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lumak - all good points. My main printer is a brother and brother support is excellent and their drivers work. The HP is wireless and I had it working nicely. I'll just have to try again. The video issue was noted in Ubuntu 8.10 release notes so I installed 8.10 in a separate partition. Many others have noted the nvidia issue while others have gotten it to work. I'll just wait until nvidia releases their next driver.
I am retired and so Linux is definitely a hobby for me. I have nothing but time to tinker. I'm not particularly technical but have learned a lot and am having fun. In some ways it is like working under old DOS. When in trouble you still need to resort to the terminal.
1. connectivity - true... but at least there is the ndiswrapper. Helped my wireless card dramatically! (though finding the actual windows drivers for your card AND making them work may be difficult as pulling out the right drivers from an... well you get the idea)
2. printers - search for a brand that supports linux. Then send them an nice letter telling them you bought their brand because it worked with linux and they provided topnotch drivers. (I've had bad experiences trying to get an i860 cannon printer working.)
3. video - problems with nvidia? really? as long as you don't upgrade your kernel, you shouldn't have any problem. (due to the need to reinstall the driver). ATI is the one I always have problems with... on my laptop (gateway 600ygr) it has some special defunct mobile radeon that ATI doesn't support and gateway doesn't provide proper drivers for. I just use the default xorg drivers.
I would add a few more things to the list (like library standards and the want of people to constantly upgrade.) However, I think of linux as more of a hobbyist project for home users and an 'install it and be done' for servers.
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