Seems to be the new darling distro of the young twenty-somethings, I 've had several recommend Ubuntu to me. These are the same people who a year ago would have recommended Gentoo as the in distro, and prior to that, I suppose they'd all be into Debian.

and it's that pattern that makes me wary if it ;)

I use a lot of esoteric software for things like turning my vinyl LPs into CDs I can take in the car and put my home videos on DVDs, so I tend to stick with the same distributions that the people who write my fave software are willing to support, and that pretty much leaves me in Mandrake and RedHat land. I was intrigued by Gentoo claims of a simple one-disk install and then fetch only what you need so you don't have umpteen text editors installed, but when I tried it, I couldn't get it up to any sort of capability I needed, so I moved on.

That said, it's about time someone came along to spice up the landscape. I've changed my distro several times since my first Linux machine in 1993, each time prompted by not getting what I need with what I had and having some say, Well, just try this one ...

All the dirty politics and obscene profiteering aside, I don't know how the Windows users cope with having only one one size fits all package and then being nickle and dimed in a Death by 1001 distinct vendors for everything else they need. For me, I just add the recommended Easy-URPMI catalogs once, and then just ask for what Ineed and wait while all the required parts are dutifully fetched and installed.

I have here now three copies left of the official Ubuntu Linux 6.06 LTS release, and although I haven't had the chance to really try it out, I've had a lot of people tell me that it is astounding in its ability to find the right drivers for even odd computer bits like printers, cameras and wireless network cards.

But it requires more diskspace and CPU than I have spare: they ask for 3GB of diskspace, 256M of ram, which was way too rich for the laptop I'd hoped to use to try it out. I did get their LiveCD option running on an old old Dell, and it didn't do too badly at that, but it refused to install, probably just running into memory limits.

But anyway, I have three copies left; to get one, you just have to figure out a way to get out to see me and it's yours for the having (while supplies last, after that, I'll just burn copies of my copy)