Linux is so easy to download, install, and set up these days that you can move from Noob to Uber-Leet Leenucks Jedi Master in just six weeks. Even less if you have a desktop; the bulk of that time is spent getting wireless to work on a laptop, particularly if you have an older one that does not have a card built-in–extra points for getting it to work with the Open Source (but imo) poorly designed Ralink chipset cards.
My own Linux trial by fire was a little over a year ago, using OpenSuse 10.1 (Gaah! Yast broken!) and a PCMCIA card for a laptop that was six years old without wireless built in; pretty much everything I have learned since then has been in Ubuntu, Fedora, Mandriva/PCLOS; the greater majority of that time was spent learning how to enable the forbidden repositories (media codecs, etc.); as that is all largely taken care of now, the only remaining hurdle is wireless–yes, you may have an exotic, ages-old peripheral that is not recognized, but then again with the prices of hardware being what they are, it’s best to just upgrade over driving yourself nuts trying to get it to work.
There are a number of channels to get help in, and with a little bit of patience and ingenuity, you can get pretty much everything you need in a simple cut and paste command that you put into the terminal–with enough repetition, it will become second nature when updating/upgrading or adding packages (apps), and tons faster than using the gui interfaces for the package management systems.
If you are going to go with one of the more traditional Linux distributions like Gentoo, Slackware, Arch, et al., then best get out your reading glasses, because you will have to educate yourself with their extensive documentation before trying them out. I did once manage to get a Gentoo install (after three failed efforts), but something like Slackware or Arch are beyond the amount of effort I wish to put into getting a system up and running.
The various forums (listed at Distrowatch.com under the various distributions) and IRC channels are an excellent source of information, provided you keep in mind that these are volunteers trying to help you enter a community, and not your paid-for technician running to help you when your touchpad doesn’t work.
A funny example of this happened when I was manning the Kubuntu IRC channel (#kubuntu), and a poster there was trying to get her touchpad to work, asking questions for several hours spanning two days–at one point she filed a bug report at launchpad.net (Ubuntu official bug station) and was going to write a bug report and submit it to Linus personally; turns out that she forgot to flick a switch on the outside of her laptop that enabled the touchpad, and once that was done, the so-called ‘kernel-level, crisis-showstopper bug of the century’ just mysteriously disappeared.
A handful of individuals patiently stuck with her for several of those hours, and at the end of that time, with nary a word of thanks, or even acknowledgement that we were trying to help her, she exclaimed ‘where are the experts around here? guess I’ll have to wait for them to show up.’. Needless to say, this did not engender much good will towards said poster, and I have to admit to a level of glee when it was discovered that she had merely forgotten to do something as simple as flip a switch on the front of her laptop. Priceless.
Cthulhu Linux 