Transitioning from Windows, I would recommend Fedora with the MATE desktop. MATE desktop uses the same kind of cascading menus as Windows.

Fedora 20 MATE 64bit Live CD ISO can be downloaded here:
http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/f ... 4-20-1.iso

You can just burn it as an ISO image (not as data) and it will be bootable, giving you the ability to test drive it before you install it.

If you don't mind me asking, what video card (or chipset) do you use? Intel has very good open source drivers for Linux but if you use nVidia or ATI/AMD video cards, you might want to consider using the manufacturers' proprietary Linux drivers. This is true with all Linux distributions, not just Fedora.

Thanks for the link. I have a nVidia GPU. Will I need to disable my GPU when using Fedora?

No. NVidia is great! Linux has open source Nouveau drivers for NVidia cards that work pretty well. They are not as good as nVIdia's drivers, which you will want to install at some point and they are very easy to install. I use nVidia myself and IMO, they provide the some of the best support for accelerated video in Linux.

All of the proprietary packages, like the nVidia drivers, are in the RPMFusion repositories. Once you get Fedora installed, you can just add RPMFusion to your repository list and get all the proprietary and NON-GPL licensed packages you need from there.

When you install Fedora, you will only have access to Fedora repositories. Once you add the RPMFusion repos and Adobe(flash) repos, you will have access to pretty much every software package and application available for Linux, right at you finger tips.

Thanks Tux!

Anaconda is the installer Fedora uses. You might want to look over a step by step guide to see how it operates. Basically, you select the physical drive you want to install to and if the drive is empty, Fedora will default to using the entire drive. If there is already an OS on the drive or data on there you want to keep, you will need to set aside some space for Fedora to be installed, which can be done using Anaconda. You can also reclaim used space from the drive which contains data you don't need to keep.

When installing, I do not recommend using LVM, which is the default partitioning method. It's really unnecessary for workstations. I normally use "Standard" partitioning for workstations.

There might be a couple of extra steps (shim) when dual booting booting Windows 8 with UEFI BIOS.

If you have any questions about installing, I'm happy to chime in with my 2c.

Thanks again Tux.