Gotcha on the keeping the hand dirty. Skills not used are mostly skills that need to be relearned!
Ack as well on just emailing and surfing. But ... then someone sends you a link to a youtube video or a PDF document or a music clip from Soundcloud or .....
Now you need to set up your browser so that the plugins work with each multimedia type. On the pay OS’s, it’s somebody’s job to make sure all this works or at worst you get a button that says “Push here in order to make this work”. On Linux, it doesn’t quite work this way. Points being:
1. Email and Surfing quickly descends/devolves into multimedia consumption.
2. Multimedia consumption (particularly if you wish to never leave the browser environment) requires some knowledge and sophistication regarding browser plugins, codecs, third party software and the like.
I used to run this distro a lot it did everything I think I even used it for Netflix that uses silver light.
http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=ultimate