[dogscoff]

I downloaded Ubuntu yesterday just to see how it is. I expected it to be a real hassle but it wasn't, you just download the image, download a little freeware app to burn the image to a CD and off you go.

Once you've burned the CD, you can boot into Ubuntu from it, so that you can try it out without having to actually install anything. It has open office installed, a media player and photo editor and stuff, so you can see if you can open all your existing files. Then when/if you do want to install, you can use the same CD. It even has a "install to a different partition and leave windows intact, with dual-boot menu when you switch the PC on" option.

Anyway, it looked prety neat. Tried it on 3 machines: On my work machine it didn't appear to work at all, but I think that's because the CD drive on here is dodgy and insanely slow. It probably would have got there eventually.

On my colleague's machine (another Dell) it worked really nicely. A tiny bit clunky, but that was only because it had to spin up the CD every time it wanted to do anything. It would be beautiful running from the HD. It picked up all the hardware automatically and completely transparently. That was pretty impressive.

On my home PC (Sony laptop) it worked, but very slowly. However that machine is 5 years old now and only has the bare minimum 256meg ram required by Ubuntu, and there is absolutely zero free space on the HD to use as swap at the moment. Again though, picked up all the hardware straight away. I think it even found my pcmcia wireless network card, although I didn't have much time so I gave up trying to get it talking to my router.

It looks like a really nice OS; very clean, very user-oriented. It would take a little adjusting to I'm sure but that's to be expected.

Anyway, point is, if you are thinking about OSes, you should definitely give Ubuntu a try, even if it's just so you can say "I tried it". You don't have to install anything, there's no commitment at all. All it costs you is the time and the blank CD required to download it.