I have experimented with Linux since the days of Red Hat Linux. Red Hat had an awful user manual that must have been written by a third grade dropout.

Then I tried Mandrake, now Mandriva and maybe soon no more, which, had a much better user manual. On to SuSe that had the best user and administrator's manual I have found with a Linux distribution and still use for a reference from time to time.

At one time, I favored Mandriva, and it's derivative PC Linux, perhaps becuase the audio always worked and it was the only distribution where the number lock worked after installation,

I never could get excited about Ubunta. I'm not sure why. But I did like Linux Mint when I first installed it. But now the problem. For some reason, many Linux distributions have trouble detecting and setting up sound cards. It's gotten to the point that I will not use any distribution that cannot detect and set up my sound card. It just waste too much time going through the procedure to do it manually. Which brings up a new problem. I have Linux Mint 7 installed on a older PC. Linux Mint 7 detected my sound carrd and set it up properly when I installed the program. Recently I decided to upgrade to Linux Mint 12 based on a lot of favorable reviews. I was disappointed to discover that Linux mint 12, unlike Linux Mint 7, was unable to detect and setup the sound card on the same PC.

To me, this is the biggest weakness of Linux. There is no consistency between, or within, distirbutions. Yes, we get nicer graphics all the time. But you still feel like you have an old clunker under the hood.