siema Piotrek,
I would recommend either: Ubuntu Linux (
http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download) or openSUSE (
http://software.opensuse.org/). You can install and run windows apps under Linux using Wine (
http://www.winehq.org/) which is free or Cross Over Office (
http://www.codeweavers.com/products/cxoffice/) which costs $$$ but you can try it for free. Also Cross Over Office my be better tuned for some of the apps you mentioned then base Wine install. Best way to find out how stable they run on Linux is to install em and run em for a while. If they run stable, great

if not then given a decent pc, preferably multi-core, with a few GBs of RAM you can always emulte windows inside Linux using VirtualBox (
http://www.virtualbox.org/) for free (not counting the M$ license) or using the commercial VMWare (
http://www.vmware.com/).
Installing Wine or VirtualBox is easy if you have your Linux box connected to the internet. From Ubuntu for instance you would run the following command from shell:
- Code: Select all
sudo apt-get install wine* virtualbox
thats it... hope this helps, thanks for your post
