I have an ubuntu VM and have been learning all I can about it, installing apps, fucking around with the terminal and what not.
Shit looks very sexy and its hella stable even with a bunch of cute-ware enabled (visual effects) - I have found replacements for almost all of the software I need, except SEO shit.
This is what I am planning to do.... Get a decent laptop (quad core with at least 4gb of ram) put ubuntu as the host OS and run xp as a guest, that way I could give xp 2gb of memory and half of the CPU to run whatever program I need to run there.. that should be enough to get those few windows-exclusive programs working in a virtual instance while I enjoy the stability of the penguin box
