I have been using Ubuntu Linux for the past year now and thought I'd share my experiences.
I started with 11.04 which is not a long term release. While it was supported, it ran well. I was able to play the computer games I loved using WINE. The only problem I had was my printer (Magicolor 2400) was a windows only printer. There was a half-working driver for it but graphics would print rather dark. It finally died though (I actually broke somethng trying to clear a jam. Oopsie!) and i bought an HP 1525N printer. Another color laser with Linux support. I have had no problems since printing.
I upgraded to 11.10 about a month ago when 11.04 fell out of support. 11.10 was buggy and Flash player was not working with a lot of sites, including some game and educational sites the kids use. Fortunatly, there is 12.04 Long Term Support (LTS) which was in the upgrade path for 11.10. So I upgraded again. 12.04 has a newer version of everything including WINE. My games still work. The only game I could not get to work was Field of Glory. I can run that in a VM of windows though so no problem there.
If you are tired of windows, here are some "gotcha's" that you should know about.
Printing. Make sure your printer has a driver in Ubuntu. If not, be prepared to either print from a VM, buy a new printer or write your own printer driver.
Ubuntu has a logical distribution scheme. The releases that come out in April of an even year are a long term support release. That is, they will continue to be patched for bugs and vulnerabilities for some time to come. the current long term release is 12.04. The next long term release is 14.04.
The desktop default load is Unity. I find this desktop to be garbage. However, you can load the Gnome desktop from the package manager. This is as easy as hitting "install". Then before you log in, there is a little drop down menu that shows the various desktops you can switch to. I use Gnome Classic.
I've had only 1 failure with WINE so far. Before you buy a game, you can make sure it runs under WINE by downloading the demo and running it on your PC. You can also go to winehq.com and check their database to see if anyone has had success with the game you are interested in. STEAM does run in Ubuntu under WINE. I have not used it too much but others have with varying degrees of success.
I found out the hard way about what video card to use with Ubuntu. NVIDIA based video cards are supported by the community. That is, the driver source code is open source. This means that the Ubuntu community CAN fix bugs. ATI cards do not have opensource code. It is up to AMD/ATI to fix any bugs. Sadly, they do no actively support Linux. I have an ATI card so I can speak to this first hand. The good news is that the drivers have been pretty solid. I have had no major problems.
Hope this helps some of you out there that are sick of Windows and want a low cost solution for a desktop OS.
John
