Difficult to learn was 20 years ago. I was amazed when I tried Linux again how simple and intuitive it was to set up. Other than the desktop looking a bit different than it does in Windows, there really aren’t any noticeable differences between the 2 OS’s.
Web browsing is just about all I do and either chrome browser or firefox on Linux will do anything as well as Windows. The advantage with chrome is that flash is built in to the browser which is different than it is in firefox.
I’m a heavy user of youtube and any web site like CNN or any other places we typically go with video works just the same as with Windows.
All of the adblock and noscript utilities are available for Linux too.
If you use a standalone email client (which I don’t), thunderbird is available for Linux. I use yahoo mail from my browser.
Best of all, Linux is historically better on older machines than on new ones, and it’s generally less memory intensive. If your machine runs Windows well, it will run Linux just as good if not better. If it runs like a dog in Windows, it will probably be nominally better in Linux.
Thank you so much! I have 10 thumbs at this sort of thing but would like to understand better. Just not on my #1 computer. If I can experiment on one of the others, I won’t get into any trouble :D