Okay, but it didn’t read that way (to me) - it seemed to be more of a dire prognostication that prospecting Linux users WILL have to become adept at command line control and WILL experience problems with every single piece of software they ever install.
If you want to learn what Unix is like, a BSD-style OS such as OS X makes for great training wheels. I also recommend a linux live cd. We use kiosk cd in our kitchen and MythKnopp for our MythTV setup. I have a couple of different thumb drives with recovery-based live cds on them. If you have plenty of spare time to read mailing lists and forums for the myriad of problems that you will encounter, then go for it. There is a lot of information out there. If you are serious about switching, I recommend Fedora Core 6 or Ubuntu Edgy Edge. There are the excellent unofficial Fedora FAQ and Ubuntu Guide, which will walk you through much of the setup, including playing all the media formats you are used to using. If you want a simple, fairly brain dead interface with not too many options, stick to Gnome. I personally use KDE for increased configurability through the interface, not to mention that it looks similar to Windows out of the box. Get yourself an IRC client and hop on irc.freenode.net. The channels for #fedora, #ubuntu and #kubuntu and others have thousands of linux nerds standing by to answer your questions, if you ask them correctly.
Since the topic is can you change to Linux “easy enough” (sic), the answer depends on your definition of “easy enough”.
From the reason you give and the way you phrase your question, I’d bet dollars to Navy beans that the answer is a resounding “no”. Linux is not an operating system for people who are intimidated by Windows; it’s an operating system for truly devoted computer geeks of all stripe. If you have a lot of trouble keeping an anti-virus package updated on Windows, Linux will not make your life easier. Think of it this way: as a car owner, if you have trouble refilling your own wiper fluid, will you find it easier to do your own ring job?
Eh, just a bit of cold water on the thread. 
As a committed Ubuntuer for some months now (got my arm twisted when my hard drive died and took XP with it) I can recommend it heartily.
I have fiddled around with SuSE previously and quite liked it but I do find Ubuntu very likeable indeed.
I am using Edgy Eft but wouldn’t recommend it to anyone completely new to Linux - you have to buy the CD with money, too (so little money you won’t notice but still)
I would go for the current Long Term Support version, Dapper Drake, which can be updated online to Edgy if you wish it anyway.
One thing that has not been mentioned yet is the option to dual boot.
You can still keep your windows installation intact, as a fail-safe in case you come unstuck with Linux, and have Linux on there too which enables you to boot into Linux and become familiar with it but drop back out into Windows if you find you are having problems with Linux.
It is also far quicker than the live CD and gets faster as it gets older.
Having become relatively familiar with Ubuntu I find that I prefer it to WIndows (and I am no Geek, not by any stretch of the imagination) and dislike having to work on Windows systems now.
I use Ubuntu at work and like it quite a bit, however I think people overstate the availability of some “replacement” apps. As has been pointed out, while GIMP is a decent photo editing program, it can’t hold a candle to Photoshop.
Likewise, you will probably be frustrated if you try to use MS Office replacement software and you have to interact with anyone else. I tried to use OpenOffice at work to read and write MS Word and Excel files, but compatibility issues with other people’s “native windows” documents was such a problem that I eventually had to give up. Now I just use rdesktop to log in to a windows machine whenever I need to work on a spreadsheet or do anything complex in Word.
I don’t know if new hardware is in the cards for you, but if so, you might want to consider a new iMac, with Boot Camp and/or some virtualization software like Parallels or VMWare you could run OS X, Windows, Ubuntu, SuSE, and Fedora all on the same machine. Get the best of all worlds!
It’s worth noting that the most user-friendly linux distro (ubuntu) can run very poorly on older hardware.
Ironically, whilst linux can be stripped bare and run at lightning speed on ancient machines, the modern functional distributions are very hardware hungry. Much more so than windows xp, I’d say.
Cymro
Whats the impact on gaming.? Is it more virus resistant.? Are there places comparable to Best Buy where games and programs are available ,or is it all downloaded?
There are almost no modern games for linux. If you want to use your computer to play modern games you need to get windows.
How about Cedega (formerly WineX)? No experience of it myself, but I’m curious to know how well it works. It seems to support a large range of games, including some recent-ish ones. Anyone use it?
I’ve used Cedega some… It’s not bad, but I didn’t find it to be a good permanent solution. It ran, but there was a noticeable performance hit, and it doesn’t support all games. However, it is entirely possible to leave a small to moderate windows install on your computer, just for the gaming. Otherwise, if the games you want are a little older, then it should be just fine.
Your second line put up a red flag for me.
Linux is a great OS and I use it all the time in a server enviroment. At the moment I’d say it isn’t ready for your average users desktop. It’s a lot like owning a British sports car - lots of fidling under the hood.
If you’re having problems updating anti-virus software in Windows, Linux is going to piss you off.
Personally, my advice to you is to leave your main OS alone but change your anti-virus software to something that works better (perhaps AVG).
That said, Linux can handle the things you want to do except Photoshop. Yeah, you can use The Gimp and get pretty close, but Photoshop is much better IMO. I can’t stand using The Gimp.
If you’ve got a pretty good computer, you may want to consider using Linux in a virtual enviroment first. Grab a copy of Vmware workstation and you can run linux in a window in Windows (or you can run it full screen). If you’re working on webdesign you can get Apache running in your virtual linux and serve your webpage. This will get you more familier with the backend side of web work - something many web designers are lacking these days.
LiveCD’s are cool, but nothing beats a virtual enviroment. LiveCD’'s are like dual booting. If you need to use Windows, you’ll have to boot to it. Then you’ll have to boot to Linux later. With the virtual machine you run them at the same time and can jump back and forth.
If you don’t want to spring for Vmware workstation, they have vmware player. This is mostly the same as workstation but you can’t create virtual machines, only run them. As you’d be running linux, lots of people have made linux player files (which they call virtual appliances). You can download them from vmware.com.
The other benefit of the vmware player (it is free BTW) over the LiveCD is you can save your changes.
My mileage varies on that; the machine (5Y.O. Athlon with 512MB RAM) from which I’m writing this is dual boot WinXP home and Ubuntu Edgy. Ubuntu is very much quicker to boot up and seems more responsive in general use too. Not always easy to compare, but I usually find that Ubuntu runs with performance that feels equivalent to XP, on a machine only capable of running Win98.
I second what Seven said about getting VMWare Player and a pre-built VM of a Linux distrobution.
There are differences between using Linux and Windows, and the only way for you to see if it’s right for you is to try it yourself. Getting VMPlayer and some distros is a great free way to do that. I used VMWare on Windows for years to do Linux development and it worked out fine.
The one thing I can recommend about trying out Linux is don’t be afraid of the initial day-to-day learning curve. Alot of things will be different from how they operated in Windows, and that stuff has to be relearned. It is pretty intuitive these days using the Linux GUI’s, but it takes a bit of time to figure out how to do everything. Remember it took you time to learn Windows, too.
As far as “flavors”, I use Suse 10.1 at the moment. It’s very solid and outside of development stuff I do, I have not had to tinker “under the hood” with any of the regular apps. Suse has an application called YaST that is your software control panel (amongst other things). This is where you can auto-install any programs you need, uninstall, etc. You can also connect into global repositories of Suse approved software that are known to work well with your version of Suse.
A couple of the guys I work with have cut over recently to using Ubunto and swear by it. I haven’t used it myself, but I hear lots of good things about it. (Ubuntu has a similar app to YaST called AppGet… I think).
I would not recommend RedHat for a new user desktop environment as I feel RedHat much more targets the network server base than end users.
All that being said, you probably will have some issues cutting over to Linux, but there is tons of info on the web that will get you past most issues. Just don’t get discouraged right off the bat and give it a fighting chance. I for one would never go back to Windows (my work laptop and 3 home servers)… and am desperately trying to get my wife to cut over her laptop, but I think it will be a long time before I can pry away her beloved MS Office products.
Ubuntu has Synaptic Package Manager, which is a front end for apt-get (or aptitude, I forget). Having used this and YaST, I find Synaptic better - perhaps only on the basis that the software library on offer in it seems very inclusive.
Would a mainstream laser printer for Windows work under Linux? Wouldn’t someone have to write drivers just for Linux? I don’t see many printer manufacturers advertise that they work with Linux.
I seem to recall that most laser printers accept Postscript files (which Ghostscript and its associated programs can handle), text of some sort (ASCII or one of the ISO 8859 family, depending on printer options, or Unicode if you’re really lucky), rasterised images, or a native vector language (for example, HPGL for HP printers). You should have no trouble with first two, and probably no trouble with the third. For the fourth, you will need a driver. HP and the other big makes probably have drivers for their printer languages, but I wouldn’t be as certain for that discount printer you just got from Pyongyang.
Irrelevant. Nothing the OP mentioned involved a command line at all.
Irrelevant. The majority of modern distros have some form of package management, which makes this problem go away entirely.
Basically no games without Wine or Cedega, no viruses or malware at all, and it’s all download.
It was a decade or more ago. Ubuntu really is a good distro for newbies in general, as it reflects a lot of change in the community to make things easier on them.
Actually, depends on the type of games. For most games, yeah, you will need Wine or Cedega. However, some types of games linux does well… generally small little time killer games. For example, an interesting (but rough) game is called Liquid War, which I suggest is worth a look.
As for the printer, yes you would need a driver, but there are plenty of people writing drivers for main stream printers, so with a little work, it would be fine. And I am quite sure you could find a step by step guide to getting it to work.