Planning on making the switch.

The overall consensus is that Ubuntu is the probably the best to start off with. Here are 3 critical websites if you go the ubuntu route:
http://www.ubuntuguide.org
http://www.ubuntuforums.org
http://getautomatix.com

I would read through those sites and try to get an understanding of how apt and software repositoris work. If you want to still keep playing windows games then you'll probably want to get Cedega (http://www.transgaming.com). It's a $5/month subscription fee but I think it's worth it.

I have no idea about the Media Direct, never heard of it.

If all you want to do is play WoW and CSS, I wine will work perfectly. Basic photo editting can be done with a program called "The GIMP". There are tons of music players out there, amarok is one that is very similar to itunes. For school work, you can look into openoffice which is basically your windows office.

As for which distro, it really depends on what you want to do. Do you want to really -learn- linux or do you just want to use it? If you are looking to learn, I would go with Gentoo. There is no better distro for learning because you basically build a linux box from the ground up. If you are looking to just use it, Ubuntu is your best bet. There really is no reason to wait for the latest version as you can simply upgrade. The differences between linux versions are usually slim to none, just updated packages which you can do seperately.

As for the media source, I'm going to say no, you won't be able to use it, but then again, why would you want to? Linux can play all of your media, and if you are really worried about saving battery life, you can create a seperate linux boot that will boot with all unecessary devices turned off (yes, you can actually disable devices in linux, however that will require quite a bit of reading and learning. Do NOT just go around trying to edit files because you want to turn stuff off).

A few caveats. With linux, there are two things you will have trouble with. One is sound. Sometimes you get lucky and sound will work without a hitch. Other times you will end up spending hours trying to get the drivers installed and set up correctly. The second is wireless. Here is where ubuntu is much better than gentoo. Although there are plenty of guides on how to get everything working with gentoo, you will have a much easier time getting everything working with ubuntu.

So yeah, there you go. Aside from gaming, everything you can do on windows, you can do in Linux and for the most part, much more efficiently, much cheaper and way nerdier. For gaming, you can use wine or cedega. Both take some time setting up config files for each game but the two games you mentioned do run. I personally ran WoW several months ago. Performance was around 70-80% what I was getting in Windows.

ehh that really depends. Gentoo is only *faster* if you make it faster. If you use the cflags and USE flags to your advantage gentoo will be built to make use of all your CPU extensions such as SSE2 and MMX and all that other junk.. on top of that USE flags will keep programs slim...say if you have a Gnome system, it will make it so that programs install only Gnome-relevant components and doesn't bloat it with KDE-related junk...thus keeping the programs footprint on ram smaller...and thsu helping speed.

On the ubuntu side, its compiled i386 for maximum compatiblity, if i am not mistaken MMX is the only extension that is used, so essentially all your fancy 3DNow! and SSE goes to waste. programs are also compiled with LOTS of junk in them to make them more usable for everyone, thus bloating up their footprint..and thus making the whole distro slower. Make no mistake though, a lot went into speeding up Edgy Eft compared to Dapper Drake starting from the new boot init...to teardown... to Gnome 2.16 / GTK2 speed tweaks. So generally speaking apps like Firefox and OpenOffice will take a few seconds to laod up....but everything else should be on par with windows when it comes to performance. Also, at least in my experience, while in windows once you open a few apps things just begin to suck, ubuntu does a better job of managing resources so you can have like 20 apps open at the same time.

if you find Ubuntu to be a tad slow, grab Xubuntu (or just install XFCE4 on top of ubuntu). XFCE is a lighter desktop than Gnome and should speed things up. If you wanna go even lighter, Fluxbox and E17 are also available. Also ubuntu offers several alternative kernels such as the i586, k7, k8....take advantage of that and install the more appropriate kernel than the default i386 to speed things up a bit.

Automatix is your friend. It should take care of your video drivers most likely(If you have NVidia or ATI) and multimedia programs(Including MP3 playback)

Firefox is known to be slow in the default Ubuntu setup I believe.

Commandline can be done a couple of different ways. Look for a terminal program, or press CTRL+ALT+FKey where FKey is F1-F6. CTRL+ALT+F7 will take you back to the graphical environment.

Seablade

BIGEE1212,
You'll probably want to update your kernel to the 686 version cause the 386 kernel is not a good performer. Go into synaptic and do a search for linux-image. grab the newest 686 version. You'll also want to search for linux-headers and get the headers that match the kernel you just checked. That way things like vmware will install properly.

Also, do what seablade says and get your video drivers installed. I also noticed that the desktop was more responsive when I have xgl/compiz installed so you may want to try that later. I have TONS of services running and my machine is very responsive, but I'm running the amd64 build.

Heh for MP3s take your choice, they are a dime a dozen.

I would use aqualung myself, but MP3 is kinda a crappy format so it won't do you but so much good. MPlayer, VLC, Amarok, whatever all play em with no problem, so yea take your choice. If Amarok installs fine on Ubuntu it will probably be the best choice for most people as it is most the all-in-one jukebox solution ala ITunes, without the store to buy music from.

Seablade

i like bmp which is a gtk addoptation of xmms which is a linux clone of winamp... for more of an all-in-one experience Amorok is a popular option.

that said once you install the media codecs with Automatix you should have mp3 support around all media apps

Ubuntu is pretty nice. It's a good, small linux distro that you can easily expand to the packages you want with apt-get. Apt is the best package management tool out there. Damn Small Linux is pretty cool too.

OSS apps are pretty good. In fact, except for Outlook, VMware and Visio, I run all OSS software on my windows xp box (bb4win, OOo, Gimp, Inkscape Wireshark, Truecrypt, AXcrypt, Gvim, Ruby, Python, mysql, notepad++, keepass, launchy, the list is endless).

If you get an Nvidia card, Linux makes a decent gaming box. I've never had much luck with ATI and linux. Wine and WoW work pretty well on Linux. If you want to spend a few bucks, Codeweavers office is a commercial Wine with 100% support for Office, Outlook, iTunes, and WoW.

Didn't we just do this?

Seablade

Well Gentoo can teach most people a few things about linux and how it works, it does take some time though. Feel free to post up questions as you come to them. If it wasn't for my need for a specific kernel set up I would probably stick with a more standard distro, but my needs for customization outweigh it, and besides Gentoo aint to tough Maybe when a realtime enabled kernel is stock on one of the distros I might consider it, at least it is moving in that direction finally.

Seablade

have fun biggie...maybe you can pull it off, and even if you fail hopefully you'll learn a few things down the road.

if you really thought the generic gnome configuration in ubuntu is on the boring side, take a look into beryl. version 0.1.1 came out just recently and it now supports wobbly menus (like compiz did) and more bug fixes. xgl is still unstable with ati, but with nvidia i am having 0 problems on my desktop. when beryl 1.0 hits the shelves its gonna be sick.

I personally hate gnome for customizing options... KDE is so much more customizable, but for a TRULY custom experience, 'non-standard' WM's are way better. A lot of people like e17 (I personally don't love it), but if you want to get into understanding how a WM works, try flux. Nothing like editing .conf files to edit the menus, background, etc, etc.

-olly