I don’t know how you had problems installing Ubuntu, there are seven clicks in the entire process. Also, it can read and mount your NTFS partition so you can get to your windows files from Ubuntu.

Oh, heres a thought, perhaps you burned the CD/DVD too fast and got an error on the disk? If you bothered to read up on something before using it, you would know that you burn slowly to avoid such problems.

As far as not supporting ATI cards, you would know this as well had you read up on it. They do support it, and if you downloaded the image, you could load your driver in it, recompile, and poof, a working graphics card.

Vista is the biggest joke of an operating system since OS/2. perhaps you should read a little and learn how to use a computer and an OS before you bash it, and perhaps you should read up on the shortcomings of Vista before you praise it.

Then again, I suppose when all you do is blog and play solitare, Vista works for you. When you get to doing real things like developing apps, running corporate servers, and actually USING a PC, I suggest you give Linux a second look.

Linux is open source’s answer to Unix, and neither are targetted for mass consumption by novice consumers. It takes some time, patience, and effort to get everything running on Linux. If you aren’t interested in or have the time to invest in learning how things work “under the hood” then Linux is not the OS for you.

One other consideration, blame the hardware manufacturers, the people who make wireless NICs, webcams, printers, etc., for the increased learning curve for getting hardware to work on Linux. Microsoft doesn’t write drivers, the hardware manufacturers do, and until they are pressured to start manufacturing Linux drivers along with their MS versions, getting their hardware to work on Linux will always require the user to jump through a few hoops.

I love linux, but I won’t bash MS; fixing broken Windows pays my mortgage and feeds my family :-)

“Most of their issues seem to be related to Beta versions of Vista or their BIOS settings are wrong… a fairly modern BIOS does not have these problems, not once have I had a Vista installation fail due to a graphics driver problem nor have I had problems installing the proper driver from ATi or nvidia. Ever.”

I have a Vista machine (my secondary test machine) which has a intel core duo 2 processor and 2 gb ram, 8600GTS nvidia graphics card. I hope you will agree must have a modern bios and graphics card.

Now most of the time I display this out of a pioneer 7 series plasma TV, and occasionally in my free time I play games on a LCD monitor. Now the latest nvidia drivers work on an LCD monitor fine, but I need to use an older driver revision to display the screen on my 1 year old plasma tv, or half the screen is missing. The problem is the older drivers crash running most newish computer games namely UT3 and Supreme Commander. So everytime I want to play games on this machine I need to upgrade the drivers and everytime I want to play games and revert them back everytime I want watch stuff on my tv… So even when you have as standard a vista box as possible the drivers do not just work…plus it took me ages to get a workable solution to this problem…

I had the opposite experience to you, my Vista installation failed, why…well although it detected that I had 2 SATA HDDs and I could format both of them in the initial installation screen I could not install to them (the error was something like no valid partitions found), I followed all of the technet article on my exact error (implying I am not the only one) I went through all 8 steps that were on there and the article stated that one of which would fix my problem.

Sadly none of them did, I however discovered that I had to remove one of my HDDs to get vista to install and then plug the second in once it had finished! Ubuntu and XP did not have this problem.

BTW I installed on a new VISTA CERTIFIED motherboard so I would not want to blame the hardware.

Ubuntu(out of the box!) and XP both support my 3 year old canon scanner Vista does not…

My ATI graphics card worked fine in all three OSs.

Vista was significantly slower in all operations, especially file copying than Ubuntu(fastest) and XP, despite my AMD64X2 processor and 2GB RAM 2 SATA HDDs all certified vista hardware…

Vista made it very hard to reinstall XP, I had to use Ubuntus disk management to format the drives so that I could reinstall XP, XP could not format my drives until I had done so in Ubuntu.

OUT OF THE BOX on Ubuntu I could play every different type of video file XVID DIVX etc. Vista I had to play about with before discovering that there are 32bit and 64bit codecs and although windows media player was running in 32bit mode on the desktop in the media center it was running in 64bit mode….also obviously I had to download and manually install several codecs!

Unfortunately I had to go back to XP because of the software I need to run. Maybe when Vista SP1 or 2 are released I will consider it for my main system again.

Peace

I recently noticed a friend of mine (at an engineering school, she’s not very technical, though) was running Ubuntu. If she can do it, a lot of people could (and evidently do).

First of all, you committed a mortal sin right off the bat: you didn’t backup your stuff (MBR, Documents and Settings, registry, etc). You are (as far as I can tell) a Windows power user, every geek worth his/her bits knows to always backup all your data, especially since you needed it. Second, your tone of voice (your a writer, you should know what I’m talking about) was what I would call “whiny”. You do not chronicle what steps you took to solve the problem (learning bash commands, linux filestructure, etc). Ubuntuforums.org is an excellent resource to peruse other user’s problems, and ask your own. The IRC channel #ubuntu is also an excellent resource for live help (although the forums are well-perused). However, in your favor, it appears that you did use Google, albeit not much. The GRUB error is well documented on the web and in the U forums.

To close, a lot of Linux problems are difficult to diagnose. Remember, the Linux devs are essentially reverse-engineering everything from the rest of the industry, with little help from the corporations. Also, ATi and nVidia both refuse to disclose any specifications of their video cards, leaving Linux devs to reverse engineer their own (nv and ati drivers) or trust that nVidia and ATi release up-to-date and stable drivers for Linux (hasn’t had a great history).

Did you have a great time with Ubuntu? No, once again, I am truly sorry. But, at least divulge the steps you did (or did not) take while installing it.

I sincerely hope you at least try the LiveCD again on your Mac.