From my personal experience of the main Linux distros, when they work fine and everything goes smoothly they are great, when you run into problems though Linux can be a bastard to fix. Most of the problem solving advice still tends to be dropping into the Terminal and editing obscure config files.
Providing everything works out of the box though, you're in luck. I almost put my fist through the wall spending almost an entire weekend trying to get an unsupported Wireless card to work with NDISWrapper and a problem with enhanced graphic drivers a while back.
For the basic day-to-day tasks most users do (web, email, facebook, youtube) Linux is great, in fact I put in on my brother's laptop as he had a habit of ending up with malware every few days (80 trojans on his Win 7 machine on last count was enough for me to replace it with Linux Mint).
It does lack applications which I need for work though which is why I keep Windows and OS X around for apps like the Adobe Suite, Pro Tools/Logic, and decent video editing software, but for general use Linux can be fine.
