Another fallacy is Linux takes less horsepower to run. The more modern distro's take just as much as Windows if not more. Also, the driver situation is lacking on some hardware you may own. I have Mandriva on one box and I can't get my Matrox G450 to work properly so I had to opt for a "throw down" card that doesn't show off Mandriva's capabilities and doesn't meet my needs for multiple monitors. The Linux lovers say "Well, just buy a new card", but that was supposed to be a perk with Linux to use your older hardware. The G450 works fine on XP and would probably work fine on Vista, I just don't have the desire for Vista yet.
You have to learn new things which doesn't make sense to Windoze users. Like why do I have to mount a drive to see it? It's transparent in Windows. Why can't I have an .exe file to install things? Later you find that certain distro's have .rpms which are easier to deal with, but still are a mystery where they put the files. Just upgrading FireFox from the website take hours of reading and downloading trying to get the simplest things done. Just changing the wallpaper on the desktop can get involved instead of 2 clicks. Most things in Windows happen automatically and we take the ease of use for granted.
I hate windows and am a clear candidate for a change, but I will get flamed just for saying Linux isn't easy. I have done Microsoft since DOS 3.1 and 286's and am not an idiot. It's just is like learning Polish after 60 years of English. Without a tutor to ask questions, you will be limited to e mail and web surfing for awhile. And the "junk box" will need an older distro to work. Ubuntu, Mandriva, and others today, need at least 512megs ram and a p4 to run without pain. Frankly, if you just need to read e mail and surf, Maybe a trip to Windows 98 would do the same faster without needing more hardware. If you are looking for the spinning desktops and other bells and whistles, it won't work on a door stop. In fact, If all you want is e mail and web surfing, maybe a smart phone is in order and you could clean out that spare bedroom with the 486's, 2 gig hard drives, EDO memory sticks and boxes big enough to jack the car up in the front yard. I know, I'm in therapy right now for the same malady. (I just tossed a Commodore 64 in the trash about a month ago) I kept thinking I would put in on Ebay some day. Believe it or not I still have my first 286 with an add on accelerator that boosted it to 12,mhz in a pile in a spare bedroom. I gave $2400 in '84. It has a 20 meg hd rll'ed to 30 megs. At the time, 5-10 megs was the norm. I was the envy of everyone I knew. I even payed extra for a 1.44 floppy drive. I found out you could drill the hole in the 720's to get 1.44 so I wanted the larger drive.
With a Pentium I, you will have to go way back to get a distro to run on it. Not sure it's worth the trouble. Pentium III, maybe a better beginning point.
OS X is a good example of a UNIX made friendly. It addresses pretty much every example of difficulty in Linux you mentioned.
The down side is you can’t slap it on that old P1 that has been sitting in the garage for a decade.
Not true at all...There are some very active Distros focusing on older machines with limited memory...Puppy Linux is in that category ...but there are others also. Slax is a Slackware based that runs well and has a lot of good features...