I eventually had given up on Ubuntu because I just missed the simplicity of OS X, but now that my two Macbooks were stolen, I decided to give Ubuntu another go on my new PC.

8.10 runs amazingly well! I cannot believe how much progress this distro has made in only 2 short years, and continues to do so! Hardware compatibility is astounding, as is usability, and eye-candy GUI. It's just plain fun to use and you really don't need to worry about Microsoft apps at all thanks to Wine and Crossover support.

Even Ubuntu Server is fantastic, and I am experimenting with Webmin to learn different server related functions. It's pretty cool stuff.

-K

So far, so smooth. All my hardware seems to work with Ubuntu :-)

I basically deleted everything from my harddrive minus the 25 gigs of music, pictures, and important files. I moved those to a separate 50 gig partition. The remaining 70 gigs are for linux, linux apps, and whatever else I may download.

Setting up Ubuntu was fast, easy, and painless. The only hurdle I've encountered was getting java to work with my system... but that was also not too hard. Now I can use Azureus and download stuff to my heart's content, lol.

The only difficulty I'm having right now is finding a decent music player. I've been spoiled by the speed and stability of foobar2000, and the usability of WinAMP. Linux music players honestly suck, and the sound is not as great as I require. I use a 4.1 speaker setup, and sound only comes out of 2 channels. It'll probably take a little research, tweaking, and luck... but hopefully I'll resolve this issue.

So I've decided that since all the major programs I use on my Windows XP box have linux counterparts, that it might be time to switch to a linux distro.

I'm a huge fan of Ubuntu Linux... the LiveCD is blazingly fast, even on my older Pentium II-450 box.

Right now I'm using my old copy of Partition Magic to prep my important files onto a separate FAT32 partition, since Linux + NTFS filesystems don't work together all that well (plus I'm lazy and don't want to have to patch the kernel and do other stuff until much later when I have time).

Basically taking my 120 gig harddrive, partitioning off about 40 gigs for my massive music collection, and another 10 gigs for my important documents. I figure 70 gigs is enough for Ubuntu + all the crazy apps I'll be installing.

*Commonly used Windows programs = Linux Equivalents*
AOL Instant Messenger = gAIM
MSN Messenger = gAIM
WinAMP = Rhythmbox
MS Office = OpenOffice
Photoshop CS = Gimp
MAME = MAME
Firefox = Firefox
Azureus = Azureus
Cabos = Cabos

I've gone over my hardware configuration, and I do foresee a problem with Linux supporting TV-Out in my GeForce FX5200 Ultra video card. I use this feature pretty frequently to watch movies on my TV. I may just say screw it, and do without this feature... or perhaps Ubuntu may even support it and I just don't know about it.

I've always been a little scared of using Linux, because the last few dozen times I've installed it, it was such a pain to setup and get running.

For my first and only attempt at using linux in 2005, I chose the Ubuntu distro. It's debian based so it has this amazing package manager called Synaptic, that will make it easy to install just about any extras you want (supported and unsupported).

For other distros I've used my biggest hurdle was getting internet to work, and the same problem would have affected Ubuntu, however I decided to use VMWare to bridge my Microsoft USB Wireless MN-510 onto an emulated VMWare ethernet port. By doing this, when I installed Ubuntu, the internet would simply work (It doesn't really surprise me that linux' support for a MICROSOFT and Wi-Fi USB card is still experimental, however by bridging, it works 100% perfectly).

I've got a nVidia nForce2 motherboard, as well as a nVidia GeForce 5200 Ultra video card, and while these work well with Ubuntu Linux, it is possible to re-compile the kernel to directly add support for these for efficiency. I'm still trying to free up enough time to sit down and specify what I need in my linux kernel (definately all my hardware support, and definately some AMD Athlon XP optimizations).

All in all, Ubuntu is FAST, and software loads at amazing speeds. I've dedicated about 286 MB of RAM and 6 GB of hard drive space to my Ubuntu under VMWare (My computer is an Athlon XP 2800+ w/ 512 MB of RAM and a 120 GB hard drive), and I've got zero slowdowns when switching from Ubuntu back to Windows XP.

Recommendation:

I guess if you don't want to mess with partitions and all that risky business, then just pickup VMWare, download the latest Ubuntu distro, and you'll be good to go for a fast and productive linux experience.