Re:No Experience? (Score 1)

Personally, I find that finding a set of drivers for your wireless card, video card, sound card and other hardware might be harder as you pick a more obscure Linux distro. Moreover, the major distros are more likely to have good googleable support and FAQ&As. (SuSe, Fedora, Mandrake). What you want seems to be readily available on all these operating systems. Personally, I use XP SP2/Suse 10.1 dual boot, and have been a very satisfied user for > 5 months. Yast package manager makes finding software for Linux a breeze. I use LaTeX everyday, browse using Firefox, listen to music using XMMS, play movies using Totem/Xine and Realplayer, check email using Thunderbird and chat using Gaim, Skype. So far, other than games unique to windows that use directx like age of empires and FIFA I haven't had a problem with Suse :). Good luck with whatever you are planning on. One last piece of info, you can use LaTeX on windows - free latex package called MikTex and there are IDEs like WinEdt to write the tex files.