Sounds as if a window manager is just like any other program, just that it only fills the unused screenspace with a few buttons, clock, background, taskbar and then translates your key/mouse input a bit and sends it back to X but doesnt even communicate directly to the other running programs? All that buzz about people loving/hating these things made me think there must be something more to it, but I couldnt think of anything.

Well, it manages all of the screen space, but yeah that's the gist of it. Personally, I do most of my work in terminals so I used a tiling window manager called 'awesome' which makes it easier to organize multiple terminals and navigate with the keyboard.

-Josh

Some info on The Reg today: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/02/18/picking_a_linux_distro/

I use Ubuntu which is easy to use. Others recommend Mint as an alternative without the recent Ubuntu UI changes.

And it's easy to try any distribution you like out with a Virtual Machine. (Indeed, if you will still be using Windows a lot, using Linux via a VM may well be better anyway - although I have a dual boot, most of my Linux time is spent in a VM, as it's so much easier to manage, and avoid rebooting. I only need a real installation for things like some 3D stuff.)

I don't know what happened with your installation - another benefit of VMs is not having to worry about partitions and boot options, and risk of damaging existing OSs. (Also my dual boot setup is on an entirely separate drive, and I set the BIOS to have that as the primary drive when I installed, so that the Linux boot menu wasn't overwriting anything on the Windows drive - so I can either boot from the Linux drive and have a menu to choose the OS, or switch back to the Windows drive, and boot Windows as normal.)