I suspect having to use Sudo for operations is the biggest problem facing newbies. I know it was for me. I hated it. I’ve since removed Ubuntu and am back with XP SP3. Enough with the typing commands and trying to figure out why what I typed wouldn’t work. Ridiculous.
Vista does essentially the same thing, prompting you to enter an administrative username/password almost constantly, if you don’t choose to run your system as an administrator.
I’ve been running Debian for years, so I guess I’m used to it, but I don’t have to use sudo for all that much.
Depends on what youre doing, Ive had to do some damn awful registry crap on windows in the past and the fact I could use a mouse to do it made it no more intuitive..
Most distros now have gui’s for common task that will pop up a box asking for the root password (sorta like windows or osx)
You can very easily make sudo passwordless for your username. It’s not always the best thing security-wise (still more secure than XP or vista with it’s nag feature turned off), but it’s certainly easy to do and would remove the annoyance factor for you.
Really, mostly with *buntu, all you have to do is search your problem on the forums and follow the instructions you get. It ain’t rocket science.