As soon as I can play my games on Linux, I'm all over it and will drop microsoft like a hot rock. Since that is what I spend %99 of my time on my home computer doing, it would make zero sense to use Linux. And since theres no way I could convince the entire populous at the place I work to completely learn a new operating system, develop our software for it, and IT to learn how to support it, I believe that Linux is still as far away as it was.

I installed it when it came out, and it went smoothly. everything works, but for some reason it won't connect to my belkin pre-n router. it connects fine to other networks. tried submitting my router login using the WEP encryption w/ default and explicitly w/ TKIP(the default) but just doesn't want to connect. anyone else have issues w/ encrypted login?

I'll try this tonight when I'm drunk. If I can install it drunk, anybody can do it sober. :D

Is it compatible with 64-bit Windows installs? Their website just says "Vista"

Ubuntu is okay. It will never replace Windows until the average user can install programs like they do in Windows.
And using a terminal window is too much like DOS. UGH!

Oldtech

When I booted to Linux the first time and it did its initial install routine, my system froze*. When I restarted, it said the installation was corrupted. I had to start over. The second install went well.

I've been playing around with Linux for years, but Ubuntu is the first one to be user friendly and have good documentation; I can figure things out without resorting to hours of searching documentation like I had to do with Debian, for example.

Ubuntu's Live CD sucked because installing things like browser plugins (SWF) didn't work right. The Wubi installation has no such issues.

My only lingering complaint is that GIMP is a POS compared to Photoshop.

Interesting that Ubuntu 8.04 installs Firefox 3 beta by default instead of Firefox 2. I wonder if the advantages outweigh the disadvantages...? Guess I'll get to find out next week. Hopefully my portable repository will let me downgrade if necessary!

damn i shoulda torrented an ubuntu iso, im using wubi and at 27% downloaded the transfer has become very slow 11KiB/s :(

12hrs remaining at this speed, anyone know if the download can be resumed from wubi?

[edit] nevermind the wubi client can resume after all, so far so good [/edit]

I just downloaded the .ISO file
But not installed yet.

I installed, booted, all I got was a command prompt ??

Well have it installed on a Dell 8300 desktop (old P4 3.ghz PC) and a new HP DV9700.. the desktop was easy.. the laptop didn't work with Wubi and had to install it from disk.

Takes a lot to get use too.. trying to get Beryl working but unable to find a guide that works with telling me how to set it up.

Following this guide now just to get 'use' to Ubuntu (http://howtoforge.com/the-perfect-desktop-ubuntu-8.04-lts-hardy-heron).

Still have a ways to go.. next after Beryl will be getting World of Warcraft working with Wine.

I still don't like how everything depends on everything. I'd rather see these distros sticking to a system + GUI core, and let others distribute the right libraries with their application, or some such.

Which leads to another dislike; that it is so centralized. If you don't fancy a lot of tinkering, you're a slave to the packet manager. I prefer a more decentralized package distribution (alá Windows).

And yes, there's a lot I don't like about the 50-60 years old design of it, like the filesystem conventions and such. I would like to see a bit more abstraction in that department aswell.

While my primary desktops (home and work) are still XP, I've been using Linux on servers for several years, and dabbling with Fedora and Ubuntu on the desktop for a few months. I believe that Linux is ready for the desktop, with a few caveats -- if you're a gamer, or in a situation like the one Hance describes (i.e. you need to heavily use a specific Windows-only application), Linux is probably not for you. Wine can be a solution for some of these situations, but not all apps play nice with wine.

I will be taking an Ubuntu laptop on the week-long business trip I'm going on next week. Just reformatted and installed 8.04 on a spare Compaq laptop (it's an older one, from about 3 years ago) that we had at the office. The laptop is significantly more responsive than it was when running XP; right now I'm in the process of verifying that I can use Remote Desktop to connect from it to both my home and work desktops.

I've also grabbed a full mirror of the entire Ubuntu 8.04 software repository (all 50+ GB of it!), and transfered it to a 2.5" external hard drive. That way I should be able to explore the available packages to my hearts' content, even while on the road. (I expect this trip to consist of long stretches of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer panic, so I figure I'll have a fair bit of time to futz around and check out the 8.04 release.)

My main workstation is dual xp/ubuntu and has been for a while. My biggest gripe is poor suspend support....I think I've had it work on one hardware config perhaps 3 releases ago.

5 button mouse support should also be GUI based. Having to tweak xorg.conf in a distro this advanced is kind of silly.

The rest of the family's boxen are straight Hardy Heron.

I recently downloaded ubuntu 8.04 but have not yet installed it on a hdd yet. I've run prior versions of ubuntu and really liked it. For my work computer, ubuntu would be just fine. But like others here, for my home systems there are certain programs that linux does not yet cover, e.g., running a dedicated video capture card so I can watch tv on my computer while working. Also, I've tried dual-boot and even triple-boot systems in the past, and really prefer not to set up a system that way anymore. That said, I've got an older system collecting dust that has XP set up on it. Maybe I'll give wubi a spin on that system.

I've installed it and uninstalled it twice on my laptop without any difficulty or complications at all, and I consider myself a real novice with linux. I was impressed that it played so nice with Vista wrt the boot loader.

What ruined it for me was the (un)support for the Broadcom 4311 wireless chipset in my lappy. The 8.04 release notes say that it should just work (it doesn't), and neither of the two workarounds I found worked on my machine. Me grumpy.

On the plus side, everything else worked, including the (easy) activiation of the nvidia drivers. Fun, I just wished the wireless worked.

I tried this feature a week ago or so.
When I boot, I select Ubuntu from the menu. Then 10 seconds later, my system reboots and I get the menu again. :(
Doh!

Another way to try it is to just download the Ubuntu ISO via bittorent, mount the ISO on daemon tools and run wubi from there. At least this way you don't have to wait for Ubuntu to download.

I would like desktop linux to be useful, but until it is possible for me to run the latest version of Visual Studio, Age of Empires III and Project Reality for Battlefield 2 in WINE, I will be unable to make a complete switch and it will simply be there for when I need little else than an internet browser and/or unix terminal.

By the way, I already have Ubuntu 8.04 installed on all of my computers via Wubi.

I absolutely refuse to download WUBI. Seeing as how I am running Ubuntu as the sole OS on this laptop it wouldnt do me any good anyway. I think Linux works fine for web browsing, word processing, email etc. The only downfalls for me are no games and I have to have Acrobat Professional support. Reader isnt good enough because I build PDF files all the time.

I've used various linux distros ubuntu/fedora/kubuntu/suse over the last few years. In the end I always end up back on Windows. Linux is a tool and it's just not a tool for my desktop. My problem (not really a problem) is that I always use the newest software tools and I like to play the newest games. The reality is that it's not useful to me. It can't do/or do what I need well without bandaid fixes.

We use linux and window servers depending on what is the best solution for us. I just haven't found a reason to use linux in my main machine.

(most of our linux servers are ubuntu server installs)

T-Shirt:
I installed Wubi and all I got was this stupid security blanket.

Ubuntu's great, although I prefer Kubuntu (the KDE-centric release), but I've kind of gotten away from Linux in the last year or so in favor of messing around with FreeBSD and PC-BSD in particular:

http://www.pcbsd.org/

Certainly, Linux may be better for certain tasks and for certain people. It's the ultimate tinkerer's OS, and that's a really powerful thing to be, but I prefer the BSD approach - consistency, stability, and performance. I wasn't expecting this when I first switched over, but my BSD system actually is quite a bit more responsive than my (K)Ubuntu/Fedora systems were on the same hardware and running the same applications. Nifty stuff.

But as to the issue at hand: yes, I think the *nux desktop is perfectly viable and perhaps even preferable as long as one of these two things are true for the prospective user:

1. They want a system that's rock-solid and runs a limited set of applications that they know they want to use on a regular basis; that they don't want to be constantly tweaking, upgrading, and trying new things.

2. They are technically proficient enough to learn to use the command line interface and the fundamentals of *nix if they don't want live under the above limitation.

I am using Wubi right now. A few server admins at work use Ubuntu on their main computer because they mainly just check their email threw owa using Evolution mail and remote to servers. they even got dual screens to run perty good.

When I can install Steam and My Games, I will say: good bye Windows.
2-4 years from now ?

tried it on my desktop and it fails to boot ubuntu. tried it on the laptop and everything is fine but wireless either isn't working or its usage is non-obvious. this is why i haven't been able to do more than dabble in linux. i'm just too lazy to figure it out if it doesn't work out of the box.

on the plus side the fact that it uninstalls cleanly and i didn't have to create any partitions or screw with the MBR means i'm much more willing to try again at a later date.

I have Fedora Core 4 on Virtual PC since FC4 went gold. It's even better and simpler, and I can work in both, in windowed mode, or switch to FC4 full screen, and hibernate/unhibernate and suspend/resume at will.

Much more convenient than dual boot. Download VPC, install, download FC4.iso (or any other distro you like), mount in VPC as a virtual drive, go. Best of both worlds in one.

Anyway, it's software that makes the difference. Both ways.

Wow, this is probably going to be the most exciting Friday night I've had in a long time!

:-(

I was gonna try this, but not being able to select which mirror to use sucks, since the default one in my case DL at 4KiB/s :S.

I installed Ubuntu via Wubi about a day after 8.04 came out. After a smooth installation and boot up, my experience was cut short by the fact that I installed it on my laptop, which is connected to my CRT, and Ubuntu would only want to show up on my laptop's LCD rather than the CRT. I went about trying to install the nVidia drivers, but the servers were dog slow at the moment I tried. Booted back into Windows and uninstalled it.

But with that all said, I'm sick at home from work and I'm installing it again as I write. Hopefully I can get it working this time around!

I know many people (ie non power users) who are afraid to dual boot linux because they are worried about screwing up their windows partition. instillation via wubi really changes the game, and opens ubuntu up to a whole slew of people.

I have been using ubuntu as my primary OS on my main desktop and notebook for about two years now, and I could not be happier!