Big words coming from someone who's clearly running Windows! I know that taskbar when I see it!

well, as a Linux user, it's got a steep as fuck learning curve, but once you wrap your head around the concepts of a UNIX system, it becomes very easy, since most of the programs follow the same philosophy, if in slightly different ways. Just keep the Gargler open and paste error messages into it from the terminal when things fuck up, and you'll probably find someone else in the same shitty situation as you, maybe even with a solution.