Figure I'll necro a topic that hasn't seen much light in a while.
I personally am using Linux again as my primary desktop OS and have been for the past few months. I have very few problems.
Like Mez, I still have Win XP installed in VMware for doing things like playing OP2. There is also a DRM music service that I sometimes use (Ruckus) that uses WM DRM and as such only works on Win XP / Vista. VMware isn't too big of a pain though, I download the files, unprotect them, and use the 'shared folders' mechanism of VMware to copy the resulting WMA files into Linux for playback.
Also a note on newbie-friendly distros. I personally use openSUSE 10.3 right now (having switched from Fedora
and think it is potentially a lot more newbie-friendly than Ubuntu, for a few reasons. First of all, the system configuration tools (YaST) are all in one place (compared with Ubuntu, they are assorted in the "Administration" menu and I don't think work as well, have as many options, or are as easy to use as YaST).
openSUSE also offers you the selection of window manager to use (GNOME/KDE/other).
Personally I think KDE is a lot more user friendly and resembles Windows a lot more than GNOME does. (For example, saving a file in a KDE based application to an unusual place like a flash drive or Windows partition: the window that pops up asking for the location to save the file to gives options such as "home folder," "storage devices," etc. Clicking the storage devices option gets you to a list of the mounted volumes in the computer. In GNOME I remember having to manually browse to /media/<volume title> all the time, which takes extra time and most newbies to Linux won't know to do this).
Hardware support: openSUSE detected all of the hardware in my laptop correctly except for the phone modem (which I don't care too much about, I don't even have a land line telephone so I couldn't even use it if I wanted to). I did have to install the binary nvidia driver for 3d support, as well as the firmware for my broadcom bcm4311 wireless card. Although I know how to do both of these manually I wanted to see about some sort of automatic installation method (so I could easily receive updates, etc for the nvidia driver). The documentation on the openSUSE website is 100x better than the ubuntu documentation. Typed nvidia into the search function on their wiki and up came a page with a "one click install" link that automatically loaded YaST and installed the necessary package. Likewise there is good documentation on how to install the broadcom firmware so that the wireless card may be used, and same for installing proprietary codecs such as mp3, wma, etc (just ran a similar package and the correct repositories were automatically added to YaST and the correct packages selected for installation).
That and SuSE uses RPM instead of deb for its packaging format... which makes it easier on most users since most binary software for linux is distributed in RPM (if not distributed in just a plain tar.gz file). This makes it easy to install.
Anyway.. that's my current experience with Linux.. few problems so far.
