Wine is just a layer that runs windows programs under linux. Think of it as virtual machine running old XP programs on 7.

Install Wine 1.2 from your respective linux respository. You'll get Wine in applications menu or Other" menu. Once you install Wine you don't need to do anything. Just run the windows programs, if it is supported under wine, installation of that program will run (or if it is portable standalone app it will start without any issues). If it is not supported, you'll find nothing and there will be no linux crash either. (Note: in case of window based games running under wine, linux display may crash but nothing will be lost and in next reboot, everything is fine, unless ofcourse if you try to run the same buggy program again. ).

You don't have to run command line, git, adept ..nothing. Wine will run windows program just like you used to run it on windows. Same options, same GUI (okay there is change in window decoration -borders etc as per your linux DE) but that's it. You get your programs running inside linux.

^ And this is the reason that I gave up when I tried my Linux experiment.  My steps were:

• 1. Install Linux on a side box and use WINE to run Windows apps.  The problem was, it wasn't my primary machine, and so everything was slower and it wasn't helping my transition, as when I went to the machine, I wasn't really *doing* anything.  In fact, most of the time, I was using slower Windows apps in WINE.
• 2. Install VM on my main machine.  Again, I wasn't really getting anything done in the VM, and when I did use it, some of my major things required Windows, so it was either install WINE to use them in the VM (which didn't seem to make sense), or go back to Windows.

In the end, I know I didn't give Linux the try it deserved, but I realized that I didn't need to- that there was no compelling reason to switch.  So I haven't.

Friends or acquaintances who durably* switched did it for 4 main reasons (one or all of them, in no specific order):

- extremely strong philosophical/ethical ideals (usually related to the open source philosophy),
- absolute need for work/studies (using very specific applications in very specific environment),
- need to be part of a certain subculture because other "friends" are part of it,
- ...  price and/or too much time on their hands.  

*durably = barely using windows for prolonged periods of time.

I was going to start a new thread, but I figured I'd just quietly hide it here in case I change my mind.

THE GREAT EYE SEES ALL!

I prefer some of the newer distros to start on.

Instead of Slackware as a "run on bare metal" choice I'd go with Arch Linux if you really want to learn what it's all about on a very fundamental level. Good docs too.

Instead of Mandriva (who's future is still up in the air) I'd go with Linux Mint for an easy to use minimal hassle Linux that's very Windows like. A very polished and svelte distro, perfect for beginners - and more than powerful enough for an advanced user. Top user pick over at Distrowatch. And for good reason.

Warning: Newbie hilarity ahead!  

I finally quit being lazy and set out to try to see which distros behave on my older test box after getting skunked by Ubuntu, and Mint was first on my list. (Last year's entry was Open Suse which almost worked, so that's my counterweight.)

Unfortunately, Mint isn't behaving clean - it almost doesn't boot. I mashed a bunch of keys and stumbled into the command line, at which point I exhausted my fortune-cookie level of Linux knowledge by typing apt, then "went for the candy" with dist-upgrade, which at least was better in that it is now doing "something" (aka claiming to be installing all kinds of juicy packages. Before it wasn't even booting, so that's progress.) If that still doesn't work, I'll just have to try another distro.

Whew! Long story short, I'm not good enough to brute force a distro for the sake of the distro, for me as representative of a type of new linux user, having the distro be able to pass the test of "But Linux is good on older hardware!" is important. I don't really plan to do a full migration over like AC in the title post, I just wanted to know where the state of Linux is these days. In that sense I'll live with glitches, but boot problems are over my tolerance limit. This is just a random Best Buy box from a few years ago, maybe Pentium 4, so it should be right in the target market. With the advent of MS trying to push XP to end of life, I think we'll see a flood of former XP boxes floating around so Linux could be waiting in the wings for a nice small usage boost.

Edit: Still doesn't boot - gets stuck checking "battery state". So off I go to another distro...

Initially I tried to use a xfce based distro, but I think the problems are deeper, I think there are other hardware conflicts going on. So I'll keep your note in mind, and see how that cross links with the "distro" itself - this whole thing of distro vs environment is kinda like a logic puzzle.

Currently I'm surfing DistroWatch under the Old Computer category, basically the same concept you were headed toward, though my next couple of distros are using other environments. Stay tuned!

Right Mahesh, I tried for an xfce build earlier, but some other part of Mint was misbehaving on my comp.

Current news: Galpon MiniNo looks cute, it loaded really fast because it's clearly taking shortcuts by skipping bloat. "All I have to do" for this step is to figure out how to change languages because the default is in Spanish! : )  Also, it's asking for a Root password to do certain things but I never entered one, so that's an issue too. But I'm on my way!

Edit: I found English - it's in the installer, I just kept walking into an optical illusion of "ES" vs "EN".

Edit2: Doesn't look like any of the apps behave right. Next distro.

Update:

With fingers crossed, I'm trying out (possibly partially modified) Ubuntu. Not because I think that's any great shakes, and I'm not interested in either Unity or Gnome 3, but just as an attempt to get back towards a fairly mainstream version of Debian, which I think is winning my conceptual race.

My problems with Ubuntu in the past stemmed from bad problems breaking my test box, but I just happened to notice that "P" 12.04 is the "Long Term Support" version, so I'm hoping they put a bit more care into it for once. I'm not demanding on my OS requirements, I really am not - I don't use Wifi and I don't print at home, (two of the more notorious funny spots in Linux), so if I were speaking to an anthromorphized OS, "Please just give me a stable picture and sound and play Flash videos and mp3's and radio channels, K? ThxBye."

Then I have to remember NOT to upgrade - (Ubuntu's October editions are a bit more skewed to have silliness). I'll just hunker down and wait for the next LTS. And maybe it will just sit there if the hardware finally proves too old. (Though I don't think I'm being unreasonable, a 2007 era Best Buy Pentium-4 Compaq box with an nvidia card isn't exactly third world obscurity, which is why I became grumpy last time when whatever edition it was of Ubuntu broke it and it quit booting.)  

I'll save for another day whether I prefer LXDE or XFCE for the front end window, vs software available, but the overall point is that my Boot problems occurred really early on in my prior bad experiences, so once the comp boots, solving point #1, then it's just down to any of 2-3 window environments that are Non-Unity. Then once I get it working I'll just leave it alone, because it seems to be a shade brittle on the specs side, and endless tinkering will likely break it again. (4 distros this weekend failed to boot.)

I really only do like 10 things in the OS level, so a simple window manager should be fine. I went with Debian-based though because I like innovative apps, and I'm curious at all the nook and cranny stuff out there once I get the OS side solved.

So I'm almost done with my survey.

Edit: My mouse pointer died during the upgrade from a sub-distro to 12.04. So I am down to a couple of steps left. 1a. Fresh CD of Lubuntu 1b. Fresh CD of Xubuntu, to test out those two desk environs. 2. Stick with the Zorin sub-distro that did load, and then bide my time for them to patch up a Pagolin edition to fix what Canonical can't seem to do on my lead linux machine.

Edit2: Mashed keys and fiddled with Tab, got past that particular dialog box.

Lol, Ubuntu. The Linux for people who want Windows. Stick with Windows, you'll love it.
(Also, Ubuntu is the most-broken distribution I know, every upgrade brings new heavy quirks. I wonder why there are so many masochists around.)

That aside, there is no point in switching to Linux if you want random Windows applications ("Wine", mentioned several times in this thread).
There is a good reason for a dual-boot Linux, like for the lulz or something, but replacing Windows for the sake of replacing Windows is never a good idea.

That said, I currently operate a couple of machines, some Linuxes on them too. My main machine is a Win7/Fedora 16 dual-boot, and Fedora is hardly ever booted at all.

BTW TaoPhoenix, if you come from Windows, try KDE. It is better than people say about it, a lot of eye-candy and widget stuff.

Tried KDE, "Hated it". I'm a Right Click fan, so that's guiding my choices. I don't recall from a year ago, but stuff just wasn't where I wanted it. Meanwhile I think I'd rather be closer to pure Debian "but with Codecs that Just Work" but some 3-4 versions off DistroWatch didn't even boot, and I'm sorry, I refuse to put up with not booting. Given the millions of former XP boxes about to hit the streets I'd have thought a P4 Box would be prime time for linux, but it's proven tougher than I first thought.  So far I seem to mostly like LXDE (what little I saw of it before I took the upgrade plunge), Puppy's JWM wasn't bad, and the last to test is XFCE.

Right-click works like a charm in KDE. KDE 4.8 is usable after a couple of quite fucked-up versions before it.
If you want "pure Debian with some codecs", try Linux Mint Debian Edition.  

"Pure Debian", however, means Gnome which is bleh. Considering that you like JWM, you really should try IceWM though!

Heh - there were SEVERAL Fscked editions of KDE, with maybe only 3 out of 7 working in the 4.x series! (I saw the outrage over 4.0, maybe one update worked, a couple of the middle ones broke things again, and now it's 2012!) And yes I agree Gnome 3 is Bleh, though I keep hearing Gnome 2 was okay, but it's fading...

Meanwhile, I DID try Linux Mint Debian Edition, but sadly, that was one of the copies that failed to boot on my machine! (Maybe despite the Compaq label, it really has a couple of crappy specs, I dunno.)

I did come across IceWM, though I couldn't get it in any of the other right config-distros. (I lost my pack of DVD's and I don't even know how clean my drive will burn them, and then even if my test machine knows how to boot from a DVD), so several of the "Dvd-based" distros lost out this weekend. (Plus this is a one-time project, maybe with one followup. I have a purposely dreadfully slow ISP plan to save small dollars every month because I normally don't do anything interesting needing bandwidth.)

Whew!

I appreciate all your advice!

About mid way through the weekend some concepts clarified:

"Full Debian Software" became the top end goal, with the mercenary substep of "any double-triple mod necessary to get past ultra basic problems like booting up." Hence my comment that I'm no fan of Ubuntu tbe brand, it's only a mechanism to stay Debian-based when several other closer distros also refused to boot. I'm down to my last 3 tests - The "Counterweight" is Zorin Lite, a "double-mod" of Ubuntu aka fixing crap that Ubuntu didn't bother to do. But I think it's based on Oct-2011. So for conceptual reasons, I'm "going for the gold" to see if I can't "park" on Pangolin because it's the LTS release. (So far my mouse pointer mysteriously vanished, but we'll wait until it reboots.)

Crunchbang ended up in the other category, "Backbone distros for 3rd tier comps". The iso somehow ended up bigger than I thought it would be, maybe 450 megs, and by that point I'd already found Puppy-Racy which is the lead contender in that half. By that point I was out of time to download Crunchbang due to my slow net line I mentioned. I'm out of energy to decide if I prefer OpenBox-Crunchbang vs JWM-Puppy. Those were "Emergency fallbacks" earlier in the study before I made better progress with Zorin's copy of Ubuntu.

Looping back, You're right in that I'm not going to ditch my Windows machine, I worked too hard on it to just trash it. I just wanted something on hand to see if I could get a Linux entertainment machine going, just to dip my toes in the water.

First important thing: Drop anything that includes Ubuntu stuff.
Really, Ubuntu is broken by design in a lot of ways, "full Debian" is the other direction.

If you want Ubuntu, use Ubuntu, but don't expect compatibility to anything aside Ubuntu then.

Oh, I have the figurative fire protection suit on, but three other Non-Ubuntu distros failed to load, so I don't have a lot of time left this weekend. (And I tend to lose my focus for this stuff on weekdays.) It takes me almost 2 hours to download and install a distro, so plus sleep that was 10 hours total lost.

Edit: Survey Says....
Ubuntu's "pure" upgrade didn't boot again, they have some standardized driver that conflicts with my system. So while I'm still half an hour out from downloading U-P 12.04 Lubuntu, it probably will have the same driver problem which means this is standard for all "regular" Ubuntu editions going forward despite desktop environment.

So I'm putting Zorin's copy back on, and then all I need to test is sound and flash. Then in X months whenever Zorin comes out with his Pangolin mod, I'll try that. So I'm almost done.

To be honest, I never gave any Ubuntu edition a run, it is enough to see how it fails - every new *buntu release floods Linux help forums.
I doubt Zorin's version is much better.

So I really wonder why you want reliability and *buntu....

Then trust 18 hours of work this weekend. Don't "doubt", here are my results. On this particular box, all copies of Ubuntu Natural from about October 2011 forward won't load because of some kind of driver problem. Zorin's copy loads. Lights out. Nothing else matters. Zorin-Ubuntu and Puppy-Racy are the only 2 out of 8 distros that loaded on this box.

Edit:
Flash works.
Sound works.
I found the file manager.

So that's almost a lock. I'm basically done.