Anyone know about any good unix distros that wont be too much of a culture shock to someone who has used windows his entire life?
If you want to have to earn back every single piece of hardware in your computer, and end up becoming a Linux superhero when you're done, install Gentoo.
If you're concerned about privacy or rights, avoid Ubuntu and Redhat distros, as they have a history of exploiting both users and the free software licenses they purport to honor.
The most software-compatible is Debian, but games/steamOS run on all x86-based distributions.
fwiw though I took a quick look at their -stable forums (http://chakraos.org/forum/viewforum.php?id=32) and there are several recent threads related to updates breaking things. I realize that will to some extent be a problem on any platform, but it seems disproportional on Chakra.
And in any case, that probably makes it a poor recommendation for Linux novices switching from Windows.
Also, avoid the problem of "privacity" with normal Ubuntu, as not use Canonical desktop stuff.
Try openSUSE:
* UI is designed to be very familiar to Windows users, with a Windows-looking taskbar complete with start menu and system tray (if you pick KDE, Xfce, or LXDE for your desktop environment; GNOME is a bit... well, out there).
* openSUSE ships with YaST, which provides rather extensive graphical system-wide configuration. It's arguably the closest thing to a proper and fully-featured Windows-style Control Panel you'll find in the GNU/Linux world. Thanks to YaST, it's pretty rare that you'll ever need to touch the command line for the vast majority of tasks.
* If you're running in an Active Directory environment, openSUSE's builtin support for joining AD domains is abso-fucking-lutely phenomenal; the YaST-based configuration blows even Windows out of the water, let alone other GNU/Linux distros.
* Pretty stable (openSUSE is the testbed for SUSE Enterprise) without being totally behind the times like Debian Stable tends to be.
I've set it up on the formerly-XP-running machines of multiple elderly, computer-illiterate people with effectively zero issues (other than one user complaining about the default desktop background; I showed him how to change it, and he since managed to figure out how to set up his own without further intervention on my part). If computer-illiterate old people can figure it out, I'm confident that someone who knows that Hacker News even exists can figure it out ;)
To be clear, I do NOT recommend it for folks who don't want a learning curve. But once you've over that curve, it is a haven from shitty operating systems.
Funnily enough, I recently switched back to Windows from Arch. Linux's ecosystem was just too depressing for me. Windows 10 makes me sad though because it had the potential to be great were it not for all the privacy issues.