You have a valid point. We should probably further define "work" as not-IT vs. IT. For those of us that work in the industry, work and hobby are mostly one and the same. For those not in IT, I agree, productivity shouldn't come to a halt while trying to figure out some computer-non-work-related task.(you have friendly neighborhood sys-admins for that....:)) To that end, KDE, Ximian, and Gnome all have interfaces that windows users find surprisingly familiar. As for distro's, Mandrake and Redhat are probably the easiest to get up and running, and both have an rpm package management system to get around the make...compile problems you were mentioning. As your knowledge grows, you'll see where rpm has shortcomings, but in the beginning it can be helpful in cutting down your level of frustration.