Not only gnome-like persons can be nerdy, Dave, old chap.
This duck is being Virtually Nerdy.

I'm just experimenting with something I found on the Interweb. It's called VirtualBox and creates a virtual machine on top of your operating system. Once you have that, you can install other operating systems as if it was a standalone computer.
I have just installed UBUNTU linux in a virtual computer on my WinXp machine.
This posting is coming from Firefox running on linux but hosted by Windoze.

As yet I don't know how it will all work in practice, but I should be able to use free linux programmes, but when I want, switch back to the usual Win Dross at the stroke of a Ctrl button.

Quack!
GtD.