Right. It's hard I think for people to remember that Linux distros are just another program -- even more so, now that we've developed virtualization tools. I sp

Right. It's hard I think for people to remember that Linux distros are just another program -- even more so, now that we've developed virtualization tools. I spend most of my time in a Kubuntu Linux VM within Windows because my workplace coordinates via Windows applications (Outlook and Spark) but my actual work is strongly enhanced by scripting, ssh, text editors with good grepping and syntax highlighting (usually Kate but also vim from the command line), and a bunch of version control work. Speaking as someone who uses Kubuntu also as a day-to-day Linux environment at home, Kubuntu will do about 90% of what you want to do. I've not had problems with browsing the web, handling network drives, seamlessly connecting to bluetooth, taking a picture with my webcam, calling for hours on Skype, writing an office document and distributing it via email as a PDF, or drawing on a PDF with my touchscreen and saving those annotations for later use. KDE also makes things like screen captures and configuring your toolbars and such really easy, and creating a button to make Chromium open in Incognito mode for day-to-day less-tracked browsing was not too hard. Most Linux environments will do something astonishing which Windows doesn't do: you tell it to install something and it will handle the details of going out and fetching it and installing it on your computer (i.e. an app-store). You can just say one day, "hey, I want lighttpd running on this computer so that I can share this image with a friend without putting it on an image-hosting site," and it'll be rapidly accomplished and ready for your use. What it will not do, includes Microsoft Silverlight (hence Netflix).