PCLinuxOS 2007 was good, openSuse 10.2 was great, Ubuntu feisty is awesome. Quick boot up, lots of guides and wikis to get you through installing the codecs and the additional fonts, and lots of forums where you can find solutions to almost all of your problems.

Yast and synaptic in openSuse and pclinuxos was a tad slow but on ubuntu it was super fast. Bootup took no longer than 30 seconds. Awesome distro. This is one to install and look for definitely.

Quite simply, I love Ubuntu. I only started using Linux because of final year project requirements at university; by installing Linux at home I didn't need to get up and go to the terminal room on campus! Ubuntu was recommended and so I made the switch from Windows XP - and have never looked back.

Ubuntu was easy to install and operate. Any problems initially encountered because of lack of Linux experience were easily solved from the extensive online and community support. (Strangely, Ubuntu seems to have greater technical support than XP, which I naively expected to be the opposite way round since Ubuntu is free and Windows isn't.) Everything seems to run smoothly and it is a pleasure to use.

I only wish that my XP games were easier to setup so that I could delete XP forever. Those I have managed to get working (Quake 4 and Doom 3) run with far superior graphics than Windows currently manages.

That minor point aside (after all, I switched to Ubuntu for work reasons!), Ubuntu is perfect for a beginner and I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to make the jump to Linux.

At first, considering I was a complete amateur to Linux, seeing the word "DEBIAN" associated w/ Ubuntu kept me away from it.

I went to RHEL, my first Linux port after Windows. It was better, but still had a fair load of issues. The "dependency error" in RHEL & in the RPM packaging system simply got too much for me to put up with.

Whatever hardware & progs installed in RHEL worked fine. But it was a NIGHTMARE upgrading critical libs like glib, etc.

After some study, I found myself attracted to Ubuntu. I downloaded a copy and I never looked back. Hardware & software install was a charm. I could get all my hardware setup using GUI- point & click.

To install NVIDIA GEFORCE 5500 3d card for example, all I needed to do was to go to the restricted file manager and enable it. The install manager took over from there & there! NVIDIA installed! All hardware went off this way. Even external USB devices.

Software upgrades were also a breeze (like enabling DVD support for Totem- the default media player). Seriously, I recommend Ubuntu for first time Windows Refugees. I don't know much about Ubuntu from a experts' POV, but for a noob- it gets the job done.

BTW- the apt-get method for installation is FAR saner than those cursed RPMs...

I do agree with most of those who like the Ubuntu. However, it comes with too many utility programs. after which it is hard to get fully acquainted with it. It is arduous to know which application or utility is the best one to use.

Unlike others, Ubuntu does not have the provision where user could simply insert the original CD, then have it scan the HD for missing drives, or application which may have been corrupted, or deleted by accident. (At least I could find it easy).

The Webcam software has ways to go until it provides a decent picture. Recording from Microphone?. What recording?. unfortunately I found the feisty 7.04 almost impossible to record from MIc. Even with ALSA.

In general for Linux. KDE & GNOM, each have their strong and weak features. Nonetheless, I think the developers of these two, should get together and merge the best features of their respective s/w and come up with one standard, and save ex-window users the hassle of having to juggle between the two.
Too much of a choice, sometimes in more detrimental then one choice.

Check it out at http://funwithlinux.blogspot.com

I had the same problem as "dingo71". I was using 6.06 LTS and KDE and liked it very much. When I received the 7.04 and installed it, I tried to set up my dial-up as before but the same options weren't listed. When I set up what I could, it dialed out, connected, and then dropped the connection. (External Best Data modem which worked on the Dapper.) Since then I read that it is recommended to update a version at a time, so maybe skipping the 6.10 was a mistake? At any rate, I have Dapper back on and won't make any changes for some time. I was looking forward to Fawn. (dingo71, did you ever resolve your dial-up issue?)

I used fedora 3 and 4 and I switched to ubuntu when edgy was released. The difference was a lot. Ubuntu is very stable in comparison with Fedora, although I don't know how newer versions of Fedora are. I tried opensuse also. I used KDE in it. I didn't like Yast software management. It's too slow in comparison with synaptic used in ubuntu. KDE may look better, but I prefer speed and simplicity of gnome.

I have never had any problem with hardware compatibility with any of my linux in different computers. So I can't say anything about hardware compatibility in feisty, since they are all good.

The only negative thing I found about ubuntu, is that it's so addictive that you never want to leave it. If you are addicted to computer, don't recommend ubuntu at all.

http://www.winxperts.net/forums/inde...showtopic=1440

Basically, that is my thoughts on the Operating System on that site. I liked it and i thought it had a lot to offer.

Installed it on the second day and so far, Ubuntu is the only distro that has never given me issues. This version has a feature that will install packages for you when you're trying to play a file format that's not initially supported OOTB. For example, let's say you're trying to play a dvd. A popup will appear, asking you to install the necessary gstreamer plugins. It certainly makes Linux easier for new users.

Networkmanager is also included, which is a lot better than iwconfig essid blah blah blah, especially if you have to roam.

The only issue I had was that it seemed to run a bit slow, but a couple updates later & disabling some services brought me back up to speed.

If you haven't tried Ubuntu yet, I recommend giving it a shot.

I was determined to move from MS and bought Suse9 which worked alright I then bought Suse10 which didn't. I tried Linspire but it only really wanted to work with certain hardware and none of the bits I already had particularly the dial-up bits. I then went to broadband/ADSL with Ubuntu 6.06 and it installed and ran perfectly. Lifted to 6.10, same. then 7.04 and audio and TV/video display problems which I still cant get to work. I now run 6.10 or 7.04 on one machine and 6.1 on two others but I still have to have MS for video and for my PDA. And I cant get MythTV to work reliably on any machine so far, but the thing about Linux is that I am having fun trying. More fun since learning DOS and Basic. I recommend Ubuntu as the best way to start the move from MS.

I run 6 systems, including a Dell 9200 Inspiron. All versions of Fedora and Ubuntu I have installed do so without any issues. The main selling point for Ubuntu is the quick ability to install DVD rippers, and other multimedia codecs / software.

If Fedora ever found a way to do so Ubuntu may very well loose lots of people, but Fedora has no intention on doing so.

Ubuntu sometimes sleeps my drives bringing the system down. BIOS and Power management are turned off. Yet it still happens.

The best summary I can think of at the moment is although I prefer the Red Hat distros they feel alot like running Windows at times, in that they are making decisions for me.

Ubuntu lets me choose for myself, its jsut a bit qwerky.

BTW I have oave 8 operating system families under my belt, and started at DOS 2.0 and I admin both Windows (though I am converting them!) and Linux systems around the globe.


Bottom line: people want to use their computers, not fix them or get them able to be used. Ubuntu is a step in that direction.

For newbie - yes. A must have! The collection of softwares simply huge! Official forum is the best forum among many online communities.

For enthusiast/adventurous users - Try other distro. Ubuntu doesn't allow much to play with Linux.

I would add ease of installation except I see a common flaw in the installation process: Default install is to wipe the hard drive clean. Some one unfamiliar with partitioning might accidentally wipe out their Windows or OSX OS. This is not unique to Ubuntu but I have only tried a few distros so far. A default installation that would recommend saving your existing "other OS" partition and shrinking it to allow about 20% more room on it than is currently used would be useful to make this less "dangerous" to someone new to this. Or, perhaps a better way of steering a person through manual partitioning, with recommendations, etc., to allow an easier installation for a newbie.

Other than the USB problem, which is slated to be fixed in the next release, I have no real problems with this OS and didn't find the installation all that confusing, but I am familiar with partitioning.

I would like to see QTparted as the partition manager as it "understands" how to resize NTFS partitions. The included Gparted does not. Other than that, Gparted worked well for me. I used a Knoppix disk that has QTparted on it to make room on another drive (it had to shrink a NTFS partition to do so).

Also, I would like to see a faster problem resolution when something like the USB_Suspend bug prevents users from being able to use their scanners and some other USB devices. The developers felt it was not a big enough issue to fix it in a kernel update and told the community that it would have to wait for the next release, even though the bug was known to be a problem when Feisty was released. Other distros worked quicker than this to address the problem.

Even with its shortcomings, I like Ubuntu enough that I'll just dual-boot to XP to use my scanner for now and wait for the next release in October, 2007. I use it for everything else, so it's what some might call an XP replacement.

I have a 4 yr old Toshiba laptop, and its CD is not reading very well. So I installed Feisty by setting up bootpd on another ubuntu machine (running Edgy), downloaded the Feisty Desktop Edition .iso, unpacked it, set up netboot, and booted it live from the laptop. Then installed via the icon on the desktop. Everything installed well with no problems. Details are documented here - https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/LocalNet.

I've been a Windows user since Win95. I bought a new computer back in April 2007 and decided I would install Ubuntu 64bit to see how it worked. To my surprise it recognized all of my hardware (especially glad it found my ATI X1600 Pro vid card and my AMD 64bit processor). Updating and installing software is a breeze with synaptic. I've been able to find suitable software to replace everything I was using in Windows. Despite using Gnome it runs very well with my 2GB of ram (there was only 1GB when I started and ran well with that too)