Ubuntu is fairly turn-key these days. I have installed the LTS on dozens of old laptops and PCs with excellent results. Most of the people I have done this for have been quite happy with it, as I made it very clear at the start what the limitations would be. Some of them love the Software Center, even though many of the apps are perpetually half-baked. The rest are the types of people that need a web browser, email client, and office suite. No one needs to throw their old hardware away and pay Microsoft thousands of dollars for this anymore. It's just silly.
I am no fan of Unity and cannot use it's absurd workflows on my main work and home machines, but I do use it on my own laptops because it "just works". I don't need 8-12 work spaces there and don't mind that my session is lost each time I reboot. As with many Ubuntu refugees, I chose Linux Mint (Debian Edition) as my desktop of choice. MATE at work and Cinnamon and home. My servers all run some blend of Debian stable/testing, depending where the Debian release cycle happens to be. Before Ubuntu existed, I used Debian on my desktop, so it's a little deja vu to be running LMDE. Before I settled on Debian (potato), I went through Gentoo, SuSE, Red Hat, Slackware, LFS, etc, dating back to the mid-90s. They all had/have various shortcomings and Debian felt like the right fit for me at the time (probably 2000 or so). I've been happy with it ever since.
I've been a MythTV user for many years (since v0.7) with 2 back ends and several front ends. Upgrades can be problematic sometimes and the migration away from analog television has degraded its usefulness significantly. However my family still uses it, so I keep it going. The Myth drive cluster is where my old HDs go to live out their sunset years.
I have a decrepit, old PC at work to do the 3 things I need Windoze for and Windows 7 at home to play games on a gaming-only rig that I rarely use these days. Virtual machines don't work for either of those. I would go crazy if I had to use Windows as my main OS, though I was pleasantly surprised with 7. I do have a few Virtual Box clients running XP that I use for various (mostly work-related) things at home. I used CrossOver for many years, mainly to bridge the Office gap. I almost never need it now, thanks to LibreOffice. I have a Brother network printer/scanner that worked perfectly out of the box with all of my machines, so no complaints there. Before that I network-printed to various HP DeskJets via CUPS on my main server. Very reliable, even though the printers themselves weren't.
So yeah, you need to be a little adventurous and willing to learn to migrate your primary computer to a Linux distribution. For Ubuntu specifically, there is a plethora of user-level support in the forums and so forth. A lot of GNU/Linux newbies all learning together. These days, the chances that you'll need to bust out the console and fiddle with text files are less and less. It's been an amazing transition to watch.
