Good question. I'm not an IT expert any more, although I have a degree in Comp Sci and in my dim and distant past used to get paid to write code.
Now I get paid to tell people to write code, I've got two kids, a mortgage, grey hair, no time and there's always something more important I should be doing...
But one day last year I was chatting to some friends who'd got themselves Netbooks, and reminiscing about the last time I tried to install Linux on my PC (circa 1995, Suse install, came on 9 CDs and took several days to get beyond the taunt of the flashing cursor). And found out about ubuntu.
I was persuaded by the look and feel of the gui, and the massive leaps in the applications that I could use. I decided to get my feet wet again. I gave myself a month to turn my home laptop into ubuntu and not weaken by adding a dual boot option. It was the penguin or nothing.
I got a really big surprise. The first evening I was surfing the web after a very brief install, after three evenings I'd pretty much got everything I needed configured, and I haven't looked back since. What helped me most was blogs, chats and articles that described problems I hit and (most of the time) straightforward solutions.
One year in, and it passed the ultimate test. When my wife's trusty XP machine finally croaked after five years of continuous use, she grudgingly let me build the new laptop with ubuntu as well. She's still speaking to me so I'm quietly confident...
I've kept various notes along the way when I wanted to set something up. I got a lot of benefit from other bloggers who helped me, so I plan to publish these and hopefully help the next soul who wants to give it a go. To misquote Newton - "If I have seen farther, then it is by standing on the shoulders of giants".
