Vx,
I had Slackware 96 Linux installed on a PC and configured the XFREE86 Windows System to work very acceptably. It (linux) knocked WIN95 into a cocked hat. BUT, like Windows, you have to obtain applications that run under it and a few years ago there was a real scarcity of them unless you downloaded them from the net and installed them yourself after uncompressing the archive file with all the command-line switches. In short, not very friendly, but impressive once running.
Tried re-installing it on my PCI SCSI-2 machine but the old Slackware 96 kernel is a little too old for the more modern cards etc so I will have to look at the latest releases, i. e. Red Hat or possibly S.U.S.E. I understand they install pretty easily compared to versions a few years ago.
I booted nto Linux using a boot-floppy. Leave it out of the drive and the machine booted up in Win 95.
If you can get a version that installs easily I'd recommend you try it. Corel now have released a suite of productivity software for Linux which matches or exceeds the usual bundled software you get ion a Windows PC. I was impressed with it, even though it took me nearly a week to get the XFREE86config file sorted out to run the X Windows System! I know quite a few people who have the two OSs on their machines and they co-exist quite happily. A pure Linux machine could be a very useful device as a firewall, if you have no other use for it.
"Anyone can make a mistake but it takes a computer to have a catastrophe".