I have finally made the decision to move to Linux, but I'm still a little intimidated by using mainly command lines for everything. I still want to be able to do a lot of the functions that I now use on my windows box. Like audio/video streaming to my internal network devices, video conversion of my dvd's to hdd. I know that being open source allows for everything to be possible and I'm really looking forward to running either Ubuntu or Fedora but I'm still not quite sure about the differences between the two. I am really new to Linux as a home system but I'm ready to start. I do have some experience building a network with Solaris 10 so I hope that will help me conquer this. Thanks.

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For Ubuntu vs. Fedora, take a look at http://distrowatch.com

For command-line, "just do it"

I would recommend Ubuntu to start with, I think it's easier than Fedora, though if you install VirtualBox (http://www.virtualbox.org/), you'll be able to play with Fedora, as well as having an installation of Windows available if there is that one application you may need to fall back on.

The way I understand the distributions, Ubuntu tries to be the default replacement for Windows, and Fedora is RedHat's way of testing bleeding edge technologies that might later be included with the main RedHat distribution, so maybe more for those that like to experiment. (I do like Fedora though, I don't think it's too terribly hard, just not as easy as the former.)

Then don't. Select a Linux distribution that has most actions available as GUI and use the GUI.

Ordinary user activities are available in GUI form in almost any Linux distribution. But system admin tasks might not be available GUI.

Ubuntu has more system admin activities available in GUI than typical Linux distributions, which is one of the reasons it is more beginner friendly than typical Linux.

Mepis is similar to Ubuntu, but has slightly more admin available in GUI form and is slightly more beginner friendly. (It is somewhat non obvious buried in the requests for you to buy Mepis for a small price that Mepis is a free download and buying it is optional).

Fedora is significantly less beginner friendly.

Well that may be true in practice to some extent, it's not what either of those distributions set out to do. I would recommend PCLinuxOS for the role of a Windows-alike distribution (but see http://linux.oneandoneis2.org/LNW.htm), and while there's a lot of cross-feeding between Fedora and RHEL, Fedora is still a very viable distribution in its own right, with some aims that RHEL doesn't have (like being 100% free software and strong community support).

I can't talk much about Fedora, because I haven't used it in a while, but I find everything in Ubuntu tends to just work, with very little tweaking required only occasionally.

For what you're looking to do with video editing, though, I would take a look at Ubuntu Studio (http://ubuntustudio.org/).

Also - don't worry about the command-line. It's incredibly useful for support forums (where it's a lot easier to say "type this command" than give a list of GUI instructions), but these days you can always find graphical tools to do the same job as well.

Hope that helps,

—Robert J Lee