Trying to get into Linux

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KDE is a great and very versatile desktop environment but it can be a little heavy on older hardware (and I certainly agree with avoiding GNOME3 and Unity - so people know - standard "Ubuntu" comes with the Unity DE which generally does not run properly on older hardware). I would suggest going to a lighter desktop environment such as XFCE or LXDE no matter which distribution you use. Personally I use Xubuntu but also agree that Mint is very nice for newbies and Puppy Linux is especially good on older hardware.

We use Linux for our day to day stuff. Even my teenage kids prefer Linux to Windows even with all of their school projects (we use LibreOffice, Abiword, and GIMP to replace MS Word, PowerPoint, and Photoshop).

Yeah, I personally prefer fVWM as a standalone window manager, or LXDE if you want a full-fledged DE that gets the job done without having massive memory requirements (and runs on the same core libraries as GNOME, libgtk+).

http://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop/ ... -installer

You might want to take a look at the link above. It is a thing called Wubi, and it is a loader for Ubuntu that installs right into Windows. You download it on Windows, run the exe and it will give you the option to install Ubuntu as a loopback device on your windows partition. You are only allowed up to 30 GB, but you can run Ubuntu natively with it. It's basically an Ubuntu installation nested within your Windows partition. You don't have to do anything with the harddrive, it does it for you. So when you install Ubuntu with Wubi, you reboot, and then when Windows boot loader comes up it will present a boot selection screen to you, where you can choose Ubuntu or Windows. It's pretty neat!

Also, if you want to uninstall it, just run the Wubi uninstaller while using Windows and it just uninstalls it like it would a normal program.

I'm assuming you mean the client desktop, not just a server correct?

Mint is pretty hard to beat. All the multimedia stuff works. I'd start with KDE as the initial desktop and then add lxde later. KDE is pretty easy to customize.

Another option to look at is PCBSD. It's just as friendly as mint. It also let's you set up a secure partition strongly encrypted as a normal startup option.

All user friendly distros can be had with all the advanced programming shells, tools and languages that the less usable distros have. Any debian tool can be had on mint, especially lmde. ALL freebsd tools work on pcbsd.

There is no reason to get a harder distro like arch or gentoo just to learn something. Start friendly. Have fun. Learn at your own pace. This will help you to get started off right.

I think that the most important thing for day-to-day working is to ensure that every file is in a non-proprietary, open standard format - no Microsoft-specific or Apple-specific or Photoshop-specific files. You can install a lot of open source, open standard applications under Windows without switching to Linux.

Also, if you are talking about actual work, with productive output, then it is amazing how much more productive raw text formats can be compared to modern, GUI-driven methods of work. Text leaves a permanent record and is easy to paste and re-use, and to automate transformations from.

(I use Linux exclusively for my own work, but I am obliged to share files with Windows or Mac users occasionally).

Most printers work with Linux. Unfortunately I can't remember how to set up a printer through Linux.