I formerly decided to try ubuntu which is part of the linux tree as I understand, I liked the look and feel ect, it was good and simple without the buggs of windows but I discovered that none of my windows programs and drivers worked with ubuntu linux so is it possible to make the majority of windows stuff work or do we have to use other programs to make it go?

You can use wine. It will run most simple programs but isn't very good in my opinion. Remember Linux != Windows. Depending on what you want to run, wine may run a program without any problems or it may have an error just loading the program. See: Wine HQ for more information.

While I am posting here I guess it wouldn't hurt to ask (as it might also help solve your question). Are there free alternatives to wine? I want to find a way to run Solidworks (a cad program that I use quite often) with Linux but it doesn't even load with wine. I am not looking for vmware (or similar things), if I wanted to run windows operating system then I would just boot from it...

Thanks,
Sparkx

There are a lot of guides, and people, to help you find non-windows replacements.

http://ubuntuguide.org/wiki/Alternatives
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SoftwareEquivalents

Non-windows replacements really are your best bet. For a large portion of software out there people have created open source alternatives for linux. For example there is open office that is a full fledged office quite, free for download, that is linux compatible in place of Microsoft Office. There are various text editors to replace notepad or other basic editors, firefox and thunderbird can replace your IE and Outlook (if you aren't already using FF and TB) etc. It really is quite possible to find a large percentage of applications you'll want re-designed for linux.

Now, obviously not ALL software has an alternative. Windows IS still the most widely spread OS out there so a large portion of software comes out for it only and therefor not all of it is translated, copied, etc into an open source linux equivalent. Wine is a great bet for these applications. A large portion of windows software can be easily installed and run. Many games especially have great compatibility and tutorials availible to get around possible bugs while running them under wine. It may not be 100% smooth going, but if you truly enjoy linux you can still use a good chunk of windows applications.

Another option, as always, is to leave a partition on your system for windows and dual boot the computer. This allows you to use linux for everything possible and boot into windows if you have a game or other application that doesn't work on wine that you just can't live without. Essentially this allows a 'best of both worlds' scenario.

Good luck and enjoy Ubuntu!

Linux has almost all alternative software which is available on Windows, except for some bigger paid software which might not be as good as the real thing and it also includes games, but anyway, if you like playing games why not get a console? Emulating Windows on a Linux running on x86 architecture is quite easy and it works.