You are using linux at a good time, a lot of the programs have gui's and are much more user friendly for the non-geeks. I hope you stick with it, although its still rough around the edges and you might spend a couple hours of time looking for some solutions and workarounds its worth it in the long run.
Yeah, I really agree, back then I even needed some ubuntu how-to's help to get my windows partitions mounted in it, I've spent hours and hours searching for solutions nearly for everything but oh well it was fun when I didn't have any other things to do, but other than that it was so frustrating I've uninstalled and reinstalled ubuntu several times. Now just nearly everything works out of the box, mostly in Linux Mint the distro I'd recommend to anyone who is trying out linux at the first time or just searching for an easy to use distro ^^.