I’ve been using Ubuntu for a month and in that month I must have had to reconfigure and restart my system from a command line at least twice a day and often more than that, thank god for my laptop and google.

My installation a Socket A AMD processor 1.2 or 1.9 Gigahertz depending on who you listen to, 750 megs of ram and ATI all in wonder video card with 128 megs of ram and video acceleration, on windows at least

I used a separate HD , 30 Gig’s, to install Ubuntu on, I didn’t want to deal with dual boot. Windows on IDE0 Linux on IDE1.

Everything loaded fine and I was up and running with basic apps in no time it was relatively easy to upgrade Firefox and set up to read my NTFS drives then I got google earth, opps first problem with video and believe me I had to reconfigure my xorg file more than I care to remember to get my desktop back after many reboots to a command line and forget desktop effects. So I bough a new video card NVIDIA gforce 6200 now I can run google earth but forget desktop effects they still don’t work for me But hey! what’s 70.00 between friends.

Next problem I’m tackling and I don’t know why I need to tackle it because it was working fine originally but now I can’t see my window laptop on the home network, the laptop connects with no problem to UBUNTU but even if the config files on UBUNTU show the laptop I don’t have a browsable network from Linux.

I also have a USB hard drive for backup 500 gigs 5 partitions fat 32, I have to use the word backup with caution because I never know what drive I am going to be allowed to write to, sometimes all of them, sometimes none, most often one or two of the partitions will be available to me but it’s a moving target and it’s getting worse, I am sure that with a few more re-boots I will no longer have access to that drive.

Video/Webcam forget it.

Sound card, well it seems UBUNTU likes my disabled in CMOS onboard sound card better than my Soundblaster, half the time anyway so I just took the soundBlaster out of the computer for now, better than switching cables at the whims of the operating system.

I never know which app. will run my video file, in Windows I always used VLC with the added codec pack in Linux even with the extra codecs installed VLC won’t play quite a few formats .AVI seem to be a problem sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t but so far I’ve been able to play everything once I figure out which of the 4 players I have installed will render the file.

I am still using UBUNTU after a month so it isn’t all bad, the basic operating system works well for most of the things I use a computer for but it ain’t ready for prime time by any means. The average computer user wants to be able to unpack the machine, plug it in throw in the disk from their ISP and be online that night not, spend 3 or four hours a day for a month trying to get video cards and network cards and sound cards to work not to mention doing something as simple as writing to their USB drives did I mention forget the webcam???

So far free has cost me about 100 hours, $70.00 some odd for a video card and a 30 gig hard drive from the junk piile but I’m hanging on, I want to be the Linux Guru when it’s ready for prime time in another few years or so.

That’s odd with the cookies. I’ve just cleared my private info via Firefox, and I come up with no cookies in a search. Well, there are files that contain the word cookies and one or two local Firefox things, but nothing from the web.

AG

Commercial software will be accepted with open arms, as long as it’s “free” software.

I’m waiting on Ubuntu 7.04 to give it a try, games are not really important to me, besides there’s also virtualization on Linux

Presently there is an anti-commercial attitude in the linux community which is an overreaction to Microsoft. Microsoft is evil, not all commercial software is. The attitude is reinforced by the (otherwise goodly and beneficial) distribution systems like yum and apt. Those systems are great at distributing open source software. They don’t do so well at commercial software. This hard-codes the anti-commercial attitude.

Until major commercial software is written for linux, linux on the desktop will forever be niche. Faking it with wine and vmware is just that.

Presently, getting Adobe’s support would be the most significant thing for linux on the desktop. Now that it’s bought up macromedia, it’s the company with the biggest set of major apps.

In comparison a fresh Windows XP install needs a lot more work (installing drivers, application software, anti-virus software, codecs etc) than a fresh Ubuntu install. And as mentioned before Automatix takes care of much of it for you.

A better way is to first test a Live CD, then install Linux as dual boot and/or install Linux on your second computer (if you have on that is) and keep windows on the primary computer.
That way, you can practice in Linux throughly and still have the option of quickly going back to Windows temporarily. I’ve myself been switching over to Ubuntu like that for about a year now. I plan to migrate completely before the end of 2007. But there’s no rush really.

I think one thing that would make the switch easier would be a tool similar to AutoHotkey.com that converted hotkeys and some other functionality from Windows to the corresponding actions on a Linux system.

She has everything she needs: Open Office, Firefox, Gaim, Skype, F-Stop, VLC and Amarok.

She needs a CD and application to connect her Sony-Ericsson camera-phone with XP. In Ubuntu, just connected it and it was immediately recognized and photos downloaded. Easy.

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Don’t be a dick.

Even before the edit, the difference between viruses, adware, spyware, etc., and hacking was clearly stated. The division of the paragraphs was even stated.

This is not your article, Brian, nor is it a place to boast about how many distros/OS’s you’ve run or how long you’ve owned a PC.

The only reason I reply in this way is to provide an example of what the average Ubuntu guru is NOT like for those considering a switch; the standard help anywhere for Ubuntu is everything but pompous, condescending, pretentious, and critical.