Excellent howto!

 As you rightly say, everyone's perfect desktop will be slightly different, but that is the beauty of Linux - the options are all there for us to customise our own setup.

I have only moved over to Linux just over two months ago. I started off with Ubuntu 8.04, which I found very good, tried Mepis  7, which didn't quite suit me and have settled (for the time being anyway!) on Mint Elyssa, which, for me, is brilliant.

I didn't go the VM route as I wanted to get away from Windows (I now have a dual boot with XP) as much as possible but instead installed Wine and am able to run Macromedia Dreamweaver , which I need to maintain a website, without any problems.

 Mint Elyssa could just be the OS that woos away a lot of people from Windows.

Frank