You can install many, many programs and never use linux. for the more complicated ones, sometimes you can just type a few times into xterm to set something up or run a progran this way, and you still don't need to learn much linux (and no programming).
Of course there is advance stuff out there and then you can do a lot more, but I have had my nokia tablet for six months and have had to type about a total of 5 minutes in xterm using linux. everything else was just installing through the GUI.