the main problem areas today are graphicscards (amd and nvidia are a bit of a pain since the proprietary drivers have to be re-installed after a kernel update and amd has way too short support cycles) and printers/scanners (While most work out of the box or have drivers available many will lack alot of advanced features available in the Windows drivers).

You don't need to reinstall drivers if you use dkms, as you should. Ubuntu handles this implicitly: install proprietary driver through the package manager and forget about it.


Additionally, AMD now offers open-source drivers for all video cards. While they have dropped support for R300-R500 from their closed drivers, the open drivers run great on those cards (and actually surpass the closed ones in several performance tests - how awesome is that?)

The main issue with Ubuntu is the art direction. The 1px resize borders should never have happened with proper design. At least the developers have pledged to fix this in the 11.04 release.

Switched to Ubuntu (again) with 10.10. Had been using 8.02 on a server years ago, to full satisfaction at that time.

Today, I still only use Linux for server (both as in "remote machine only reachable via ssh" and as in "gui-enabled server in a VM") and for occasionally doing a thing in Fontographer, since sadly Linux remains unusable as "main desktop system" (and I don't see this changing any time soon). Linux desktop distros are getting fatter and fatter and in some way better too, and they do feel more and more like Windows (which is not always good, though), and admittedly the overall installation process and compatibility has improved a lot (memories of my first Slackware box in the mid-1990s come up...).
However, you still don't have and probably won't ever have the compatibility/support that is necessary to make a system really usable as your main desktop.
Under Windows, you plug in pretty much any random part that you buy over at Amazon or Newegg, and you can trust it will just work. Under Linux, chances are 50/50 (maybe 80/20 in the mean time, but still...) that it won't work at all, or that you will spend two days reading forums and editing config scripts for making it work.

Before the Ubuntu 10.10 release came out (which pretty much changed everything), I used Debian because seamless integration with VirtualBox didn't work under Ubuntu, and Debian installed considerably less crap than Ubuntu. The same server-with-gui took 1/4 of the hard disk space and ran with little over half as much memory. Which, admittedly, is insignificant on a real server given today's storage capacities, but it kind of does matter if you keep around the disk images of half a dozen installs (each of which Replica will backup, doah...) and if you regularly run a VM-server on your desktop machine.

For some reason, the Ubuntu guys seemed to believe until recently that installing a graphical desktop is not imaginable without having a fully-blown office suite, 2 web browsers, remote desktop, calendar groupware, a dozen games, support and half a dozen tools for bluetooth that the machine doesn't have, a print server and 20 drivers for printers that aren't attached, and whatnot, in addition to internationalisation for 172 languages of which 171 you do not wish to use, 167 you don't understand, and about 70-80 you have never heard of in your life.
It seemed unbelieveable that someone would just want a graphical desktop so he can use something other than [font="Courier New"]vi for editing config scrips and so he can have two or three consoles open at the same time, and maybe run one or the other graphical tool that is just a tiny bit more comfortable than commandline.

While the 10.10 release still installs a lot of crap, you can now uninstall 80% of it with just a few clicks and trim down your system to something really nice and slim, which is fine. Though I'd prefer not installing that stuff in the first place, I can see how a "fat default install" makes the writing of an installer a lot easier, so... granted. Also, seamless integration now works nicely (and from its appearance with full hardware acceleration), which is a major "selling point" for me.

Also, Ubuntu packages are usually very much more up-to-date than most others (often years ahead of Debian), which may be a good thing or a bad thing, but for me it is mostly a good thing (reasonably new kernel version (not something like 2.6.24), installing redis 2.0 out of the box, and such).

However, you still don't have and probably won't ever have the compatibility/support that is necessary to make a system really usable as your main desktop.
Under Windows, you plug in pretty much any random part that you buy over at Amazon or Newegg, and you can trust it will just work. Under Linux, chances are 50/50 (maybe 80/20 in the mean time, but still...) that it won't work at all, or that you will spend two days reading forums and editing config scripts for making it work.

Is this really true nowadays? In the last five years, I've never once encountered a peripheral that didn't work either out of the box or after running apt-get install some-driver (which would have been taken care of automatically on Ubuntu, but I prefer Debian.) Meanwhile, neither my printer nor my PS2 controller adapter works at all with Windows 7.

Also, Ubuntu packages are usually very much more up-to-date than most others (often years ahead of Debian)This is a very common misconception. Ubuntu is years ahead of Debian's stable distribution, primarily because, well, it isn't stable in the same sense. Ubuntu is based on Debian unstable, which despite its name is highly stable most of the time. Debian testing, which is what you'll want to use on a desktop, is always months ahead of Ubuntu, and usually contains less bugs too.

If you want to compare Ubuntu to Debian stable, you have to compare the latest Ubuntu LTS, not the cutting edge version.

I switched from Xandros Linux to Ubuntu Linux when Xandros stopped paying me and Canonical started. Otherwise, I would probably still be using Slackware.

I would like Ubuntu a lot more if it would quit kernel panicking after every kernel upgrade, such a huge pain in the ass

Ubuntu can be a bit cumbersome on a few occasions. But the rest of the time it just works
A while ago I had to write a c++ plugin for Windows, and it was a hell to get a c++ compiler working.
On Windows you have to download WinSCP or putty, if you want to connect to any ssh server.
Windows does not come with a bitTorrent client.
Windows can only use zip files.
And ms Office has just recently added support for Open documents format. But ms Office does not come with Windows by default.

So yeah Windows is for games But that again is because of their huge market share.
(I did develop on Windows for a lot of years, but after I tried Ubuntu, I don't want to go back)

Ubuntu got a lot of features working without it requires you to install additional programs. And most of the programs you'll need, can be found at the software center (simple package browser), or synaptic (advanced but complete package browser).

btw remember to install compizconfig-settings-manager, then you can customize how shiny and/or advanced you want your desktop environment to be
I switched to Ubuntu as my main OS. After I got a gaming pc with Win7 (ms gives it to software students for free (the OS not the pc )). I use Ubuntu on my laptop at my university, and on my development pc at home.

I tried it, and even got my whole development toolchain set up on it. I abandoned it for Windows 7 for the following reasons:

• It was really, really hard to resize windows. Like, the handle on the edge/corners of windows was typically 1px for resizing.

Youre busted Beandog , you obviously havent used Ubuntu more than 10secs
heres how to change winborders

(menu) system->preferences->appearance + then look for a winborder style you like, mine are about 16pixels wide (I created my own)

Surely you give something a decent go before you criticise it

@valderman
Yes youre correct Nowadays its linux that seems to have the better hardware support (out of the box) for samoth to say 50/50 is proof he hasnt used something like ubuntu recently

I use Ubuntu for development and Win7 for entertainment. As for hardware support it can be hit or miss. 10.10 didn't recognize wireless in my new desktop, it took editing a config file to fix(as in it already had the driver but kept loading some other driver instead.)

I use linux for development because it is the best tool for the job, more interesting libs, and programs either just support Linux better or don't support windows at all. Try getting redis or hadoop working on windows as an example, especially if you don't wish to run cygwin.

@valderman
Yes youre correct Nowadays its linux that seems to have the better hardware support (out of the box) for samoth to say 50/50 is proof he hasnt used something like ubuntu recently

To be fair, you should say that I said "50/50 (maybe 80/20 in the mean time, but still...)", but regardless of this:
Among the peripherals that I use are a Logitech keyboard, a Logitech mouse, a 3Dconnexion 6dof control, and a Seagate Replica, neither of which works. So, for me, it is more like 0/100.

Sure enough, the keyboard works as "keyboard", but none of the macro buttons and little of the extra stuff in it works (the volume dial does, granted). The mouse works as mouse, but the speed switching button does nothing (no biggie, but when I have a button, it should do something). The 6dof device didn't work at all under 8.02, though admittedly I've not tried under 10.10. And sure enough, the Replica works as harddisk just fine, but that's not what it is supposed to do. One can debate Replica's annoyances (which is really just Rebit rebranded and bundled with an ordinary USB disk) such as that it's certainly not overly intelligent on what it backs up, but among all the other backup solutions that turn out being just plain shit at the end of the day, Replica is the only one that you plug in and that you never think about again until you need it, and then it turns out that it just saved your day. I've had this happen twice during the last year and my wife had it happen only a few days ago when, after getting her laptop upgraded, she noticed that the IT guy doing the migration didn't feel like copying the entire last month's work to the new machine, so he skipped that. Unluckily, Replica just doesn't work with Ubuntu, since the software on it is stricly Windows.

Ubuntu 8.02 would not boot if my life depended on it on a computer with a P5Q mainboard, which truly is not something exotic and wasn't anything special 2 years ago either (though 10.10 now works perfectly well with the exact same machine), and saying that getting hardware RAID-1 to work was a pain is truly the understatement of the millenium (I wouldn't ever install RAID-1 again anyway, but that is besides the point -- the point is it was a total quirk under Linux, whereas under Windows XP it was 2 clicks). When I last tried (which admittedly is a year ago already), my plain normal nVidia card didn't truly work either (well, it did work, kind of... but not nearly the same as under Windows).

So, no, my experience is not that everything works just fine. Most mainstream things work "kind of", but that's it. Which doesn't mean that Linux (and Ubuntu in particular) isn't a mighty fine thing for many applications, especially for a server... just as a main desktop machine, sorry no. Not for me at this time.

Seagate Replica

I don't really know what exactly that is other than what the manufacturer's website tells me, but what it tells me is that the product is more of a complete software+hardware solution (that is, I wouldn't consider backup software a device driver even if it ships with a specific piece of hardware,) not really a peripheral. You might as well complain that $BACKUP_SOLUTION for Linux doesn't work on Windows. As for your keyboard, I don't know what special space gizmo that is, but every fancy hotkey works on the Logitech keyboard I'm using right now without any configuration. The ridiculously overpriced Logitech mouse (which I bought for ergonomics alone and never even noticed has a bunch of fancy buttons until now) also does exactly what it's supposed to if I'm interpreting the symbols on the buttons right, and the even more overpriced MS bluetooth keyboard I normally use works just splendid. That 6dof thing though, that seems esoteric to warrant major headaches; what do you even use it for? 3D modelling? Games?

I don't know if I'm just extremely lucky, but I truly haven't had hardware issues in Linux in as long as I can remember.