I have had nothing but grief with Suse 10 on AMD64 and am putting serious thought into switching to Ubuntu. I do prefer KDE, although I'm interested in Gnome. I do bring forward a few pre-install questions for y'all... hopefully I can get some answers from current Ubuntu users? If anyone has experience with Suse 10, please let me know some of the benefits of Ubuntu.

Suse 10 didn't have MP3 compatibility for MP3s and other media out of the box...
I've experienced a variety of troubles because of Suse 10's seemingly flaky 64-bit compatibility.
My Samba and MySQL are hopeless (apparently because of the 64 installation).

Can I expect to have any of these issues out-of-the-box with Ubuntu?

Also, I've currently mapped my 200GB hard drive as /home... I would prefer to NOT erase that... would that cause any problems? would I be able to mount it as /home again? (i'll erase the 40GB drive for Ubuntu and application installs)

Obviously no distro is perfect, but I wouldn't mind an effortless install and configuration.
I'm certainly far-from-perfect... =)

I am sure most *nix systems will have bugs with the 64 bit install.

What have been your problems? Have you tried to resolve, and most Distro's (correct me if I am wrong) do not come with built in MP3 support (with the exception of Linspire).

So, what kind of problems have you experienced? maybe those would be easier to fix, then switching distro's.

Also, give KDE a shot..

It seems Suse isn't closing applications properly when I shut down... which means MySQL doesn't start when I boot up... Samba just doesn't want to work (apparently since the last patch release).

I've had nothing but trouble with this installation.

well i've never tried 64 bit, however i did use SuSE 10 not that long ago and like you want to switched to ubuntu.

my main reasons for this:

1) i prefur gnome and Suse has shi...ahem, bad gnome support
2) rpm sux, Ubuntu is based on debian and has a huge package selection
3) on suse i experianced WAY to many reliability problems
4) what can i say? i tried ubuntu and it just felt like home

but if your looking for perfect multimedia support out of the box, Ubuntu (and most other *nix distros) wont give it to you. Ubuntu is a 100% foss OS. Which means many non foss software is not included. But ubuntu has the next best thing. There is a program called Automatrix that will automaticly configure your ubuntu breezy system for almost everything you can that you can think of. At least dual boot with ubuntu and suse for a while (they can share the same /home and swap partitions). Thats what i did and i just found myself booting into ubuntu more and more, eventualy i un-installed suse and windows.

PS: at least try the live cd a try

hope you enjoy ubuntu, pengu

I like your suggestion of the dual-boot... I hadn't thought of that... I can do the Live CD thing, but I don't know how much experience I'd really get out of that; I'm downloading it anyways [to try].

I'm glad to know there is someone else in the same boat as me.

Thanks for mentioning the sharing home & swap partitions... I'd hate to erase that drive if I don't really need to.