Over the last few year I have used Linux as my desktop

operating system on and off.  This has

normally been in very short spells, I never found a distribution which I liked

enough to keep me from going back to Windows. 

I tried SuSe

(Their Enterprise Linux offering is great), I always seemed to get hung up with library files not

being found etc.  Fedora (previously RedHat) was pretty

good, that was back at version 2; I recently tried release 4 and had no end of

problems trying to configure my WiFi card, not so good.  A few days ago a colleague of mine showed me Ubuntu, he couldn’t say a bad word about it

so I have installed it myself.  Installation

was fast and clean, the base system (which still includes major packages like OpenOffice,

Gimp etc) installs from one CD—additional software can be downloaded (including dependencies)

using the included package manager. 

Despite the fact that my WiFi card is not natively supported by Linux,

an included tool allowed me to easily install the Windows driver (with ndiswrapper).

So far I haven’t got a bad word to say about it, let’s see
how long that lasts!