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With regards to Windows, I don't entirely disagree. However, there are APIs available that tell a developer/installer/whatever where the correct directories are located.

Yup, Linux has standards too. One's called ~. (Mac also uses this.) It always points to the current user's home folder where you can place your data. If that doesn't suit your fancy, getenv_("HOME") will get you the home folder as well.
It also has a standard location for binary files, shared binary, libraries, etc.: http://proton.pathname.com/fhs/2.2/ | http://www.tuxfiles.org/linuxhelp/linuxdir.html

Hint: /usr/bin is where you put your "user" "binaries"... I know it's such a hard concept to wrap your head around. Maybe you should take a few minutes to try to figure all that out.

In soviet linux the keyboard is the mouse:

http://www.tuxfiles.org/linuxhelp/movecursor.html

If they paid that much, they got ripped off. I have been running Linux (on the desktop as well as several Linux servers as well as helping Windows users switch to Linux and troubleshooting production servers) for almost a decade and I have paid a grand total of $0.00 for everything.

Seriously, with all the documentation available (http://www.tldp.org/ http://www.tuxfiles.org/ various forums and IRC, not to mention the man pages) one doesn't need to pay for help.

If you do it right, Linux will cost the same on one machine as it does on a million machines: $0.00
Microsoft will never allow you to do that.

My opinion is, they messed up bigtime.

I've tried a number of different distros, and the two I like the best are Ubuntu and ELX. ELX is more Windows-like, it even has wine (windows emulator) already set up so you can run most windows programs, but it's not as popular, so if you run into problems, it'll be rather hard to find to find help for it. I use Ubuntu as my main OS. It's pretty simple to use, and there are some good websites to get you going on it.

As for games, it depends on what kind of games you like to play. If you like puzzle games, you'll find 8 gazillion of them for linux. If you like FPSs, UT2004 runs on linux. Many other games will also run under wine. I'm a gamer too, but I tend to stick to consoles so I haven't tried many games under linux.

Pretty much all files that work with windows will work in linux, as long as you have a program that reads them. MP3s are rather universal, and almost every linux distro comes with an MP3 player, usually XMMS, which is a lot like winamp. The default office program in most distros is Open Office, which also runs under windows and works with MS Office files. As for compression, well, I'm still a little bit of a n00b myself, so I'm not quite sure. I know in Ubuntu I can easily compress stuff to tar.gz format in the file manager, and I can open .rar and .zip files. I'm sure I could install a more elaborate compression program, but I haven't really found a need for that yet.

I'ld recommend you look around at other websites too, and find out more about linux in general. TuXfiles has some pretty good articles and guides, and I;m sure you can google around for more stuff. Or you can just email me. Good luck.

now they have a linux distro with clippy

yay.

Another analyst added, "they pay 5 guys to sit around and post blog entries to the internet. They don't even write their own content; they just cut and paste what other people send them. They don't even correct glaring spelling errors or correct obvious factual inconsistencies".

Furthermore, industry pundits have also revealed the truth around the questionable business practices being exposed by the lack of demand for LNUX stock. It appears that Linux's own community has begun to change their collective viewpoint.

"If linux is so great", said one, "why did they change their name from VA Linux"?

Who wouldn't use the helpful mascot! Clippy for Linux

Another analyst added, "they pay 5 guys to sit around and post blog entries to the internet. They don't even write their own content; they just cut and paste what other people send them. They don't even correct glaring spelling errors or correct obvious factual inconsistencies".

Furthermore, industry pundits have also revealed the truth around the questionable business practices being exposed by the lack of demand for LNUX stock. It appears that Linux's own community has begun to change their collective viewpoint.

"If linux is so great", said one, "why did they change their name from VA Linux"?

Another analyst added, "they pay 5 guys to sit around and post blog entries to the internet. They don't even write their own content; they just cut and paste what other people send them. They don't even correct glaring spelling errors or correct obvious factual inconsistencies".

Furthermore, industry pundits have also revealed the truth around the questionable business practices being exposed by the lack of demand for LNUX stock. It appears that Linux's own community has begun to change their collective viewpoint.

"If linux is so great", said one, "why did they change their name from VA Linux"?

One more step towards Linux XP ;)

Microsoft!! Look at the beauty of XP. MS Linux:)