Linux is "fun", "interesting" and "competent", but you do need to speak pretty good Geek to get it to work properly.
I've got Fedora, Debian, Kubuntu, SuSe, and Knoppix on my "playing" PC. They are all a lot faster than Windows on the same machine, but they all needed a fair bit of complicated "machine code" to get the last bits to work.
If I had to pick one of those, it would be Fedora. It was the easiest of the lost to install, and the only things that didn't work "out of the box" were the Midi play facility and the DVD player.