I can understand why Joe, As a former Computer Science professor we use Linux in every course. Without knowing what you normally do at home it is hard to answer Joe. The safest thing is to do this, download and burn a CD of Unbuntu Linux, Then boot your home PC with the disk. Don't intall, You can live test Unbutu on your home machine from the CD without changing a thing on your computer. This way you can see how it looks and feels for you and also how it runs on your PC. If you like it, then you can install. My office is a complete mix. I have 4 big servers running, two are Linux, two are Windows 2003 Storage Server R2. Each Server has over 900 gig of storage and all servers talk to each other. So Linux fits with Windows in a Server mix just fine . At home I just use Linux. As far as programs go there is almost nothing that you can't get for Linux free that you buy under Windows so it works really good at home. But the safest thing is to do the live test run that I described first.