Thanks to WINE and its commercial big brother, CrossOver, you can run some popular Windows programs on Linux.

CodeWeavers is right. In my testing of CrossOver 13.2 on my main Linux Mint 17 desktop, I found installing Windows programs such as Office 2010 much faster and simpler.

Linux Mint has a great selection of pre-installed apps and an easy package manager, but may lack compatibility with some Windows apps.