Fear is not needed with Linux's SuSE, I recently purcahed SuSE thinking the same, but to my suprise it has come on leaps and bounds for novice users, i will admit to being a novice user in linux; I have been using MS for years and i have found my way around it but Linux is a brand new thing for me--it has some amazing features but it can lack compatabillity with some hardware you have this is where MS comes out on top in most cases, unfortunatly companies dont make drives for Linux, and i dont see why, if you purchase SuSE Linux 9.2 Professional (try eby), it will come with a lot of sotware all that you said you wanted. It comes with an amazing office suite, which i think is better than MS Office and it comes bundled with Programming tools,
games the works. I suggest giving it a go, you can always create a dual boot where MS is still on your hard disk in a seperate partition which is accessable through Linux (Provided that you have a user without a password), the Linux installation will do this all for you. I am happy with my computer and my Dual boot MS and with Linux, it is very usefull. the down side about Linux there is no DVD film players avalible due to legal reasons. I hope this can be sorted out. Thank you. chip618