Linux is so educational. You will learn things about your computer and networking that you never knew before. It will be very frustrating at first, like learning a foreign language, but ultimately you'll find it very rewarding. The file system is much more flexible when you need to reconfigure as your system grows. You just copy the directory to the new location with a temporary directory name, rename or unmount the original, mount the new partition under the permanent name, and your back in business with nary an application broken by the move.
Many applications are free.
If you can handle a 70MB download you can get a complete office suite with a word processor, spreadsheet, presentations program, database, personal information manager, drawing and graphics program, and Internet browser that is free for personal use. It's called Star Office 5.0 from Star Division and can open and save in Microsoft Office formats as well as HTML and its own native file formats. You can also get WordPerfect for Linux from Corel. Many Websites run Linux with the free Apache Web server and FTP server programs that come with it. Some of the top computer companies are now offering Linux preinstalled on their server machines.