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I’m with StoneChucker and others who’ve endorsed Mint for folks wanting to try a desktop Linux distro. Really slick. I’m not an “IT industry insider” but my certs and experience are “good enough” for America’s Third World County, such that, although almost all the systems and networks I service are dominated by Windows, I have managed to flip a few folks on to an appropriate (for them) Linux distro. Heck, sometimes it’s Puppy Linux, but when that’s appropriate, you can be sure that the old Win 98 (or 95!) system it’s used on will be a useful machine.

My own experience with Ubuntu has been mixed. Early iterations were too fiddly for me to recommend to others. 7.10 was the first that started to approach becoming “good enough” for the average user. But as I used 8.10 I had the same fiddly lil issues crop up time and again. Sound (particularly midi) required re-configuring after every darned update, it seemed. Ditto for my nVidia video drivers. Interestingly, unlike cluttermagnet’s experience, although darned near every software update caused me to have to reset the video drivers, when I changed to a different nVidia card, everything when smoothly. Go figure. 9.04 never quite made a full upgrade and I had to scrub and reinstall. But the transition to 9.10 was smooth. Not even the typical sound and video problems.

Now, my main machine runs Win7 with Linux Mint in a VM. Why? Well, my main machine doubles as a media pc, and there’s not a single solitary (or combination) solution on the Linux side of the equation that does things even half as well for recording TV, for example, as WMC does. Tried ’em all. Some would sorta work, but needed mucho mondo add-ons to approach being half as functional as WMC right outa the box. And my Wonder Woman does like to watch nice digital recordings of her programs. So, Win7 is running all the time so WMC can handle TV recording (and tons of other media sharing while it’s at it, just cos it’s already there) and I get my comfy Linux Mint install working in a fully-functional VM. So, Victor, you are almost right about Linux offering “everything that Windows does and more.” If I could really do everything WMC allows in Win7 in a Linux distro, I’d likely run Win7 in a VM as a reference “machine” only and do everything in Linux.

But Linux still falls short in media use. (One other: although I can get almost complete functionality out of a music transcription app designed for Windows by running it with WINE, almost doesn’t quite get the baby made, and no, Rosegarden and other attempt to effect decent music transctiption for Linux do NOT come close. Some Windows apps are still better than anything in Linux.)

Other reason why I run Linux in a VM on my Win7 machine? Easy. I hate dual booting anyway. Did it for years with Win98/2000, then Linux/WindowsX (whatever current was, including, for a while last year, Win7B/RC).

BTW, PCBSD as an alternative to a well-designed desktop Linux distro is an option folks looking for a change ought to consider. I’ve had a PCBSD machine or two running around here (I try to not let them run loose, as it were :-)) for some years now, and the OS just keeps on amazing me. Nice stuff. Heck, it’s BSD, so skinning it to have a Mac-like look and feel is a fun thing to do when MacCultists are over…