Personally, I use Ubuntu. It just works. I used to use Fedora on my PCs but got frustrated by all the little things that went wrong and reinstalled every six months, as it grew outdated rapidly. Ubuntu should also have better support for proprietary drivers than Fedora.
I like getting stuff done, not tinkering with the OS. Ubuntu should do everything you need it to do and then some.

Canonical created the Ubuntu Online Tour to demo the Ubuntu desktop in your web browser.

Mint is another choice, but for my purposes, it comes with way too much bloat. And from what you're describing, it would be just a load of cruft for you as well.

You can always try it, and I would encourage you to.
Download Ubuntu
Download Mint
Download Zorin
and for @cwizardone, Download Slackware (And an installation guide for Slackware, you're going to need it if you go that route.)

If money isn't an issue, buy a Mac. Seriously. If it is, well... sell the laptop and buy a Mac? Disliking Windows is a really bad reason for moving to Linux, which is at least one order of magnitude more difficult for "the average user" (whoever he is!) to work with.

I disagree on both counts. It was a great reason for me to switch nearly twenty years ago and while I wasn't the average user then I still had a lot to learn. Besides, things are far easier now than they've ever been. I've seen many posts even years ago by average users who had made the switch and loved it.


Disliking Chevy is a really bad reason for switching to Dodge, then, right?

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Walking and swimming are not so different...

They really aren't!

Maybe not the safest thing but some kids do swim before they walk...

Linux is NOT windows.

However, there are many cross-platform programs that you may find in windows with linux like:

Firefox & Google chrome browser
libreoffice ( formerly OpenOffice )
vlc
DropBox
Keepass
Thunderbird and Pidgin
Skype
Gimp and Inkscape
Android SDK for transferring files to android device

These are what I can think of now, but there are more. Also, linux has many good alternatives as well.

OpenOffice is still around and now supported by Apache, https://www.openoffice.org/

LibreOffice, https://www.libreoffice.org/

Firefox, Thunderbird and SeaMonkey are Mozilla projects with versions for Linux, ms-windows and one or two other platforms. I've read Mozilla is planning to spin off Thunderbird and is looking for someone else to support and develop it. Apache has been mentioned.

As ms-windows is, by far, the larger market, Vivaldi, Opera, Midnight Commander, gKrellm, Clementime and Audacity, all have versions for ms-windows, as do many, many other projects, both Open Source and proprietary.

As per fwilson in post #21, If you've been brought up on Windows, perhaps you should read this article for a bit of background information regarding any perceptions you may have about Linux being some sort of substitute for Windows.

Play Bonny!

I though OpenOffice was forked to LibreOffice.

Anyway with the additional projects you listed in your post, the OP can indeed experience a windows-like atmosphere in linux to some degree.

The only exceptions are some proprietary programs that isn't available for linux like itunes, windows media player, adobe reader, quicken, autocad and others. OP will have to resort to alternatives.

I wouldn't recommend using wine for those programs because those programs may not work 100% in wine.

OpenOffice still does exist along with LibreOffice. There are also alternatives to the alternatives, true to Open Source style. Like Calligra, which somehow found is way onto my Fedora box at work.

I'll second that the OP has his answer ten fold.

Here is a little history of OpenOffice,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenOffice.org


There is a commercial version of WINE from CodeWeavers,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CodeWeavers

Windows 10 supports NON UEFI mother boards where as all of the UBUNTU based distributions seem to be refusing to work if your BIOS does not support UEFI.

So I am in the process of testing dist-roes that target older machines including: Vector Linux, Macpup Linux & SlaxLinux.
I was happy using Mint-Mate until it updated/upgraded & therefore self destructed my operating system leaving me high and dry stranded in the Windows10-TROJAN-WORM virus OS.

I haven't found any problems with Ubuntu on either type of system or even secure boot. There are some known poor implementations of UEFI and a lot of new things that need to be learned. UEFI can present what one my say is a device as a service to the OS. Anyway, not anything to do with the OP.

Generally people who get into trouble with Windows also have a number of security issues that cause it. In all OS's, you need to learn and use as many best practices as you can to avoid problems.

No amount of security can protect one from some of the bad websites is my opinion.

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Like don't visit porn sites when using windows!

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Here's an article with pretty much every possible alternative to Windows covered:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11...ystems/?page=1