If I'm being honest, my big fear with Linux is the scripting. I'm really not that interested in learning scripting because it's fun or it will help me grow as a person. I want to get things done as easily as possible. i think 40hz knows that about me, that's why he is recommending Mint. I also don't think the issue is getting Linux to be like Windows in an aesthetic sense. The idea is that Windows is easy because it has buttons and gui things that are easy to use. Scripting is not easy. Building kernals is not easy. Clicking a button is easy. Knowing which button to click is less easy, but still easy.
My goal for using Linux is to be able to do things more easily than if I stick to Windows. If I can do the same in Windows more easily than in Linux, what's the point? Again, I'm not doing this for the love of it. I feel this notion always gets lost with those like me who ask for advice when transitioning to Linux.
And this doesn't mean I'm opposed to learning scripting. But it's not something I want to do every day. I'll put it this way: if I need to script to get things going in the beginning, that's fine. But I don't want to script on a weekly basis. After it's set up, I want buttons and GUIs.
-superboyac
You have buttons, guis, start menus. But the little applets don't always work. When you click an applet and nothing happens, it's good to be able to find the script. Unless you can hire an IT guy to be the SysAdmin you should think of yourself as one. Although Linux is a lot more bullet proof than in the old days, and much stuff works with point and click, it's not a no brainer. To think you are going to breeze in and everything will be Jake is self-delusion. If you want no think point and click you should go Apple. If you stop and consider all the little tools you buy and download, and all the tips you read, to keep Windows usable, you may realize you are maintaining it all the time. It's just you've swum in that stream so long you don't feel the water. Linux will be alien. The biggest transition will be text editors have a different paradigm. To start you may want to find Windows editors that will run under Wine. But it's better to use the Linux tools as they work best with that OS.
Linux is very powerful but there's nobody else to do the lifting. To go in half-hearted, you may as well just use what you know.
edit: when I say you'll need some scripting I don't mean run out and learn a bunch of programming languages. I mean you may read some basics of bash scripting, which is most likely what will be set up on the system. You can usually find example scripts to do certain tasks that have the generic stuff filled in. Or you just need to edit an environment variable that's set in one of the start up scripts. If nothing else, you'll probably need to edit /etc/fstab at some point. It's just a text file with the layout of the disk partitions and file systems that are mounted under root '/' currently. It's not that difficult.
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