I keep trying Linux, of various flavours on my laptop and end up back going back to Vista.

My foray this time was with the latest version of Ubuntu, released last week V9.04.

After trying the livecd I went ahead and did a full install on my laptop. I am not sure what they have done with the Intel 945 drivers in this version, but their performance was truely shocking. Things that worked in 8.10 are really slow in 9.04, and the graphics seemed very glitchy in things like Google Earth V5. I found several nice Mediacenter type apps (Elisa and XBMC). XBMC just wouldnt work properly and was painfully slow, Elisa had a good interface but failed to find any album art for half my music.

My laptop is not a slow old donkey either, its a Core Duo with 3GB ram and 320GB HD.

After trying lots of things, I have given up again and am now restoring The WHS backup of the laptops Vista install.

Maybe in time Linux may become a true MS alternative, but its not there yet.

Strangely enough, I installed 9.04 too and love it! 8.04 was decent already, 8.10 was crap, but 9.04 is rock solid so far.

Maybe its just down to the poor performance of the 945 drivers. I do like ubuntu, maybe I need something with more oomph in the graphics department.

To be fair, all intel integrated solutions are dire for 3D performance... and always have been. :(

Ive been running solely ubuntu on my desktop since 8.xx and recently it upgraded itself to 9.xx and I am very happy with it.

My hardware is mainstream and well supported though (core2quad, Asus P5WDH, 8800gts), so I guess that is what makes things easier. It takes some getting used to but as I didn't have the option of XP to fall back on (and Vista for me was a no-no) I had to adapt and I am very happy with it now

Just upgraded my laptop to Jaunty and it went very smoothly, everything worked and it seems quicker. it even picked up the built in modem which it hadn't with Intrepid.

i'm sure I've seen several threads about the intel 945 graphics, may be worth a look if you haven't already. Just a shame that my laptop is rather old and slow with a rubbish graphics card the thundering 16mb of video memory doesn't like trying to play video.

I don't really understand the point of Ubuntu (so I guess that goes for Linux in general). I'd got a spare HD knocking about so I installed 9.04 on it (think it then updated itself to 9.11) and had a play around with it and other than discovering that it had a version of Connect4 on it THAT IS UNBEATABLE AND CAN READ MINDS I don't really see the point in it. I don't seem to be able to play any proper games on it, so I only really end up using it for web browsing, which Vista and Opera do perfectly well. It doesn't even seem to boot up that much quicker either! Fair enough if you're running a server or whatever but for Home use it doesn't really work for me. And it still crashes!

On my laptop the latest version of ubuntu booted from completely off to a useable system in less than 25 seconds. Performance of the graphics card is my biggest bug bear with the latest version. Had it not been for that it would still be on the laptop. Google Earth for example performs slowly in ubuntu and quick in vista.

You can do everything you do with vista etc on Linux, you just need to be a bit more technical in your approach. For example getting google earth working involves downloading a .bin file, changing its permissions so its executable and running the intstaller from a command prompt. If you just use the package manager then you tend to get fairly basic applications, although you can add more repositories to give you a lot more, eg. xbmc, elisa, and so on.

Tried Ubantu -it came up really fast on mine - found everything , but I just didn't like it .Then tried Mandriva ,(which to be fair has the other interface ) - and am now getting to grips with it .No Intel stuff on here though -it's a SIS MOBO with an AMD 2.8 . TBH don't really use it as much as I should -tend to run everything except security concsious stuff on Win 7 ,which makes XP look like a snail .