On 2004-11-04 21:10:29 +0000 Jeremy Dales jeremy@thepeak.fsworld.co.uk wrote:
As requested, I'll try and outline why I am interested in Linux [...]
Welcome Jeremy. Thanks for the good introduction! I'm also concerned about security. Recently there have been some interesting claims about the ability of open free software development to fix bugs more quickly than closed proprietary software. The preprint at http://arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0306511 is one of them.
You don't say which distribution you installed, if any. Some of them are much easier to drive than others and nearly every distribution has a slightly different emphasis. At least twice, I've chosen a distribution by sitting down with a gift box of CDs and continuing until I find one that I like. I think it was Slackware the first time and Debian the second.
The text configuration files aren't usually too difficult and even shell script is fairly easy to start with, but there are good and bad pieces of software. I keep hoping that the worst ones will go away or get fixed, but there's a lot of inertia. Printing and emailing are the two worst categories, in my experience (yes, CUPS has a pretty web front-end, but it's big and not fun to debug).
Fortunately, there is a lot of good documentation out there, once you decide how you like to navigate and use it. Start at your distribution's web site, http://webdocs.essex.ac.uk/LDP/ or by asking people.