+1 for mplayer.

IMO the best video player hands down for any platform. Beats VLC in image quality and speed. I also use SMplayer as its frontend, but occasionally it has nagged me with some donation dialog, what's up with that windows like crap?

For video encoding I use ffmpeg which is great and avidemux for simple edits like cutting, rescaling and adding new audio.. Haven't found a good fully featured video editor though.

For photo editing ufraw and Gimp work fine for me. Darktable is nice for playing with raw images too, but too resource heavy for my measly ibm laptop (now almost 10 years old).

Geeqie is a nice and simple image viewer, with basic options for rotating, reading exif and other stuff you'd expect. And nothing beats imagemagick for quick commandline image editing and batch processing.

All in all you'll probably find reasonable replacements for most software you use in Windows and plenty that are superior to their windows conterparts. And who the hell runs apache on windows anyway? I'm probably not wrong if I say that over 90% of webservers run on linux.

I suggest you to try out several linux distros and taking your time with them before deciding which way to go..It's probably easiest to start with Ubuntu, Mint or another similar fully blown install and move on when you've got hang of the basics. (And have gotten some idea what programs you like to use).

I''ve been using debian 'testing' for last 9 years or so and would recommend that in the long run (no need for reinstall or full upgrade as it's basically a rolling release). I've found that sooner or later whole distribution upgrades (ala ubuntu) will **** up your system and be pain to fix making reinstallation the easiest option available. I think last and only time I reinstalled debian was some 4 years ago and that was simply for building a well optimized system on a new SSD. (boots to desktop in 6 seconds on 2004 hardware so worth it).

Whatever way you decide I hope you enjoy getting rid of that spyware called Windows.