Ubuntu has taken a bit of a leap lately. I've been primary-Linux for coming up on a decade now, for context. Several years ago my father and I both purchased very similar laptops, with the screen size being the primary difference. Mine of course has been driven into the ground and have various keyboard, mousepad, and hard drive issues, his is going strong (albeit with a different hard drive now). I was there for Christmas and tried to see if we could find a video on Netflix and couldn't find a single computer in the house that we could turn on and get the answer to that question in less than five minutes. I'm not making up that number, that's the time the fastest computer took to boot and present a working Firefox. 1.6GHz Pentium M may not be state of the art, but it's not that slow. It is of course because there's just so many things running in the background that the various virus scanners and backup product (or possibly products, I wasn't 100% clear) are just killing each other with IO contention. (If Windows doesn't already have it, it really needs an official "scanning" component in the OS that things can hook to so it can coordinate disk scanning and avoid thrash, that would help an enormous number of home users.)
I was nervous about removing the virus scanner in particular; he's savvy but he's a professional in another industry and doesn't have time to keep utterly up on every threat. Even if they aren't perfect they do sometimes work. So I offered to put on Ubuntu 10.10, which of course made the system usable again.
What stunned me was how slick the desktop really was. Integrated messaging, application menu is great, the application manager filters the apps from the incidental cruft like -dev packages, and just an indefinable feeling of polish everywhere. Still not quite the Windows level of polish but getting the very quickly and surpassing it in some areas. If you haven't played with stock Ubuntu in a while, I'd recommend checking 10.10 out just to see the current state-of-the-art. I was so impressed I put it on my own laptop. (Fortunately I've learned to keep 20-30GB just sort of lying around on the hard disk to make trying a new distro easy; I recommend it next time you find yourself partitioning.)
I was nervous about removing the virus scanner in particular; he's savvy but he's a professional in another industry and doesn't have time to keep utterly up on every threat. Even if they aren't perfect they do sometimes work. So I offered to put on Ubuntu 10.10, which of course made the system usable again.
What stunned me was how slick the desktop really was. Integrated messaging, application menu is great, the application manager filters the apps from the incidental cruft like -dev packages, and just an indefinable feeling of polish everywhere. Still not quite the Windows level of polish but getting the very quickly and surpassing it in some areas. If you haven't played with stock Ubuntu in a while, I'd recommend checking 10.10 out just to see the current state-of-the-art. I was so impressed I put it on my own laptop. (Fortunately I've learned to keep 20-30GB just sort of lying around on the hard disk to make trying a new distro easy; I recommend it next time you find yourself partitioning.)