I'm interested in *nix, and have almost done more installations of various distros than I can quite remember, but I find the learning curve puts me off when something breaks or begins broken and won't respond to treatment.

Either it doesn't have the programs and stuff that I want, or it does, but won't work.

I'm sticking to Win98, given that it is fairly stable for me, and that MS is not currently... erm... 'targeting' 98 the way they are XP. They aren't trying to sneak in 'helpful' features which ruin things... as much.