GSO, I'm not afraid of Linux at all.. I have used it, and I had it installed on a dual boot system some years ago. I don't care for it. I started with UNIX systems years ago when I was the Tech Support Manager for a software developer around here. Linux, a derivative of UNIX, was junk for a multimedia system back then. It has gotten better as the different versions developed and improved their GUI. The problem is that its all a kludge. It was never developed as a multimedia OS, and everything is a catch up now. Not that Windows isn't either. It sat on DOS for years and always had the 640k for a TPA limit until a few versions ago. UNIX and Linux were at least flat memory OS'es. Apple has it all over all of them in terms of the GUI. The best multi-user UNIX style OS I have used was called BeOS. It was developed just for multimedia applications, but got bought out and squashed. It reminded me of how they took the Amiga OS years ago, and buried it. That OS was a true preemptive multitasking OS that ran on a floppy disk.
Sorry about the rambling. I just don't care for Linux or Unix for that matter. Maybe I should revisit Linux, though. As you pointed out, they are getting their UI more user friendly and is a "safer" system. We won't debate the bloat however, although Linux is less bloated than the UNIX environment.
Doc