Originally Posted by
aqd
Using modern Linux desktop is more like iOS or WP7/8: there are huge repositories of free applications with verification (safety guaranteed). 3d graphics, usb storage, printers etc all work reasonably, and you can find browsers, media players for all sort of formats, professional office suites, photostop alternatives, and commercial games etc etc.
But all those are not designed to be clones of Windows environemnt - a lot of problems would pop up when you want to use it just like PC - you cannot play latest windows games on it directly, or edit office documents and expect them to look 100% the same when opened later in MS-office, nor can you work with files used by photoshop or 3ds max etc. There are virtualization and emulators, but what's the point of bothering with linux at all if all you want to run are running windows games and apps?
Besides, those new desktop systems on linux are quite annoying. About a decade ago they started some sort of movement to make linux desktop more friendly, and now it's just as friendly but also as retarded as Mac OS/X. Most of advanced features are removed and no improvement has been done in those parts, although you can still type commands in console. On desktop there is nothing comparable to windows group-policy editor, IIS manager for web servers, or event viewer etc, and you cannot even do file-copy-paste in standard file dialog boxes - which is called file chooser internally. Apart from software installation which is a nightmare on windows, there is nothing good I can say about it compared to windows-7 or server 2008.
PS: if you're still interested, get ubuntu. Don't waste time trying different distributions.