[Sistermadly]

Unless you're a gearhead who likes to spend more time configuring his computer rather than getting work done, you don't need Linux. If you're just curious about any variant of the *nix platform and want to play around, RedHat is probably the easiest to install and use, save for Mac OS X. I've run FreeBSD, SuSe, and Debian beore, and to be honest, other than the rather dedicated community of Debian users, I couldn't tell you the difference between them. I use OS X on a daily basis -- it's the most stable OS I've ever run (I'm on 29 days without a reboot), and I can get under the hood and do command line stuff when I want to/need to. I can also run X11 which lets me run more *Nix programs.

As for Windows..well, I hate it, but again, unless you're a gearhead, it's probably your best bet. There are more programs available for Windows, and you can tweak and customize it to a certain degree to suit your computing style, but the architecture isn't open, and you don't get that feeling of freedom that you get when you run *Nix.