It is time to turn away from philosophical matters and begin focusing on Linux as a technology. This is fertile ground. Linux is an extraordinary piece of engineering. Here is a rich land with a beautiful and varied landscape. It is also a rugged land, with many unique and unusual vistas that are not always easily approachable. You have to go by foot at times if you want to see the best parts of this land, and even the opening stages of the journey can be fraught with pitfalls.
To understand Linux as a technology, we need to start at the beginning. In this case, the beginning is the distributions. With Microsoft there is only one distributer, and if you want to buy an OS, you know where to go. The same is not true of Linux. There are many different versions of Linux, and the first thing one needs to do is sort them all out and find which one is best for your needs.
Everyone asks about distributions, and which one to get. In the most technical sense of the word, it doesn't matter which distribution you have. Linux is a free OS, and it is very modularized. You can always download updates to any particular distrubution, and make it into whatever you want it to be. The problem with this theory is simply that experienced Linux users can rather easily update the OS, while newcomers don't even know where to begin such an operation. As a result, the question to ask is not which distribution is best, but which is best for newcomers.
Here is a list of three commercial distributions:
Any of these three popular distributions will meet your needs. In choosing them, I am not necessarily asking that you choose the distributipm that is simplest to install, but rather the ones that are most complete and best supported. Some distributions are easy to install, but you soon find that you need to update them to get them to work with your favorite software. As stated earily, updating the OS can be tricky for newcomers. As a result, the question to ask is not necessarily which distribution is easy to install, but which is easiest to maintain.
Of course, it goes without saying that there are other fine distributions out there. Furthermore, I have not tried all the distributions, and I do not claim to be making a definitive rating. My goal is simply to help you get started.
In that spirit, it is only fair to point out that RedHat is the most popular distribution, and it is the one about which most technical documents are written. It is common in Linux to be reading a description of some technical task, only to find that it applies to a distribution other than the one you use. This is going to happen no matter which distribution you choose, but if you choose one of the popular ones, such as RedHat or SUSE, then you are less likely to be left high and dry when searching for technical help.
The big alternative to the distributions mentioned above is Debian. This is a distribution made by the GNU software organization. As a result, it is perhaps closest in spirit to the true ideals of the Open Software movement.
Linux can be the only OS on a system, or it can be dual booted with other OSes. I use it both ways, but I assume that most people will want to dual boot their machines. (Very few of us are willing to completely give up Windows. For instance, I still use Windows about 5 percent of the time -- mostly for playing games.)
Linux is different from Windows in that it runs natively at the command line, rather than in a GUI. In other words, the GUI is not, as it is in Windows, part of the OS. The GUI is something layered on top of the command line, and you can use the GUI or not, depending on your taste.
Those of us who come from the DOS world may have a tendency to think of command line as not very powerful. The truly powerful features of computer programming, such as multi-tasking and networking, happen to be introduced on a large scale to the DOS world at about the same time as Windows the GUI environment emerged. However, that was really just a coincidence, and there is no reason why a command line cannot support very advanced features.
What we mean to say, when we think thoughts about the command line, is only that the DOS command line was not very powerful. The Linux command line is very powerful. It has great support for multitasking, and great support for networking.
One of the key things to grasp about Linux is that it was built to multitask, and it was built to run on top of a network. In Linux, there was powerful networking, and powerful multitasking,almost before there was anything else. When Linus Benedict Torvalds (http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/faqs/linus/) sat down to write the Linux kernel he thought about these kinds of issues almost before he thought about anything else.
If you hark back to what I said earlier about the scripting and Linux, then you are likely to begin to see the power of the Linux command line. Linux is driven by scripts, and scripts run fine on the command line. Conversely, it is hard to write a script with even a versatile three button mouse, and as a result, the GUI is not really as close to the heart of the OS as the command line is. (If you are someone who really loves the GUI and the mouse, then you can perhaps already begin to see which way to run if you want to get back home.)