If anyone is curious about GNU/Linux, I suggest downloading a copy of
MEPIS burning it, and then reboot from it and the whole OS loads from the CD. No need to install anything or do anything to your HD (but you can in case of emergency). I've been using it for years now and it's been great, no viruses spyware or anything annoying, plus there's thousands of software products available in the built-in catalog system, available to download and install with the click of a button. It's based on the Debian distribution, so you can get any software that's packaged for it.
I have also put it on my Mac and I'm using it as a webserver (as I did before with Mac OS X). Linux is quite a bit more robust in that I very rarely need to reboot. If the graphical layer becomes unstable I can reboot it independently from the kernel.