Hah, hah, I'm using the Linux (Ubuntu isn't as bad as I expected.)

[jkoebel]

My many-years-old, migrated-across-motherboards-and-CPU-architectures Windows XP Pro install has started to get...shall I say..."funky" on me, with preferences not being saved, drive letters reverting randomly on reboot, and TrueCrypt forgetting to save my favorite devices list of encrypted folders.

I don't use a PC for much except playing media, web browsing, and word processing, so I figured I've got nothing to lose.

I downloaded Ubuntu, since everyone seems to speak pretty highly of it. I'm posting from the Live CD right now.

The most interesting thing I've noticed so far is that my sound works. And my network works. Those are two things that have never happened before when I've tried Linux the other three times on any distro (Mandrake, Red Hat, Fedora Core 2, Fedora Core 3, Debian) that I've tried.

Not only that, but it was able to automatically find the fact that it needed an ATI driver, go download it, install it without an error message, and tell me that it'd work automagically when I reboot next.

I'm very, very impressed so far. I'm planning to partition my primary hard drive, set up ntfs3g and TrueCrypt (TC runs native in Linux, supposedly, and all my drives with my documents etc. are in NTFS) and go from there.

Does anyone have any suggestions for what to do to my system to make it "friendly" once the initial install process is completed? (I've got 3 monitors...so any tricks that point towards "making all three work" would be appreciated.)

[Benzino]

Best of luck. I was frustrated with Ubuntu back in the day due to sketchy video driver support, but it was certainly a smooth distro.
I might dual boot with it someday, but until I can figure out flawless gaming support, I'll stick to Windows as my primary OS.

[k1114]

The guys at work have been humping the ubuntu install disc for days, I don't get what's so funking great about it besides the whole visual effects...

[jkoebel]

Originally Posted by k1114

The guys at work have been humping the ubuntu install disc for days, I don't get what's so funking great about it besides the whole visual effects...

I don't think its "great" enough to hump by any means, but I'm certainly impressed by the fact that they seem to have put together a "base" system that actually is operational.

I don't even think my Windows install worked on this hardware without supplying loads of drivers in VGA Safe Mode, the fact that Ubuntu was able to work well enough on "interesting" hardware and *not* need hand-holding for the vast majority was a very cool thing to me.

I'll post progress updates here, I'm in the process of making a Ghost image of my C: onto external media before I resize my main partition into two 150s, and go from there.

[demosh]

Ive been running ubuntu as main OS for several years now. I have no real complaints, I do wish that support for mobile phones and pda devices was better (ie. actually existed) though.

[PopeKevinI]

Minor complaints with Ubuntu (most of which I've worked through in the past):

-It's a pain to get wireless cards to work right if they don't autodetect.
-Not all packages in Synaptic work; I had one completely break Gnome and force me to reinstall in 5.10
-This is a Linux problem in general, but it bears repeating in the hopes that someone will figure out how to fix it: broken dependencies SUCK. I've had to attempt compiles more than a dozen times because of flaky dependencies in an otherwise solid piece of software.

All in all, it's a great OS that will do everything I want but gaming, especially since I discovered Inkscape and Scribus. It's just frustrating at times, the same as Windows

[critofur]

Originally Posted by demosh

Ive been running ubuntu as main OS for several years now. I have no real complaints, I do wish that support for mobile phones and pda devices was better (ie. actually existed) though.

The last few times I setup Linuxes I saw some mobile phone apps, I'm sure there must be some PDA device support also. How about WINE? WINE is not perfect, but I've been impressed at how simple it is to use and how well it works (for those programs that it does work with).

I was using Windows XP for years, my two most recent computer setups which I'm using now (in addition to some XP machines I still have around, but use less) are a laptop with Vista Premium and a PC with Fedora 7. I must say, I like Fedora better than Vista.

[ytzombe]

Oh and if you have a wireless network with static IP's forget Ubuntu.

[f00ker]

if I can run my 9600XT AIW (tv tuner) in ubuntu, i'd give it a shot on my spare computer....

[PSXPaul]

Originally Posted by ytzombe

Oh and if you have a wireless network with static IP's forget Ubuntu.

Right, because its impossible to assign an interface a static IP in linux

[PSXPaul]

Originally Posted by demosh

Ive been running ubuntu as main OS for several years now. I have no real complaints, I do wish that support for mobile phones and pda devices was better (ie. actually existed) though.

I've had good luck with using vmware to load ringtones on a mobile phone. I believe if you have vmware running when you first plug in a USB device, it acts like you would expect windows to. I've also used a program called moto4lin, in case you have a motorola phone.

[SnarkFish]

id be running ubuntu if it wasnt for 2 things
my work vpn doesnt work
and my laptop freaked out because i installed ubuntu when it was docked, it refused to boot into x when undocked without some xorg editing

edit: and my wireless didnt work - at home or work. and i installed the firmware, i can see the access points, just not connect

[Flames]

i would install but wireless doesnt work