It seems that Linux is more for hobbyists than for practical computing.
There are too many flavors and no real direction.
I have played around with a few of the LiveCD versions. Most of them have failed to recognize all of my PC peripherals.
I have considered buying a cheap PC just to play around with Linux, but so far, I don't see much advantage to that.
[I started with DOS/MSDOS in the early 80s. I went kicking-and-screaming into Windows in the early 90s because that was the direction business environments were going.]
The wubi installer can be found here:
http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/downloadmirrors#wubi
The bank runs linux on some of the highest transaction rate applications (WebSphere 6.1 on RHEL4) and the load distribution, response time metrics, and other key data points all indicate that linux is rock solid in the enterprise server arena.