I got started with my Linux experiment a little early, but I'll still use it through the end of March. It seems that I'll use just about anything as an excuse to put off packing more stuff into boxes. I'm moving in two days.
Back to Linux. My machine is a 2.6 GHz P4, with 1 GB of RAM and all the trimmings. It runs Windows XP. Red Hat 9.0 (or whichever '.x' version was the most current on the FTP site) was installed in a Virtual PC 2004 session, and has 384 MB of RAM allocated to it. I did a custom install, choosing KDE and a variety of productivity tools (no dev stuff or server stuff). Performance under VPC is crisp, but I wish I had another fast machine to dedicate to Linux. I earn my living with this box, so I have to keep my toys in a sandbox... :-)
A couple of initial observations. I really like KDE. I'd guess that most users would find it as easy to use as any other major OS shell. They all have their pros, cons, quirks and personalities. It seems there's still a way to go with hiding the fact that you're running *NIX, though. Many Linux enthusiasts might not consider this important, or even desireable, but if Linux is to achieve its goal of mass appeal, hiding *NIX is essential. I see two major areas where it bleeds through:
1) Seeing all those modules load at boot-up. Geeks like me enjoy watching them, but my mother might not find them so entertaining, and might even think that she'd broken something.
2) Some of the bundled applications have clever, yet arcane names, possibly with origins in the developer's favorite fantasy role-playing game. These apps need to be renamed to something more descriptive, or the average user will be afraid of them.
Windows used to show a lot of stuff loading at boot time. It confused most people, and now we just see a clean, pretty graphic while everything's starting up. Linux/KDE/Red Hat (etc.) might consider mimicing this approach.
It's also pretty easy to pooch the display, by applying invalid video settings. Windows used to let you do that, and it was the cause of many headaches. Now they make you try newly-selected modes before committing to them. Linux needs that, too. The dude in Marketing probably appreciates that his old settings were saved as XF86Config.backup, but he probably doesn't appreciate that he now needs a geek to get him running again. All he was trying to do was get some more screen real estate to work on that fancy presentation that's due tomorrow. :-)
The purpose of my living in Linux for a month is not to bash it, or to give undue credit to its competition. It's to learn about an OS that I've dabbled with for about eight years, but never really invested the time to understand.