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Steph Foster wrote:
Having read about a lot of problems and heard a lot of complaints I am now finding myself wondering if I could genuinely recommend GNU/Linux as a desktop OS to any non geeky user.
I've had a mixed experience with Ubuntu. Mostly it "just works", but occasionally things go wrong, particularly when upgrading. e.g. when I upgraded to Karmic it all went wrong --- the upgrade botched halfway through, leaving me with busted wifi drivers, which meant I had to dig out an ethernet cable and move the machine within cable distance of my router in order to finish the upgrade. However, now it's upgraded it works fine, and I use it all day every day.
The only issues I have are a few small irritations (which I get with Windows too, though in a different form of course) and that it does tend to page to disk rather a lot. I "only" have 2Gb of RAM, and I find that it doesn't take too many apps open to cause excessive swapping (Firefox, Thunderbird, emacs, openoffice and maybe something else). This seems to be better now I've discovered the "swappiness" setting, but when it *does* need to swap it freezes the whole system, so you can't even use the mouse whilst it thrashes the disk.
Anthony -- Author of C++ Concurrency in Action http://www.stdthread.co.uk/book/ just::thread C++0x thread library http://www.stdthread.co.uk Just Software Solutions Ltd http://www.justsoftwaresolutions.co.uk 15 Carrallack Mews, St Just, Cornwall, TR19 7UL, UK. Company No. 5478976 -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html