The new player has marked improved video quality for me. Other improvements included are automatic resume from last playback, de-coupling from windows media player and, greater viability for cross-platform usability. It works on Mac OS X with Silverlight for Mac. I hear tell that there are plans to support Moonlight.

However, I don't think Linux folks have yet LOST anything they already have. So the best you can hope for is that they eventually do support Moonlight.

Yeah, i was thinking some sort of mesh in front of the turbofans, but yeah, that works too.

Yeh, I know but parent above you was. I have a bad habit of posting comments to the wrong parent. Sorry :\

Don't forget beer.

Hardy worked fine for me. nvidia binary shipping with it worked great. Sound worked great. Then... Update Manager downloaded 2.6.27 and everything broke. Of course I didn't realize it was the kernel, otherwise I would have just gone back to using the previous ones.

Instead, like a n00b I installed the latest... 8.10, and it failed, big time. Video didn't work yet, and audio was still broken. I downloaded a fresh release that contained the exact failures that caused my problem before.

This is certainly enough to make me jump ship from Ubuntu. I like their goal, but they're not doing a very good job with it.

Scratch that, a large portion of the grandparents and total computer illiterates will be able to install Ubuntu just fine.

But the slightly advanced users that might want to get *both* of their monitors to work, or perhaps, even get 5.1 audio are screwed. -- That is, unless they, too become kernel hackers.

So... if I had the person who invented product x killed, then I could reproduce it exactly without paying licensing fees to his family? (Although they could really use it because his death was rather unexpected and untimely.)

Why does Ubuntu (and other such distros) include automatic kernel updates that can break nearly everything? Or, why would Ubuntu package maintainers push such new versions of the kernel to the repos when they're clearly not ready for prime-time?

Nothing.
-and-
No, I have no free time.

Unlike a lot of Linux distros, things in OSX just work because the drivers you need are there and they have been tested with the hardware you purchase from Apple. 'Nuff said.

I _really_ *want* to be able to use Linux on my desktop. Seriously, though, why does sound support break on recent releases of the kernel? Why did my nvidia driver become completely unusable in 2.6.27? I did have everything working... which took nearly a week. My time is worth money to me and my family. Maybe my money and time is better spent purchasing a Mac where all that stuff has been done for me. As opposed to wasting hours on IRC and forums attempting to patch a broken ALSA module. I still have the benefit of *nix compatibility and the command line. So I'd be right at home.

And of course, I could finally have full support for my iPhone.

It seems to me that the Linux kernel could use a bit more QA. Perhaps just some QA at all would be helpful.

If you want to use Xen, I suggest RHEL 5 or CentOS 5. They both have support of libvirt which provides an API to work with Xen and other virtualization technologies. Additionally, RH has provided the "tools" which many seek.

Also I saw a web application that seems to support plenty of virtualization technologies and is accessible via browser. I cannot recall its name at this time, however.

I have also tried Citrix's XenServer which appears to be a customized version of RHEL 5. Their tag-line of "10 minutes to Xen" isn't off base at all. You can really be setting up VMs within minutes. It does include 'yum' but I've found the default repositories to have nil in the way of updates. So 'borked' package updates aren't likely. I have found that it performs well on a single-server instance. But have been unable to test it in a multi-server pooled environment. Although it has the capability. That said, XenServer does seem to be focused on a more virtualized Windows environment.