Well, I'm very much a newbie, and running as a dual XP/Ultimate 1.3 user. I have also virtually no experience with terminal commands or shell scripts - I'm a total GUI person.
Interestingly, I've found that the Ultimate 1.3 is more user friendly than a standard Edgy install - eg: I tried 3 attempts to get a standard Edgy install, but it always used to hang at around 38% install.
Ultimate went through without a problem. Most things are also easily installed via Ultimate from what I've seen, especially propriety codecs.
The only problem that I came across is with enabling nvidia drivers, however if you ignore the Envy option it wasn't too painful to install, following a guide found elsewhere on this forum.
I'm intending to remain a dual boot, mainly as I enjoy playing LAN games with a few friends who are all fully XP people. I'll also be using XP in order to do stuff that I know when I don't have the time or the intelligence to figure out how application 'x' actually works.
My reason for migrating is twofold - my hardware is ageing and I can't afford updated hardware, and Vista's asinine requirements.
FWIW, I have found Ultimate to actually be more stable on my system than a core Edgy install - I don;t know why, but it is. Heck - I've had it for all of 2 days, and I already have Beryl/Emerald running, (hoping to impress the LAN mates with the eye-candy!) and most of my application preferences that I had in windows I've already managed to set.
About all that I have to do is find a good WYSIWYG website editor (looking at NVU) and arrange my panels to how I like them.
EDIT: As well as the ususal Add/Remove Programs, they also have Synaptic and Adept package managers installed.
cheers
Scruffy