Concerned about privacy? Ever wonder how secure your system is? Tired of paying for the never ending "upgrades" that provide little to no functionality, or are even a downgrade? If these are routine concerns you are having, then there are a number of free and open source solutions for your problems. If, however, none of this applies to you in your quest to 'elect more and better Democrats', then go no further.
Increasingly, we spend our time online communicating, networking, raising money, and just venting. So your privacy, security, the integrity of your data, and the cost of maintaining all of these are never more critical than now. You can become a part of something that is much larger than yourself. You can back up your words of not wanting to allow corporations the say in what you use your systems for, or you can 'go along to get along'. By voting with your wallet, avoiding the 'corporate tax' on any systems you do use, you can signal to hardware makers that you want systems that are free, open source, not just now, but for the forseeable future. Accept no substitutes.
Over the past eight months or so, a number of vendors have heard the call for open, non-proprietary systems that allow you the freedom to do what you want, how you want and when you want with your systems and your data. Vendors such as Asus, Acer, Gigabyte, Dell, HP, Lenovo (formerly IBM Thinkpad) offer systems with free systems installed at the get go. Some of the most exciting systems are the eeepc, the Acer Aspire One, the MSI Wind, and the Dell 'E' series of mini-notebooks. Systems that often run on SSD (Flash) and are too lean and mean to allow for the blight that is Vista. And with the End Of Life coming for Windows XP in less than two weeks, it may be time to start looking for a usable system that is not prohibitively expensive, or an OS that will be supported on that older system for as long you wish.
In the latter category there are several truly excellent choices: Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron), OpenSuse 11.0, Fedora 9.0, and Mandriva 2008. Keep in mind that all of these OSes have the liveCD option, so that you can load the CD and try it out safely before deciding whether you want to install, create a dual-boot system, or slink back to your proprietary masters (humor tag). The reason for focusing on these systems (ie not linuxmint/pclinuxos et al) is that the support is there in much greater numbers and security and stability is much higher as well.
Should you wish for a more technical and tweakable system that will run on a wider variety of hardware, then Ubuntu is the obvious choice. The support on offer on Freenode IRC is without parallel (channels #ubuntu, #kubuntu, #xubuntu, etc.).
If you like living on the absolute bleeding edge (and can fix things when they break), then Fedora is likely the option you are seeking. For polish and best out of the box experience, both OpenSuse and Mandriva are clear winners.
All of the above OSes have advanced to a degree over the last couple of years that using the terminal (CLI) is truly not needed any more. Nice bright clicky icons for you to configure everything or anything that you demand. And if you get stuck, there is a worldwide support community that never sleeps, awaiting eagerly for questions relating to your xorg, bash commands, and other such arcane stuff. As always, please back up any precious data before trying any of these out; just a good precaution to take in these instances.
You can have a fully functioning installed system in less than an hour; and while it may take a bit of time to get used to the new paradigm (first time users often dual boot), after a while you will ditch that other OS and want to get all your work done in a totally free and open source system. No need to wait; try one out today.