I took advantage of my large hard drive (320 Gigs) to install Ubuntu 9.10 along side Windows XP. The handwriting on the wall suggests more "new and better Windows Software" at a larger cost so I decided to try playing around with Ubuntu as it is non-proprietorial and appeared to offer advantages over Windows.
After some research, I downloaded Ubuntu 9.10 into a partition and added WINE. Then added K-Meleon, a lightweight fast Mozilla based browser. So far all worked well and reasonably rapidly for a 1.4 GHz Athlon powered computer. I've been running Media Jukebox 8 on my XP and am very comfortable with it. Never upgraded to a Media Centre since I only use it for music. However, MJ8 is no longer supported and fairly hard to find, so I thought I'd try the new FREE version: Media Jukebox 12. I copied my 12k music files from my Windows partition and imported them into MJ12. It runs great. I can't say it is any better or worse than Rhythmbox, but I'm familiar with Media Jukebox and did put in a lot of research several years ago when I chose it as my default music player.
I think I'm going to like Ubuntu and probably stick with it rather than switch over to anynew Windows when OS upgrade time comes.