Hey,

I've been dual-booting for a lot of years, Debian, Mandrake, Lycoris, Suse, and now Fedora Core 2.

My "home" machine has gotten really old and obsolete, and in that process, much to my dismay, my "linux" drive bit the dust "stranding" me in Winows for a few months. Really painful, if you're used to software that just works, and tons of free applications.

Since then I've become legally self-employed again, meaning hardware is deductible again, and two new replacement machines are currently in the middle of my home-office floor being configured. There are some REALLY sweet deals on Dell 400SC servers these days if you know how to go about it, and they're easily converted to very good desktop machines. Both of these will still be dual-boot, but the plan is, sometime in the next 6 months, to retire one to dedicated server use, and build a MS-free/Intel-free box for my own desktop (about half the parts are already at hand).

I used SUSE for a bit, but found it a bit clunky. I would recommend taking a look at Fedora. It's a fork off of Red Hat, and has taken on a life of it's own... and it's mainstreaming, in that you can take advantage of really huge numbers of Red Hat RPGs out there, plus apt-get. And it's free. Really. Not just a trial version. The recipients of your efforts won't owe anyone.
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No matter which defintion of "free" software you use, it does mean that there's no Bill to pay.