whole bunch of questions!

[Hart Larry]

Well Jeff: I will tackle #2 and maybe #3 on your list. Sure moving-and-coppying 
files are much easier in Linux, similar to ways many of us worked in DOS back in 
the 90s. Unfortunately I toons is not for Linux, but if you can find an rss feed 
on an apple site, you can add it to a podcast client. I actually prefer hpodder, 
however, you would have to grab from an older archive.
At a time when I was in windows, there were 2 items holding me back from 
switching. Drivers for my DecTalk were not ready or working poorly. But also, 
running Openbook as a scanning engine in windows worked quite well. Supposedly 
folks say Tesseract is a best scanning solution in Linux, but so-far its quite 
awful. But once you become comfortable with commands you will enjoy daily, you 
will be much happier. And yes there are plenty of conversion tools for working 
among video-and-audio file formats. A wonderful program was created by another 
on this list, called, edway. Hope some or all of that will help in an important 
discision.
Hart