Come now, no need to get your keyboard all confused...............
One of the real surprises was that Ubuntu seems to have just set all the irritating default things, like language, keyboard layout etc up properly as well. It asked the usual "UK or US English" questions then just went off and made everything work.
Maybe I'll find some flaws with it, but so far it seems to do exactly what it says. Open Office seems pretty intuitive as well, not much different from Office XP (apart from being free).
It is certainly very, very fast. I'm currently working on a 300MHz AMD machine of about 1998 vintage. Everything appears to work at about the same speed as it does on my 2.53GHz Windoze XP machine. Pretty impressive.
The only snag is that I will have to keep the Windoze machine to run AutoCad and Solidworks, as these won't port to Linux (as far as I know). Still, with a KVM switch to simply switch between the Linux box and the Windoze machine this shouldn;t be a problem.
Hope this dispels some of the worries for others contemplating such a move.
VP