I've been thinking about switching my laptops OS to Linux, and my biggest questions are whether or not I'll be able to do the things I do, mainly, downloading torrents and playing games (mostly roms (SNES, GBA, n64) Being able to keep playing FFXI would be nice too, but I'm thinking of quitting anyway. Oh, and burning DVDs/VCDs, I do that a lot too.

To briefly answer your question, yes, you can do all of that fairly easy with Linux.

And by failry easily, Morm means only with the sale of one kidney, a part of your liver, a minimum of 10 illegal chinese, and 3000 man hours (less depending on if you get more chinese).

To be fair, there is the whole learning a whole new O.S issue to tackle...

I'd be willing to learn if it meant getting the most out of this machine. It's not like retarded hard, is it?

Not if you don't want it to be. Ubuntu is a pretty easy distribution to get into. I've installed it myself once, and it was trivial. I haven't used it since, though...it bores me, which is probably a plus for you.

http://www.ubuntu.com/products/WhatIsUbuntu

Torrents: My favorite torrent program is uTorrent, but there's not really a linux equivalent of that. There's a ton of other ones though, so you can easily do that.

Roms: There's linux ports of most emulators, not an issue

FFXI: wine can run most windows games just fine, with a slight performance hit (less than the hit that you get with vista)

Burning DVD/VCD: Plenty of open source software for that, although DVD is a closed format so technically doing anything with a DVD on linux violates the DMCA

Been fiddling with this all day, and I haven't been able to even install it. I keep getting an error about my X-server

What kind of laptop do you have? Make, Model, Specs?

Dell Inspiron 9400, but I finally got it working by using a different build. It was pretty nice, my only complaint is the resolution weirdness and that things seemed a little slow.