Alpocan

I'm still on XP because there is no clear choice for an upgrade path. I have a pile of business, programming, and electrical engineering applications that work well on XP and maybe fine on Windows 7. I don't like the bloat, interface, and locked-down nature of Win7. But do I wait for Win8? Or maybe try some Linux flavour and run XP/7/8 in a VM? It's really not an easy choice. Larger enterprises must hate this.