Michaelr:
It's not often installed on PCs when you buy them - there was a time when Microsoft refused the huge discount on Windows pricing if the supplier xin't install Windows i-on every PC sold - but they're not allowed to do that now.

The Asus EEEPC (a tiny sub-notebook) was originally available only with Linux; now on higher spec versions you can have Linux or Windows XP. Dell are selling PCs with Linux pre-installed, and there are some suppliers that specialize in selling PCs with Linux installed, of the the best example I know of is Linux Emporium in the UK.

But it isn't hard to install, and if you want to hedge your bets and you have some disk space to spare you can convert a windows PC to a dual-boot system easily.

Adobe Illustrator? Don't know what that is, but there's a probably a free software equivalent.

Pro Tools? There's numerous free audio applications of which the most ambitious is Ardour, a complete mutitrack DAW. You can also get a whole Linux distribution packages and optimised for audio and other media production called 64studio

Anahata