Don't kill yourselves just yet, it's not staying on this machine, I'm running it off the CD.
I never really knew what to make of linux, back in its early days it was just another domain operating system that I just couldn't get my head around, but now with this whole 'free' initiative, a totally free OS seemed a tempting option to try, especially because I've got an old laptop handy.
Its my dads old machine that he no longer needs, on account of his work providing him a brand new dual core laptop(!). He told me to fix it up to put in the kitchen for my mother, so I thought I'd have a play before I got to the dirty business of killdisking it and submitting to windows XP reinstall.
And you know what? I think I'll keep Ubuntu on the laptop. It's damned clean, has all the features that you could need for the 'tubes (firefox), image editing (gimp), office tools (OpenOffice) and music (rhythmbox).
That, and it's also linux. Even though i'm running it straight off CD at the moment, it's running as fast, if not faster than my Win XP install ever did. It's snappy and responsive, even when I was trying installing new software off its online software catalog (which again is totally free).
I'm not going to keep it on here, that would be silly. It does of course have all the compatibility problems with windows software. Wine works, but it's slower and not everything is supported, and incomparability with my sound card and no suitable graphics capabilities on my desktop stem it in gaming - but who's going to use a 1.7mhz laptop for gaming?
Bottom line? Give it a shot.
It's totally free from here as an ISO download (took me 20 minutes, you need to supply a CD to burn it on), or you can request a free CD (Takes a few weeks to actually show up) or purchase a cd/dvd for a very, very low price. You don't even need to install it as you can run it right off CD.
Oh but hl2 doesn't work that well on linux... yet.