These days it's pretty easy to download your flavor of choice and get running. For any difficulties you run into, there's a lot of documentation, forums, and other support available. It'd be helpful if you know somebody who knows what's going on, as with all things, but it's not a requirement.
Once you've got things set up, it's all pretty darn easy. In fact, for the general user, things really aren't that different. When you want to go on the web, you start up firefox. When you want to make a spreadsheet, write a document, you use open office (which you should be doing in windows, too!) And then there's thousands of free, fun, open source programs out there to play with. There's everything you could imagine, a lot of it comparable to or better than it's commercial counterparts.
Me, I have my dad to help me when I get stuck, but general operations are all pretty straightforward. Further, I've frozen mac OS, I've frozen every windows edition, but I've yet to freeze my computer while using linux.
Can you still get a "downgrade" of XP installed or has MS ended the licensing of XP? All the techies at my job in programming swear XP (32 bit) is still their best to date.
I believe that they recently dramatically raised the price of "downgrading" vista systems to XP. Or at least it was the case for one of the major companies... Dell maybe.
damn windows in Vista constantly asking me "are you sure you want to do that" are starting to really torque me off
I hear that! I like my OS to be transparent, not a system resource hog that'll actually prevent me from performing desired operations.