I too have used Linux a good deal, and I like it.
Unfortunately, I’m a software developer and have about twenty years experience using MS Visual Studio. The developer tools for Linux (mainly Eclipse and Net Beans) is just a little too painful - in terms of learning curve - as long as no one is forcing me to use it. We have a lot of legacy code written over the last twelve years or so.
But I’ll tell you, the hassles of staying with Windows are have me right at the threshold of saying “enough already” and switching to Linux.
Watching video in a Win XP box is not quite up to flawless, but I screwed up in the installation (It was just a test to see if it would even work so I under supplied the VM with resources on purpose so as to not screw up the rest of the machine..) and didn't get the multiprocessor kernel in the XPP setup. (I'm working on fixing that without a reload, but with all the layers of abstraction software can easily be "designed" to overwhelm any hardware).
Adding the VB enhancements made the XPP box appropriately size up to use a 1080x1920 screen just fine.