What a wonderful little post! I'm thinking of diving back into the Linux world after a pretty long break, and may need some advice this time:

Quote Originally Posted by ions
What apps do you use most?
Firefox, Firebird, Sunbird, Peachtree Accounting, OpenOffice.org, GIMP, NVU, eBay TurboLister, PayPal postage printing (printing to an HP laser), Azureus, video playback, and on rare ocassion I'll boot up a game like Neverwinter Nights.

Do you have a broadband connection?
Yes - SBC/Yahoo DSL

How familiar are you with computers?
Very - worked as IT support for several years. Don't keep up with it as well as I did back then though.

How familiar are you with Linux?
Not very, any longer. I was at one time fairly fluent, but that was about six year ago and I haven't touched it since. Will probably be lucky if I can remember how to create a new directory at this point.

How much time are you willing to invest into learning Linux?
Not much. I no longer have the time to sit around for hours/days/weeks tinkering with something trying to get it to work.

How powerful is your computer?
I don't have it memorized, but I believe it's a 1.3Ghz, 512MB, 80G HD, video card I think is probably a bit on the crappy side but I can't remember how much memory it has.

Anyway, the reason for my post is that my Win2K is getting very tired, I was holding off on upgrading because I didn't want to buy XP right when Vista was about to come out -
And then Vista was released, and I was just about floored when I read the requirements (not to mention I'm never happy with Windows prices and licensing/registration agreements).

This made me think about Linux again - I tried it out back around the turn of the century (back when RedHat & Mandrake were both fully open source & free) and although I though it was OK, I found certain aspects to be so frustrating that I decided to jump back to Windows.

What I'm hoping for now is to be pointed in the right direction (even if it's unfortunately back towards Windows) -
My techie days have pretty much passed, and I'm running a small business in my "spare" time now, so I don't want to waste a bunch of time in the meat of the OS - I want to be able to just log into the computer and have stuff work.
That means not having to jump through 50 hoops to get my accounting package to work, and if some file needs updating I need to be able to just hit a couple of buttons and have the software take care of it - I still have horrible nightmares of trying to keep up with system file dependancies when trying to update even the most basic programs.

Don't know if it matters much but at the time I had a preference to Gnome for the GUI, and taking another look it looks like it's still one of the nicer ones out there.

SO - right now after doing a little looking around, Gentoo looks like it might be a possibility, or maybe maybe Mandrake if that's gone through improvements (and it's called something else now I think?) but I figured you guys would have the best suggestions - watcha think!?