I run Ubuntu Linux on my laptop. I still have XP on my gaming system and Mac OS 9 and 10 and my recording computer, but I will gradually replace them with linux.

You can download a disk image of Ubuntu and then run off the cd and play around with it to see if it's for you. WINE allows you to run a lot of windows software within linux, but there are more and more open source versions that run natively on linux.