I Want to identify best Linux approach, and any pitfalls. 297

You don't give a budget for your system so it's hard to recommend hardware. However here are some general rules,

1) Nvidia graphics card. Nvidia has the best Linux support. Any Nvidia card will work out of the box and if you install the Nvidia binary driver (which is easy to do) it will work even better. If you don't care about performance get a $60 card, it will be good enough.

2) Most motherboards will work. For an Intel based system any board that uses Intel bridge chips is always supported. For AMD based systems I like Nvidia Nforce 4 chipsets but Via works fine to. You'll get the most bang for your buck with an AMD system. I have a number of Athlon 64 systems ranging from a 754 pin 3400+ to a dual core X2 4400+, all work perfectly with Linux. If you want a really cheap system you could get a Sempron based system but if I were you I'd spend a few bucks more on an Athlon64.

3) Ethernet NICs generally all work, certainly if you get an NForce 4 based motherboard there will be absolutely no problems.

4) Wireless is a pain in the butt. If you want to get a wireless chip with native Linux support you have to be very careful. There is a way to use an XP wireless driver with something called Ndiswrapper but it takes work to get that to work.

For software,

OpenOffice 2.0 is very good. I like it much better than Word 2K. OpenOffice produces nice looking PDF files so you can produce documents that anyone can read. Importing and exporting from Word is less than perfect. As long as you don't have to collaborate with anyone who is using Word you won't have any problems. For spreadsheets I like Gnumeric better than OpenOffice. Gnumeric is much lighter weight than OpenOffice and it does everything I need.

For e-mail the best choice is Evolution. It has great filtering capability and a wonderful feature called virtual folders. It looks just like Outlook however it lacks Outlook's virus propagation features.

For a UI. Both Gnome and KDE should work quite well for you. I like Gnome better, but it's really all a matter of taste. All of the big distributions have both as well as a bunch of light weight window managers. You can install as many as you want and switch back an forth so you can make up your own mind about which one you like better.

Linux is not Windows, so don't expect it to look and feel like it. However unless you are functionally retarded you should be able to figure out how every thing works by poking around for a few hours. All of the major distributions come with GUI control panels that are self explanatory and easy to use. These control panels are always available from a Gnome or KDE menu. There is also a browser based tool called webmin, available from for most of my configuration work because it's very clean, powerful, and self explanatory. You can also configure any machine on your network because it works from a browser.

For the distro. Thats a matter of taste also. I like Fedora Core. However you might want to give Ubuntu a try first. Ubuntu has become very popular with desktop users, it's easy to install and it only requires one disk to do the basic install. One thing you can do is when you parbreastion your disk for the first time create several parbreastions to hold different distros so you can try a few to see which one you like. At the very least you should create at least two separate parbreastions to hold OSes as well as a separatehome parbreastion. Even if you are only using one distribution you want to leave room for a future upgrade.