Philski, Knoppix is ideal for getting your feet wet. There will come a point where you will learn enough to be frustrated running it off of the CD, and you will need to explore some alternative at that point to get over the frustration (e.g., HD install, poor man's HD install, persistent home & swap, etc.). You will want to do a lot of lurking here before taking that on, as you will no doubt have questions about partitioning, installing, and somewhere along the line, you will have to become acquainted with BASH, which will not be pleasant. Further, if your "normal" OS is WinXP, you're not going to feel comfortable abandoning everything you know with Windows to jump into the strange and scary world of Linux, so you are going to want to dual boot, without screwing up Windows, which is going to add yet another layer of complexity and frustration. AND, if you have a factory installed XP, you'r probably dealing with NTFS as your file system, which Linux is so-far unable to write to reliably.

In some ways, installing software in Linux is easier (e.g., using apt-get), but in many ways it's much more difficult (typically, there are no click-the-button-to-install wizards as with Windows applications of the past 10 years). But the good news is that Knoppix has darn near everything most people want or need built in (if it's available).

The nice thing about Knoppix, as far as newbies are concerned, is that there is no risk in trying it from the CD. Also, this is one of the most helpful forums I've seen for any distribution of linux. There are many people here who have almost an encyclopedic knowledge of Knoppix. As with other tech sites, though, these knowledgable individuals grow really weary of answering the same newbie questions over and over again, so be sure to check the faqs and use the search box, because there are a few people who will dress you down, or give you the cold shoulder, or just ignore you altogether, if you ask a question that has been covered elsewhere.