Do they just sell the software?Yes I know this is supposed to be a free OS but I have not had the best of luck with downloading and installing it off the web.I'm getting a little bored with everything in the house running 98se or XP.I do play games but mostly on one computer the others I use mainly for the internet,internet radio, and as a spare when my main is down for upgrades or repairs.
I recently downloaded Fedora Core 3, which was pretty painless (once I figured out that Roxio doesn't like burning IMG files and switched to Nero). Installation was amazingly simple, too, although it helped to do ten minutes of reading ahead of time in order to choose a partition and boot manager setup.
Once upon a time I knew a reasonable amount about Linux (I actually wrote a kernel driver for a video capture and MPEG encoder card), but I've forgotten almost all of it in the ensuing years.
You might want to try a live distro, such as Knoppix (Debian) or Slax (Slackware Live) and see how you like it. They are very well at configuring support for a system, and they come on a single cd. While most Linux Distros are usually free, they sometimes require you to pay for continued customer support and sometimes upgrades. Off the top of my head I can only really count on one or two hands the number of companies that require payment for software. A few games play well on Linux using WineX/Cedega, but there can often be a few bugs that arise trying to run them.