You don't find that something like Ubuntu covers most of what an average user would need? Web browser, office suite, and some knick knacks?

User-friendly, no? DIfferent from Windows, but no more so than MacOS.

Sorry to hear that.

I was actually impressed with how everything worked OOTB for me. My WiFi, Nvidia card, sound (mine is onboard tho), it even identified my monitor which Windows always listed as a generic PnP. Everything worked on first boot. Same thing with my Toshiba laptop, all my components work: Wifi, bluetooth, video. I still am amazed at the level of hardware support.

What plug-ins? Like Flash Player? Why not? I got mine installed and I have to be very honest and say I know nothing about Linux. If you're any more layman than me, you'll have to dig a hole to see the sky.

You running from Live CD or an install?

I'm downloading other distros like Mandriva, Fedora and OpenSuse to test but I'm happy enough with Ubuntu now.

Out of curiosity, what would the advantages be for running 64-bit over 32-bit at the desktop level currently?

User-friendly as in use or in set-up? Sounds like your gripes mainly centre on zeroconf hardware support.

With Linux, I think it's reasonable to expect some issues to arise that requires some fingerwork on the users part.

Ubuntu, for example, installs and runs flawlessly on my system. Everything works but it's the only distro that does that for my computer. Fedora. Mandriva, and openSUSE all had issues on mine.

But I was curious about the others, so I tried openSUSE anyway.

With openSUSE, I had to run through hoops. The LiveCD sends my LCD out of frequency because X selects an incompatible driver for my video card so I only have a blank screen. I had to find out how to boot at Init level 3 to reconfigure X to to use the right drivers. Had to do this since even failsafe wouldn't work. No choice since I didn't know terminal commands and didn't want to install something that wouldn't even let be fire up a GUI.

Installed it and then it gave me a GruB error 17, which I learned was an unrecognised file system for the partition, and refused to boot into either Linux or my Windows (alarm bells). So I had to hunt down how to reinstall Grub (didn't work), reconfigure Grub (didn't work), reorder my partitions (didn't work), and reset the partition type (type). No luck, so I had to move Grub onto the /root on my USB. At least I got Windows back.

Once I got that working, it then conspired to not boot into openSUSE from my external drive. More hunting taught me that USB booting isn't the simple process that I thought it would be and, after much pain and suffering, I only discovered that my motherboard isn't USB-boot friendly as it wouldn't recognise boot files on anything USB, not even if it was a Windows rescue disk. I need to either have Grub on hd0 (can't because of error 17) or a /boot partition on a local drive, but if that's the case I might as well have the whole installation internal.

So now I'm in the process of migrating files out of one of my storage partitions to convert into the new home for openSUSE.

Everything could work out of the box, but chances are some things won't. But whatever it is, the answer is out there