Depends on what you mean by function key.
Using the commandkeys themselves as trigger keys in the Gnome keyboard UI is pointless since that renders the keys themselves useless for actually doing commands other than changing the keyboard layout.

If you were to learn how to use the terminal in a good and efficent way. I would recommend you installing either Gentoo or Archliux, preferably the latter.
If you as you say have about a year of experience using Linux you are just in the situation that I was in last winter when I got my hands on an 800mhz laptop with 256megabytes of RAM. My mission was to get it running, but not only that but to get it running smoothly.

I had heard that the real hackers of Linux spend their time in Gentoo, atleast my older friends had, so that was my first go. I prepared as well as I could and read the installation documents well and through before I started my installation. Having irssi in one tty and two links sessions open in two other ttys I started the installation, but failed miserably.

I tried to reinstall the system about five or six times before I gave up. It was simply out of my scope, I wouldn't even get the ethernet connection to work properly.

So I remembered someone at the WeGame.com forum saying that the Arch way was the way to go. So I read up and figured that I might give it a try. And man it worked well!

Fallowing the installation guide just as I did for Gentoo I got my system installed. And i pacman -S'ed all the applications I needed. Did the configuration needed to get Xorg working because the hardware didn't work with hotplugging. And after working around on the ArchWiki I got a beautiful Macthemed XFCE running.

Now that laptop works great for surfing the web and social stuff.

So my recommendation to you is to grab the Archlive CD and drop yourself into the console. I promise you. After the first shock of not having any GUI I found the TTY's to be very handy. That is how I learned how to live in a terminal enviroment.

Any distribution with a rolling release scheme will probably be the most up to date ones. Examples of these are Archlinux and Gentoo.
But it's quite common that you can get the latest software from unofficial repos for your other distributions. I'm running Firefox 3.5 in Linux Mint. I got it trough a PPA.

And a popular GUI for pacman is Shaman. It's actually one of the best GUIs for package management I've seen out there.

The reason why commands are used when explaining how to install experimental software is that it's sooo much easier to give the user a command that automaticly installs the application instead of giving 5miles of GUI instructions that can be misunderstood. And also, they are used to scare away people from experimental software. There is a reason for not putting unstable in the official repositories.

To read the fully outfleshed blogpost fallow this link: http://linux.com/community/blogs/the-mixed-curse-of-using-dvorak-and-linux.html

What you end up reading if you fallow the link to my blog post is the question: Is there any way to make QWERTY the active layout when right Ctrl and other command-keys are pressed in Linux?

I use the Dvorak simplified keyboard layout on all my computers, but the applications I use are designed for QWERTY. So all commands such as Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V are no longer onehandmoves you can do with your other hand on the mouse.

In Windows I use an tray application that a friend of mine has developed, basicly the development started because the bult in layout switcher in Windows is the most random piece of crap on this earth.

In GNOME there are support for altering keyboard layout when some keys are pressed and then change back. But not for the most used command key, right Ctrl.

So is there anyone out there who knows how to solve this little problem of mine?

No, wait!
Why would you even advertise here?
That is the most stupidly placed gold selling ad I've ever seen.

And for a distro with all your favourite propitary codecs and flash installed from the go. My vote goes for Linux Mint 7.

When it comes to Linux native games it's absolutely OpenArena. That game is just genious.

Trough Wine it's World of Warcraft. Why o why did they drop the development of the Linux native version?