Quote - Benefits ? I guess the main one is DX 10 if you wanna play the latest games

Want to play games?, buy a Sony Playstation 3 and forget all the Microsoft crap.
It will cost you less than the computer required to run Vista and you will be able to play real 3D games and not the crappy DX and no blue screens.......

Quote - I thought I'd try it since I recently got a new Mac, and was very impressed with its speed. You wouldn't believe how fast the Pentium 4 pc I tested it on ran. It wasn't equal to the Mac of course, but it was certainly much faster than it was using Linux, or XP.

Linux depend on the version and package. Linux is not something as Windows that you install an run (after several tries).
There exist many pre-made packages that you install and run, but I found some that are so slow that cannot be used, all depend on how the package was made and compiled.
Linux is the most versatile and can be the faster Operational System that exist, but it requires a lot of work and knowledge to build something efficient.
Linux is formed by several components. The Linux kernel is so small that it fits in one old 1.44M diskette!!
When you load the Linux kernel you have the operational system, but no grafic interface, only keyboard. Now you need a graffic package such as X11, X12 (don't know the latest one), you have different versions, different compilations and different machine specific optimization.
One loaded the graffic package you are able to run Linux programs, but you have no Windows, you run your application from the keyboard.
To have Windows to have to install a Windows package, but the Windows package is not as in Microsoft Windows or Mac, it is only a component and you can have any Windows that you like and switch between them in the act. You can have a Windows 98 style, a XP style, a Mac style, a Unix style and as many as you can find. (I liked KDE).
It remain to pickup the libs (Linux DLLs) needed to run applications, find them somewhere, install and put them to work.
The result can be something very fast or something very slow. Many Linux components are built using scripting language as Pearl, and many times a script call another script, you cannot expect that something that is a script can run fast. If you want something fast you need a compiled version of the component.
Many Linux components are written in C++ and C++ once compiled is something very slow compared to plain C. Also Linux components are built based on using othe Linux component that is built itself using other Linux component, so the result is something so slow that can be easily compared to Microsoft..
If you have time and patience you can built the faster and most reliable software and even you will able to run Poser on it!!!

Stupidity also evolves!