The installation is definitely a hard slog for owners of certain pieces of hardware. I had issues with my USB wireless adapter, my recent-ish nVidia graphics ca

The installation is definitely a hard slog for owners of certain pieces of hardware. I had issues with my USB wireless adapter, my recent-ish nVidia graphics card, DVD playback, and flash. However, after I got it all up and running, the experience was worth it. It looks like the nVidia support got better between 7.1 and 8.04. I was able to get my card running on 7,1 using a little script called "Envy", which can be installed and ran through apt-get. When I upgraded to 8.04, I did not need to make any further changes to get the graphics to work, though I did need to jump through the same hoops for my wireless adapter again. Coders are now making scripts like Envy to help users install those last few tricky pieces of hardware. It would be nice if the auto-detect, download, and install process were part of Ubuntu itself, but these are available now as a good halfway point.