... before I bother going into great detail- anyone here familiar with it?

I'm having a hard time figuring out how to "install" ordinary stuff, particularly from CNR. I get the DL, I open the DL wizzard, then no luck.

This Linux is life-tilting me so, so bad. I may just go back to the evil empire.

Yes. Have you used Linux before? Are you familiar with apt-get?

(sorry, I'm a huge tard. I had forgotten I posted this and have just been quietly cursing this machine for the past week )

Not familiar with apt-get. Are there any tutorials you can recommend that might tell me what it is and how its used?

The best advice I can give you is get rid of Freespire. CNR is an abomination. Freespire is honestly the worst Linux distribution I've used. Why are you using it and is switching to another distribution an option?

I consider myself a computer expert and I spent an hour trying install a simple application with CNR. This is something that should take 10 seconds in any other flavor of linux.

Why not try Ubuntu? Took me 15 mins to install and I'm a complete linux n00b.

Yeah, I'd stick with a well known and well supported distribution like Ubuntu/Kubuntu, OpenSuse or Fedora.

I have a personal Bias toward Suse with KDE, but Ubuntu with Gnome seems to be very popular in the US.

I'm not familiar with the package manager in Ubuntu, but if it's anything like Suse's, installing new stuff ought to be a breeze once you've done it a couple of times.

The current version of Ubuntu (8.10) has an "Add/Remove..." menu item that launches a nice little program that lets you search, view descriptions of, and easily install packages (much better than Synaptic or apt-get).

OK, so, I just don't have the time in my life to totally relearn how to use a PC.

One of the reasons I went with Freespire is because someone I know (and now hate as a result of his suggestion) told me that the functionality was very similar to Windows. This is easily the worst operating system ever.

How much will I have to 'relearn' if I stick with Linux? I have no problems learning a few new processes, but I have no interest in completely relearning how to operate a PC. How much will a windows lifer have to relearn upon installing Ubuntu?

This is actually a pretty tricky question to answer, and as weak a reply as it is I'd probably respond with "it depends"

I'm not a day-to-day Linux user so this might be better addressed by somebody who is, but I would say from my own experience that at some point you are definitely going to have to roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty with this OS. The timescale for this purely depends on how lucky you get with all of your hardware working right off the bat.

Assuming you don't run into any troubles relating to hardware immediately after your installation, you will probably be fine picking things up piecemeal as you go along. It would definitely pay you dividends to understand some fundamental concepts of the OS and how it differs from Windows (a kind of "what hand beats what" level of understanding), but you don't have to be able to fly around the command line in your first week or anything like that. In fact, one of the reasons for the popularity of distros like Ubuntu is that they put a friendly face on proceedings for people migrating from Windows.

It would be misleading though to say that you can simply switch over, devote no time to learning the OS and to expect to be flying around in a couple of days. Some things are just fundamentally different (such as the concept of packages and dependencies and if you don't learn about what these are life will be a lot tougher for you in the long run), so it is going to require at least *some* amount of time investment on your part. How deep you want to go with it, however, is up to you.

It might be useful to know what your reasons are for moving away from Windows in the first place.

Ubuntu ftw.

Super user friendly.

Download/burn Live CD, put CD in, reboot to functional Ubuntu desktop and simple installation.

Download some Virtual Machine software to test drive an OS.

Or try this.

Add/remove and Synaptic are just front ends for apt-get

As for learning the OS I switched over two of my roommates and neither has had any trouble. But then they only need web/office stuff.

I run linux as my main OS. I made my girlfriend switch to linux. She's not a power-user by any means and she hasn't had any problems. Ubuntu hardware detection is phenomenal. The Ubuntu documentation is vastly superior to Windows. And the Ubuntu forums are very helpful if you need them.

How long it will take to learn really depends on you and want you intend to do with the machine. If you just use it for basic office/web/email tasks then you'll figure it out in less than a day.

If you know the package name, I think apt-get is the easiest (but I'm an old school command-line geek). Having used both SuSe and Kubuntu (Ubuntu with KDE instead of Gnome), I like their package management system (actually Debian's, originally) better than RPM. I actually find installs with Kubuntu to BE easier than with Windows, for the most part.

Linux has come a long way since the days when I had to rewrite the dialup shell scripts on an ancient version of Redhat just to get on the internet.

I'm well aware of this, and rarely use anything other than apt-get (especially now that it has built-in autocompletion for its 'install' argument). I was just pointing out that Ubuntu has a very friendly front-end for installing packages that is suited towards novice users.

An other distro that might be worth a try is Linux Mint (http://www.linuxmint.com)

It's just a fork of Ubuntu but with some non-free software installed by default.