Check out this site for
Linux Distros (click on the distro list on the right for reviews and info about each).
Mandrake is a pretty popular distrobution these days... free to download and easy to setup. I don't know anyone whose tried the Linspire/Lindows distro, but it IS built on top of the Debian distro and I guess made to look more like Windows.. (and not free) here's a pretty good
review of Linspire.
Whichever you choose, you should be able to run the standard apps like OpenOffice, Gimp and do anything you could do in Windows (except run certain games). If you want to run Windows apps, you'll still need an emulator, and these are known to be far from perfect. Good luck.
|worm