Goodbye Windows, Welcome Linux to my home

At work I use Windows XP as my workstation because that's what our clients use to run our frontend. Most of our development work is done on servers running Linux and truthfully the most used program on my XP box is ssh. But at home, I have always run a Microsoft OS. Of late, I have been questioning why. The home machine is used for paying the bills via the Internet, reading email, browsing the web, updating this blog and the odd bit of wordprocessing. In the past, it was also used to play games, but the XBox has taken over that role. Based on the last couple of months, the home machine seems to spend most of it's time downloading service packs or the lastest anti-virius update. So I decided to give Linux a chance to prove that it could do my home tasks. Using a "Live" CD version of Ubuntu 5.04, I have survived two weeks without having to see a Microsoft logo. Another interesting thing I have discovered is thanks to GMail etc, that I haven't needed any local hard disk storage.