I installed Ubuntu 11.10 a few days ago on my AMD laptop as well as an ancient P4 that is inside of an arcade cabinet. In some ways this article shows the gain

I installed Ubuntu 11.10 a few days ago on my AMD laptop as well as an ancient P4 that is inside of an arcade cabinet. In some ways this article shows the gains made by the Linux community (and Ubuntu) in the last 5 years. It used to be the barrier to entry was lack of driver support for any number of peripherals, a user-unfriendly install that would render dual-booting impossible, performance so abhorrent without manual config changes, a community that would mock your problems, and regardless of package manager always having to break down and "untar; ./configure; make" at least one set of dependencies before getting your needed software to run. Ubuntu (and the latest Fedora, as I've witnessed recently at work) installs with little more interaction than a partition selection. That being said, I hated Unity and switched to fluxbox on both machines immediately. I'm not sure what they've accomplished exactly.. it's less intuitive for someone from a windows experience. I guess the dock is most similar to a tablet menu? Anyways.. It's interesting, not for me, but if this is the new horizon of "linux problems" maybe <joke>this is finally the year of linux on the desktop? </joke>