One of my great pleasures in life is taking old computers with some version of Windows installed on them and wiping their disks to install Linux. My heart is warmed by their little sighs of relief as they are finally liberated from bondage to the Beast.
I've been using some variety of Unix-like operating system more-or-less daily since 1992, on machines ranging from supercomputers to workstations to my humble laptop, and even internet routers. I still come out in a rash when I have to boot my PC into Windows, *shudder* 8^)
All my day-to-day work, web-surfing, listening to music, email, office tasks, website development, image manipulation, programming and general techie stuff is now done under Linux on my laptop. Really, there are very few reasons indeed to boot into Windows. And I can do so much more with Linux, such as running a local webserver to test the website, or run native IPv6 applications, for instance.
My preferred Linux distribution is Debian GNU/Linux. Debian is something of a purists' distribution and much favoured by techies, although I do not resemble the Debian Geek. I used to be a RedHat user, but was persuaded to convert by the overwhelming superiority of Debian's package-management system, and the purity of its open source philosophy.
My current IBM laptop's configuration:
My old Toshiba laptop's configuration:
