Who uses Linux?

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Ah... I'd not say that. The expression "Out of the box", generally speaking implies that you bought something. I.e. the definition of freebie is "not out of the box".
I bought SuSE purely because is was cheap way of getting hold of the six CDs, versus downloading them on dialup! I thought it might be useful to have the support that came as part of the deal, but in the event, I never used it.

Debian is a "freebie" (if you download it, or pretty much "at cost" if you don't want to download).
The current i386 release is 14 CDs or 2 DVDs with 3 CDs of updates.
Ubuntu will send you their CD for free. It's Debian based. You can pick and choose what extra bits you want from the full Debian archive plus all the other more specialist repositories.
Erm... that doesn't include all the sources for everything... I haven't checked how many CDs that is, should you want it.

Most commercial distributions these days come in free versions as well - often (nearly?) identical.

The only really significant difference between the commercial version and the free one will be the provision of support. (Sometimes there may be proprietary content considerations - or a manual!)

Waffle, waffle I go...

Imagine, side by side, a "commecial" stack of disks and a "freebie" (= at cost) stack of discs, of the same height.
I'd hazard a guess that more things would work straight "out-of-the-freebie-box", rather than "out-of-the-commercial-box". At the end of the day, the freebie set is getting more users, more exercise, greater feedback, more developers.

One comment... it isn't so much that non-commercial distros are buggy (although some of the 100+ out there undoubtedly are), it's that most are sticking to free and open source software. A few companies (notably nVidia and ATI) refuse to release open source device drivers for Linux, instead giving out binary gobbledegook which may run OK, but which is their intellectual property, and cannot be modified even if one could make any sense of it. Things like Flash and Realaudio plugins are also closed source, as has been Sun's Java (an open source release is imminent, and being anxiously awaited). And some Linux folks have a problem with software where you can't read and modify the source code -- both as a matter of principle, and as a practical issue.

Although there are usually alternatives available which can deal with proprietary formats & such, some distros resolve them better than others. Ubuntu has taken the path of encorporating closed source software at least as enthusiastically as the commercial distros -- for example, getting permission to ship their disks with the Opera browser, Flash plugin, and many closed source device drivers (including nVidia and ATI) already installed. Others, like BLAG (Brixton Linux And GNU) turn up their noses at such things, but manage to find ways of getting free, open source software to do almost everything, e.g. nVidia drivers which are open source, but lack the proprietary driver's 3-D acceleration, which work quite well if you aren't a 3-D game player. I tried BLAG out recently and was amazed at how well everything did work, right out of the box -- and you can still download proprietary stuff for it if you like, they just leave it off the install disks. Which, if you think about it, is no different than a new Windows install anyway -- those still need Flash, Realaudio, and so forth to be downloaded, too.

I was going to give Ubuntu a try....but it does not handle NTFS partitions.

GAME OVER.

I gave the Gimp a try, did a bunch of work....but it cannot output to CMYK mode.

GAME OVER.

Odd, Mine does. Well, it reads them fine. Why would I want to write to such a useless closed file system?
Not that I'm an expert, but two a minutes search found "CMYK Plugin for The GIMP" on FreshMeat and Scribus does CMYK.

Funny, both my BLAG and SuSE systems do... the BLAG supports read and limited write, the SuSE supports full read-write access.

It supports it just fine, you just need to download a plugin, it's called called gimp-cmyk under SuSE. The one for Ubuntu (and I think it will work under most other flavors, it's pretty generic), 'separate,' isn't quite as slick, but it provides the basics. http://www.blackfiveservices.co.uk/separate.shtml

I have religgious/conscience problems with intellectual property,
as I consider any ideas as the property of the gods,
and men only can remember what they have learnt in a pre-worldly existence.
Thus I'm restricted to free (as in speach) software.