Linux is fine for bread an butter ie web/comms/ and office for an average user.
If you dabble in 2D photo manipulation, 3D, video editing, well, on Linux that can be a painful experience. And games..
It depends. You can run a fair wedge of software designed for Windows via Wine these days.
If what you want is Ubuntu's software centre, installation is fine. If not, its a pain. Eg I muck about with emulation SNES, N64. Even Instaling the latest versions that aren't in the Ubuntu software centre is a pain in the arse, compared with the Win versions.
If you want up to date releases, you could download the source and compile it yourself. Generally only stuff that has been found to be reasonably stable will make its way into regular repositories.
Stability wise, XP Pro rarely crashed, Vista hasn't-at all- and neither has my Win 7 laptop. It hasn't been my experience that Win is any less stable than Ubuntu.
Yeah, as long as you look after it, any reasonably modern OS tends to be fine in that regard. In my experience, most people have problems with Windows due to naivety.
As for security, I'm not convinced that Ubuntu is any more secure per se, just that less time and man hours is devoted to exploiting its holes.
Actually, exploiting most linux systems is fairly easy, provided you are sat at the machine. What sets it apart from Windows is that it's a lot harder to exploit remotely, and that's the type of exploit most users will unfortunately be exposed to at some time.
And there must be holes, else why are the security updates being released periodically for it?
The sort of vulnerabilities that are routinely found and fixed tend to be things like potential buffer overflow exploits. Sometimes the context in which the vulnerable code is called actually renders the vulnerability "unreachable" from where it is ultimately invoked since some sanity checking further up the chain blocks it, but regardless of whether or not it can be reached, if spotted it will be fixed and find it's way into a security update. This is basically one side effect of having a transparent development process.
I don't particularly like the Ubuntu (Gnome and KDE 4) look and feel either, and I don't think its as fast and efficient as its claimed. I think its the Windows of the Linux world; people use it because other people use it.
I wouldn't say it was that per se, but it has certainly gained a reputation for comparative ease of use. In itself is debatable, but there is now such a large community of users that whenever you do find a problem any google search will usually return a ubuntu specific discussion.
And i hate the "re-install after 18 months" release cycle, or go to LTS and possibly end up with a POS like 10.04 where i couldn't even get a mobile modem to work, even though it was fine in 9.04.
IMO MAndriva was the most polished Linux out there.
My recent 8.04 to 10.04 distribution upgrade was truly shocking, to be honest. Shocking that it went so well, that is. I was expecting a lot of pain, but the truth is, the biggest nuisance was the time it took to download the various updates/replacements for the 1400 odd packages I've accrued over time.
Anyhow, I suspect you aren't about to try it, but you might find Mint a better distribution for your hardware. It's an ubuntu derivative with a bit more emphasis on including more drivers and various proprietary components (that may be a better fit for any given bit of hardware) out of the box.
