I've been a linux desktop user on and off since Redhat 5.0 and usually take a year break between attempts to give it time to catch up. Recently I installed Fed

I've been a linux desktop user on and off since Redhat 5.0 and usually take a year break between attempts to give it time to catch up. Recently I installed Fedora 15 because I love the new Gnome3 desktop and was disappointed to have all little sorts of niggling stupid things on my 4-year old ThinkPad T60... like recovering from sleep and now sound doesn't work or the iwl3945 being buggy. I tried out ArchLinux and love the distribution, but found that building my own Gnome3 desktop with all the little applets and gadgets Fedora build in (like advanced touchpad controls, etc.) to be a pain in the ass of hunting down exactly the right modules I needed. I almost gave up, but decided to try out Ubuntu 11.04 after swearing it off when I spent a year with 8->9 and decided Unity looked horrible. Boy... I was surprised. It is more polished than anything else out there I tried. Runs well, everything worked out of the box and the first thing I noticed right out of the gate is the Add/Remove software has gone from being a simple UI over Synaptic to being what looks like an app store already. As soon as I saw that it dawned on me how brilliant canonical was being with taking Linux desktop a step forward by giving a direct sales channel to people wanting to work and sell on Linux. 11.10 and 12.04 behind it are going to be excellent user experiences and with the addition of the app store I think Canonical is making all the right decisions to take Linux on the desktop to the next level. You factor in tablets and tablet-friendly apps in the next few years and this is a really smart/aggressive move on their part. Big congrats to that company and team for always pushing beyond the scope of what "Linux is known for" and shoving their way in to realms dominated by other consumer OSs. It is nice to see the ambitious and gusto.