You will like the easier install of Ubuntu but you will pay dearly - it has Vista UAC like prompts, only worse and for basically anything you do.

As you can see, Ubuntu(and variations) is not for everyone. Don't forget Slackware!

Thanks again everyone. Lots to think about here. I am definitely going to check out every distro mentioned here and try them as LiveCDs.

After looking at Mint and Ubuntu I opted for Mint 7 (something about it just struck me I guess). It installed with no problem at all, and activating my wireless was just a mouse-click to download the Broadcom driver.

I also burned an image of Crunchbang linux (yes, the name attracted me) and put that on a separate laptop. Again it was pretty simple.

Now I've been looking through all of these other distros people are mentioning and they look pretty cool as well. I think I'll make a few more liveCDs and just play with various distros for a few weeks at a time.

Nice to see such a great community here - I appreciate the help and feedback.

I'm looking forward to settling on a distro I like and moving away from Windows. So far I can't complain about linux at all. I see in retrospect the mistake I made starting with Gentoo. Maybe I'll get to where I know enough to try that one again someday

Cheers!

Sounds like a very positive outcome: Gentoo isn't the place to start for most people, but people who like Gentoo really like Gentoo and don't like putting newcomers off.

• Next stage: try the live CDs and see what appeals to you.
• Install something that you like
• In six months, you should understand your own preferences in more detail and at that point you should think about whether you want to change. It still, at that time, may not be the time to step up (if it is a step up) to a more techie kind of distro, or you may prefer to 'stick' rather than 'twist'. In any case, at some point in your testing, you should try to find out which GUI, or GUIs, you like as that information will help you in future, and to do that you need to try out different GUIs. (Gnome, KDE, XFCE, Enlightenment...)

I've seen some people advocate jumping right in at the deep end and going straight for Slackware! Great if you're willing to learn a lot in a very short space of time! I've got Slackware installed in Virtualbox. It fits beautifully into the above scenario.

If you're trying Live CDs, have a go at Mepis. Or PCLinuxOS, come to mention it!