I have fiddled with *nix shells on other people's machines for a while, so know some basics. A few years ago I decided to try install Red Hat, and fell down at the first hurdle.

Over the weekend I downloaded and burnt the ubuntu install CD on a new "spare" laptop, and it was 100% working within an hour - no fiddly linux stuff for a newbie like me to have to figure out.

It even picked up my wireless network, with the same laptop couldn't do in windows.

Now i have 2 issues to figure out:
- 1. Need to run security updates, not sure how
- 2. Need to figure out how to repartition the hdd as I got the sizes wrong during the install.

But from one afternoon of playing, I am really impressed at the "out of the box"-ness - maybe i just got lucky tho...

-- Mike