Pretend you just graduated with a B.S. in MIS, and you are going to grad school for a master's in MIS. You realize Microsoft make terrible products. You ALSO realize that 99 out of 100 business use M$.

The dilemma: Do you install M$'s latest & greatest (term used VERY loosely) OS and learn it inside & out, since that's what you'll most likely be dealing with in the future, or do you set up a dual boot with some flavor of Linux (suggestions)? Or would dual booting M$ and Linux create some sort of warp in space-time? I have ran RH 7.1 and Mandrake in the past, but it seems like I always have to have some M$ OS to do school projects (like Access )