After trying many flavors and textures of other products (RH,SUSE9.1 live, and others too numerous to mention) over a number of months, I am leaning towards ubuntu.

The only real problem with xubuntu was the fact of so few games coming with it (otherwise I loved it). Kubuntu had trouble loading on two of my machines, still working through some issues.

Suggestions:
xubuntu: add some games out of the box -- please :)

Bottom-line: ubuntu seems to be a balanced system as far as eye candy and (newbie level) ease of use and useability out of the box.

Just would like to add Ubuntu is the best and easy to install.

For such a modern distro the installer could do with some playing with...it was fine for me but i grew up with linux and started using it in 1990 so this is a lovely little distro.. Like it and as i'm gettin lazy this distro is perfect..no thinking required, just enjoyment...
have found some limitations, mainly trying to run an app as a daemon..but i'll get around that once i get use to the differences to the standard distro i'm use to...

First tried the 1.5-year-old linux system (Slackware) in 1993 (about 25 floppy disks IIRC), when it was pretty horrific to try to set up. Forgot about it until I tried Redhat5, then moved through SuSE, Mandrake/Mandriva.

My wife bought me a new laptop for Xmas, asked them to install Linux on for me, she had to tell them what it was, and they installed Ubuntu; and apologised because they couldn't get sound to work (mixer switched to'external amplifier'. Why?) nor wireless network (big shock, eh?).

As I wasn't too happy that 10% of the harddrive was wasted space (recovery partition for XP) I completely wiped it, and installed XP Pro & Ubuntu; the former was significantly harder to set up; so all you whingers about how easy MS is to set up try it some day; don't forget to have all your cds with the printer, scanner, wifi, etc drivers on hand (snigger).

OK I didn't like the theme, but no big deal, a couple of mouse clicks and its something different.

Not keen on the sudo route, so changed root password (sudo passwd root) and go the 'su' way. Thats the thing with this OS, you can always go at least 3 or 4 different routes and choose the one YOU want.

Spent today installing on a 10-year-old P120 laptop. Uninstalled gnome, installed XFCE4; then found out that there's an Xubuntu that would have saved me the trouble. However, it reminded me of how much I've forgotten about installing linux over the past few years, and how far the install packages have come.

Twenty min I tried to find a con to write in the above space I am not aware of any. If anybody is having problems with the latest ubuntu they are either not reading the ubuntu forums or have not found the automatix script. The ubuntu forums will try to help you sort out any troubles you have. If your using any version but 6.06 get rid of it and use the latest 6.06 ALL the previous problems from other versions are gone don't waste your time with the older versions. Install ubuntu then search the ubuntu forum for "automatix" download it and run it that will install mp3 suport video drivers and everything else that is not "open and free". I know this is more of a basic how-to than a review but when there is all pros and no cons writing a review is difficult.