Now, you can do everything with open source software which are totally free. Why are you still buying or pirating commercial software?
Migrate to open source today, there you can do everything without paying any money and you don’t have to pirate any software that you can’t afford. Open Source software is always FREE. They are free because there is a huge community  is working behind these Open Source Software. Many Open Source Software have surpassed their rival Commercial Software, in quality. Good example is Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome (Google chrome is not open source however, it is free under google’s license) are better than Microsoft Internet Explorer in almost all aspects. If you compare MS office and Open office.org, you will not find any significant difference in terms of functionality or usability. So are other software. There is a belief that Linux is comfortable for advanced users only, it was true a few years ago but now Linux has become a user friendly operating system, some distributions especially Ubuntu have made Linux a very user friendly operating system. Besides all of these facts It is totally free. So, why don’t you try it even once if you don’t want to move away from your Windows? I am pretty sure if you tasted open source properly you would very unlikely go back to windows.

The following software are some examples which can serve the fundamental needs and wants of a home user.

• Operating System – Linux – Ubuntu or other (Good bye Windows)
• Web Browser – Mozilla Firefox (Good bye Internet Explorer)
• Media Players - VLC Player/MPlayer (Good Bye all commercial media players & WMP)
• Photo editing – Gimp (Good bye Photoshop and Firefox)
• Office – Oppenoffice.org (Good Bye Microsoft Office)
• Email Client – Thunderbird (Good Bye MS outlook)
• Video Editing – Openshot Video Editor
• CD/DVD Burning – Brasero, GnomeBaker, k3b (Good Bye Nero)
• Video Converting – WinFF (No need to buy any converter)
• PDF editing – PDF Editor (Good Bye Acrobat Professional)
• 3D modeling/Animation – Blender (Good bye Expensive 3D software)
• Vector Graphics Editing – Inkscape Vector graphics editor
• Diagram Creation/Editing – Dia (Good Bye Visio)
• Partitioning - Gparted (Good bye partition magic)
• Voice/Video/Chat – Empathy
• All necessary Accessories and there are many other software

Viruses are a big headache in Windows.  Linux is totally virus free so you don’t have to worry about any virus in Linux(A virus is a dead file in Linux). This is also a significant benefit of using Linux.

In case you find it difficult to move to Linux all of a sudden, you can move gradually one by one. Start Mozilla Firefox instead of Internet Explorer, Start openoffice.org instead of Microsoft Office and so on. Thus, when you move to Linux you will have your friends or acquaintances (Firefox, openoffice.org, Gimp, etc) there to welcome you.