Folks,
Since installing this OS on my other laptop, I'm quite pleased about how it has performed.
Pretty much, it takes nothing to install (I did it with a 2GB pen-drive to use as a Live thing to see if my system would support it) and then killed Windows and installed it on the HDD.
Linux is no longer for geeks and nerds, although saying that you need to be able to sort problems out.

Windows has the problem that it is made so that "everyone" can use it, without having any computer skills what-soever.
Ask any Windows user what a command line is and often you'll get a blank stare.

Ubuntu 10.10 works with most hardware and although it ISN'T WINDOWS it works a lot faster than Windows, it has wireless support and quite a number of other things.
Obviously Ubuntu will not recognise proprietry files like .wma and the like, but it will do .mp3 files.
I am in the process of loading my collection of CD's on to my laptop.
Open source is the way of the future, when M$ realises that, the better off we will all be.

Can you get plug ins for the MS file types? That was always my concern with Linux. Microsoft kept throwing roadblocks in front of them by giving away windoze software that used proprietary file types.

If you're talking about the Windows Media file types (.WMA and .WMV) then they're no problem. A number of third-part codecs exist for them, on Linux and OS X.

How about DOCX? (the Vista and up default for Word)
I have a plug in for XP that works.

Generally Greg, you'd use OpenOffice under Linux.
It also works on Windows.
Believe me, there are work-arounds for almost everything that Windows offers.
People have found out these problems and written code to enable a solution.
This is the beauty of open-source software, you aren't depending on only the developers of the propretiary software, anyone can write this stuff, given a few simple rules and knowledge of how it works.

I guess I will give it a shot some day. I usually have a machine laying around without an OS.

Pretty sure you can open them with OpenOffice, though I haven't gotten any and had set my work computer to save as the old formats.

By the way, .docx and the like (.pptx, etc) have nothing to do with the version of Windows, but rather the version of Office. It's an XML-based format that Microsoft adopted starting with Office 2007, similar to what OpenOffice was already using. It is also an open, ISO/IEC certified standard.

Welcome to the world of free software! Try the Opera browser. I think it's better than Firefox and Google. If it isn't in the Ubuntu list you can download direct and it will self-install.
http://www.opera.com/browser/download/

There isn't a good replacement for every Windows program and you might need to spend time researching things that don't work. Some new hardware isn't immediately supported, so you need to pay attention to what you buy. You never buy linux software from a store. It's all available, mostly free, on the internet.

You might want dual boot, so you can run some special software. My wife uses Windows so I have access to that machine instead of dual boot for one program that I use once a year or so.

I'm running Ubuntu 11.04 and I like it but I tried the next upgrade and went back to 11.04.

I always run Windoze software but I stay a version or two behind. The software is free that way (salvaged from old machines) and it is a lot more stable. I would not run any Microsoft OS that was not about 3 revisions old (XP SP3, W/98SE etc). Otherwise you are just going to be part of the debugging community.

You can always run "some" windows applications/programs under Ubuntu, using a thing called WINE.
Now, I've never actually used this myself, but I have heard of people that have and can't fault the thing.

Greg,
I can really understand what you're saying about staying a version or two behind with Windows OS's.
I see that Windows 8 is in the pipeline, however I can't really see that selling that well.

I can't help but feel that the reason that Windows 7 sold so well, was people were trying to distance themselves from the Vista system they were using before W7 was released.
My 2nd desktop computer here runs W7 and although it took a bit to learn to drive it, initially, I really can't fault it at all.

I will say this though, if anyone needs a hand to get started with Ubuntu, start your own thread in this section and we'll get it sorted for you.
The beauty of an OS like Linux, is that you can do so much with so little memory and drive space

Ubuntu, is now up to 12.04 LTS (Long Term Support), at the time of writing, this adds the new Unity interface and quite a few tweeks to the OS.

If anyone here needs a hand to install your own Ubuntu scheme on their computer, by all means post here, Linux is as stable as, in the 18 years I've been using Linux, I've never had a single crash or error message, open source is the way to go, because you have a ton of other people around the world updating the code.
Once these updates come to a head, they are released, they take half as long as any M$ update and they give you a stepped progress using a text based up-dater, while the new files install so you can see what is going on.

Do the regular old windoze applications run on that?