Linux

[Blodrast]

Thanks Blodrast a few questions

Would you notice much of a jump in performance on a lower end machine compared to windows?

Define "performance", please... I talked about this in my post above, towards the end, in the "Performance" section. The general rule is that you can choose to have all the bells and whistles, and in that case of course the OS will use up a lot of resources, or you can choose to have fewer bells and whistles, and the OS will use fewer resources.

The big desktop environments, Gnome and KDE, are / can be as much a resource hog as Windows is. The main difference is that you can choose exactly how many resources to enable (to a larger extent than just using/not using, say, Aero).

However, as a rule, on average, I'd say that a machine with modest resources would have a much easier time running a Linux/Unix OS than Windows, yes.
Remember, this is an OS where one doesn't even need a graphical interface, and can do everything from the command line, if one chooses so (and this is a very common case with servers). Naturally, you will use a GUI, but even so, yes, I would argue that fewer resources are needed to have a smooth-running OS than with Windows.

What Distro do orgahs here use and what do they think about them

The other members will speak for themselves, naturally. As for me, I'm using Fedora at home (dual-boot with windows though, since I do play games occasionally), and Debian and Ubuntu at work. All three of them are major distros, and I would advise going with a popular distro first, since it will be easier to find help and/or fix common issues, and there will be plenty of support (as opposed to some very specialized, obscure distro).

All three of these are popular for good reasons, and you can't really go wrong with any of them. I would maybe recommend Ubuntu, since it seems the most user-friendly of all. But really, the differences between the three are not relevant to you at this point - e.g., I don't think you care that certain configuration files are called differently, or located in different places, or have a different format.

Finilly does Itunes work via wine or anyother method is there some other program that works with ipods?

Good question, and I don't know the answer to that one. Never tried, never looked into it.
iTunes doesn't natively run on Linux/Unix. There are alternatives on Linux, like, for example, Amarok. However, if you want to buy music from Apple, afaik, you can only do that through iTunes. However, it does support iPods - check out its features: http://amarok.kde.org/features.

Somewhat related, though, is this: you can use Rockbox (see if your particular ipod is supported). It will replace the original firmware, and give you extra functionality (mainly, you'll be able to play a whole bunch of other formats on your ipod, which may or may not be relevant/useful to you, depending on your digital music library).