No, sure, I think we will have to wait for at least another 5 years until the year of Linux on desktop ;)

But for me, it already happened, 2008 was the year of Linux on desktop for me. Hope you will have better luck with Linux in the future.

BTW, for your machine spec, I think you better use Lubuntu (Ubuntu - GNOME + LXDE), it is much lighter than Ubuntu.

No, it won't uninstall whole GNOME desktop, that is just meta package for ubuntu-desktop, so you can uninstall it without any problem.
  Well, not really, if you install any audio apps that have pulseaudio output (like MPD) you will have to reinstall it again. In that case try changing alsa setting, pulseaudio takes alsa output by default, you can change that by set alsa output device to hw device (you will lose the ability to have multi programs to output at the same time that way). Or the better way is to fix /etc/asound.conf and make a dmix device (google for more information). Good luck!

I second that.I once get a call from the teacher of my brother ask me to fix the laptop for her neighbour.

There was a saying, if you helped them once, you will have to be their tech support forever. When I was still a high school student, i was glad to help them, but now as my support list is 2 numbers, I really regret that.

Maybe because there are more Java programmers than Objective C ones?

IMO, this isn't a very smart move of FSF, from what I have heard, Windows 7 is a big improvement over Vista (from an user end of point), do they really think they can convince people to think different? I'm sure that people who really care about those 'sins' would have already switched to another OS long ago.

In all 4 years I have been using Firefox, I have never seen it went pass 800MBs RAM, even with the heaviest browsing (about 70+ tabs), so I can't understand why people complains so much about it consuming too much ram :-/ Sure it consume quite a bit of ram with normal browsing (171MB with 10 tabs open on Linux right now) but I haven't seen any memory leak yet. I also tend to keep Firefox open for several days too.

But sometimes I want Chrome to remember login information & history so I browse it back later,. The sites I browse is in the 'gray' zone, it isn't porno or something despicable, but I still do not want other to know about it.

Huh? Why do you need to load that module? MPD support ALSA/Pulseaudio output. Well, sometimes its doesn't work but I hope this will help.

... and people are acting crazy. When I used vista, I have absolute no problem with it, so I don't understand what with the Windows 7 hype. From what I have heard, it is just Vista with the retarded parts removed.

But I have no reason to care about Windows world anymore, switched to Linux half a year ago and now I am a happy Linux user :) There may never be an year of Linux or its market will never go past 10%, but I can use it comfortably now, so it is fine with me.

Not really, I have seen 13 seconds latency with Pulseaudio on Ubuntu 8.04, of course, it was caused by a bug, but that is still horrible.

Yup, IMO Pulseaudio has some interesting features, but the most important one (for me) is the 'glitch free' playback, it help saving a lot of CPU power due to much lower CPU wake up times ( 86.2 per sec with plain ALSA, and 10 with PulseAudio).

However, Pulseaudio is not mature yet, I still have some problem like super high CPU usage when playing anything that has frequency differ from 44.1kHz, or some CPU overhead when playing music. But I think it will be fixed, it is just not ready yet, like KDE4.

[OT]Nvidia Geforce 9300M?

For an acceptable video experience on Linux with nvidia card, you have no way but to use their closed driver. To fix the tearing, tick "Sync to VBlank" in X Server Video Setting, this should work. [/OT]

About Linux media player, IMO, they are very good, mplayer will play *anything* I have (more than 100 codecs), though the GUI may need some fixing, but I am using mplayer CLI version anyway.