Not familiar with Open Source? Some information on how Open Source software impacts you and what it can do for you and your community are available here, here, here, here, and here. Additionally, there are some bits I've written here and here.
Describing technical things can be a bit of a challenge--you don't want to make it too difficult, but being overly accessible will do little to inform. Looking back, I erred in making things overly difficult, and for that I apologize.
While there are some routers involved, there are certainly no guns. Follow below the fold for more.
Broadly speaking, switching from your familiar proprietary operating system can be a jarring event; all the things you knew about the system you used for so long, all the assumptions you had about things worked have to be just tossed out the window.
There may be a number of reasons involved in why you are considering making the switch to an Open Source system--cost, security, stability, avoiding vendor lock-in, avoiding Digital Restrictions Management, wanting to keep older hardware running longer, or simply a sense of adventure, as your current experience has drained your enthusiasm.
If you are thinking of doing so for any of the reasons apart from the last, then you more than likely won't be disappointed; though the degree of difficulty you face, while certainly lessened in the past nine months or so, depends to a great degree on what platform you are switching from.
Based on my own anecdotal experience, Mac users face the bigger challenge than Windows users; the layout of Open Source systems is much more like those in Windows XP, for example, than they are in Mac OS X. Plus the fact that things do occasionally break, a rarity for Mac users, unless you were around for System 8.5.
That being said, the number of things that are unfamiliar are great for users from both camps--especially as relates to having to install a system yourself (many users buy machines with everything already installed), not to mention partitioning a disk, facing difficulties with wireless cards, and generally having to customize things to your liking, as both major proprietary systems make a lot of choices for you.
The best path in entering the world of Open Source software is a gradual one, and once you are used to some of the software that is used daily in Open Source systems, the shock of change will certainly be lessened--the blogroll on the right has two links: OpenSourceWindows, and OpenSourceMac, both of which contain a large number of Open Source and free (!) software applications that can do many of the things you are accustomed to doing now in your proprietary system as well if not better.
Apart from using more Open Source software to get the lay of the land, you may want to try out some Open Source operating systems, be they Linux, Unix-like, Sun Solaris, or other; again, this is best done in a gradual manner, and there are a certain number of factors to take into consideration before embarking on this path.
The things you need to consider are: your current computer's hard drive space, the amount of ram it has installed in it, the CPU speed, and to a lesser extent, the Graphics card, unless of course you want to play Counter-Strike Nine Trillion as soon as you are using the new system, either via a liveCD environment, or in a virtual machine.
These are the two most prevalent options available to trying out a new Open Source operating system--that of using a liveCD, or trying the system in a virtual environment.
While the terminology may be unfamiliar, the concepts certainly are not--the liveCD is similar to taking a car from a local dealer for a test drive; once you have done so, you take it back to the dealer, and if you liked the experience, you may choose to lease or purchase the car, and if you didn't find it particularly suited to your needs, you leave the car behind, and your wallet is none the lighter.
Virtual machines, via virtualization sounds even weirder, but when you think about it, is something even more familiar than the test drive scenario; when you play a console or computer game, you are entering a virtual world, and any actual carnage (or touchdowns, or unicorns, depending on your taste in games) is purely imaginary, and in no way affects you once you turn off the machine.
Those are the two prominent choices you have when wanting to try out an Open Source operating system, and if you have only the one machine, then virtualization is likely the best option to choose at the start; we'll get into how to use a liveCD in a subsequent installment, but for right now, let's focus on the steps needed to get a virtual machine going on your computer.
First off, you are going to need to download an operating system; these vary in size from as little 40-50M (M representing Megabytes) to as large as several Gigabytes (represented by 'G'). Since this is our first time doing so, let's get a smaller one, weighing in around 90M. The file that we will be downloading is an ISO file, so when your computer prompts you, just click 'save to disk', and wait for the download to finish. The link to begin the process is here.
Once that is done, and you have the ISO disk on your desktop (or wherever), you are going to need to get the software to enable you to run this ISO file in a virtual environment; the software we've chosen for the purposes of this trial run is called vmware-server, and it is available, for free (as of now), in both Windows and Mac versions. The link to get the software is here; once you have registered the software, you will be given a code to enter, be sure to write it down, take a screen capture, or however you wish to save it, you'll need it to use the software once it is installed.
Now that you've downloaded the software and entered the code you saved from above (you did save it, right?), you should have an application called vmware-server. You want to start up the software (double-clicking on the icon should do it), and then you will choose to either download an existing virtual machine, or make a new one. Let's choose new, as we already have a machine (in the form of the ISO file we downloaded previously, PuppyLinux) to run.
Click on the button labeled 'new', and another screen will come up; here we have to choose what operating system we are going to use from the dropdown menus--we want to choose (from the list 'operating system') Linux, and (from the list 'version') Other Linux 2.6.x Kernel. Once you have done this, click continue.
A new screen will come up, and here we can name our machine, or just leave it with the name already there. We also need to choose where to save the new machine, and anywhere is just fine, for example, the Desktop. Make the choices, and click continue. The following screen is where we choose the virtual hard disk space, and don't worry; this is just going to install it to a file this size, and in no way mess with your current operating system's installation--for PuppyLinux, a few hundred M will do, so you can enter 0.5G here.
Just one more step, and then we'll be finished--we need to locate the ISO file we downloaded earlier--at this screen, choose install using disk image file, and then using the dropdown menu, find it on your hard drive, like on your desktop, if you saved it there. That's it! The system will start up, and you can click your mouse in the screen that pops up--to recapture your mouse, there are instructions on the bottom of the screen; just wait while it boots up, and you can then use it, as a virtual computer inside your computer--visiting website, etc. Congratulations! You've done something fairly difficult and technical, and at no cost (apart from the time spent). Anytime you want to repeat the process you can do so, following the instructions above, though with a different ISO file, obviously.