Stanron wrote: I've just read through the thread and realised how much Linux has come on since 2004.

Yes, I remember looking at all the the linux flavours treewind mentioned in that post of 2004: Mandrake (with its yellow stars) Red Hat, Slackware, Gentoo... No Ubuntu back then. I chose SuSE mainly because it was European, and tried out SuSE 6.2 under KDE. I've used every version of SuSE since then, though I dropped KDE because they added fancy visual effects and unneccesary features (just like Windows did in 7) so I now use the much simpler XFCE.

There's no reason for a long-time Windows user to change Linux if they can afford to keep hardware up to date and are happy with where Microsoft is going. Many Linux distros overemphasise their similarity to Windows, and people start using it expecting it to be the same. They often come unstuck the first time something doesn't work - a trivial configuration issue can completely stump them.

On another forum recently I tried to help somebody who'd used a windows-like distro for several years and kept telling everyone how easy it was. And it was - while he stuck to the defaults. He decided to change browser from Firefox to Chromium but found that his links in Thunderbird still opened in Firefox. He thought it would be like Windows - just change the default browser. He didn't know what a Desktop Environment was, or which one he was using, or what a protocol handler does, or the difference between that and a mime-type handler...

I do think you need to be technically curious, adventurous even, to use Linux. Don't expect it to be like Windows or you'll be disappointed.