Over the past 12-18 months I've been playing with Linux: Ubuntu, Fedora, PCLInuxOS and PCUserOS ( A distro created by PCUser magazine based on ubuntu but using xfce).
No Linux distro I have tried has quite the ease-of-use, hardware support or reliability that my XPPro machine does (18 months and not one blue screen).
All Linux distro's I have used have exhibited some quirky behavior eg screen settings change on their own every time I boot, dial-up not working, selecting the firewall to start on boot but it never does and has to be manually started every time, install a 300 k emulator and have a non bootable system...
I appreciate that this may just be my system but go on the forums and have a look at the number and type of support questions: many problems are serious and a novice would never fix them, some are simple but require you to jump through hoops to get right.
I thought PCLinuxOS was the best distro I tried, until I realized they use a "rolling upgrade": as soon as anything in the repos has a new version, you can install it. Great except that that new thing may need to install several or even hundreds of megabytes of other updates to other things, some of which haven't been tested to work with each other. You could, like I did, end up with a non-usable system because you just installed a 300k emulator, which installed 100 meg of "updates" that forgot to install a 55 k library that meant your GUI wouldn't come up. Try then finding the problem as to why your computer no longer starts..
Media center funtionality is another Linux no-go zone: I did the mythTV thing and it took me nearly 6 weeks of searching, trial and error, reading copious documentation to set up. In XPPro,I downloaded mediaportal,installed some add-ons, rebooted. I can schedule, watch, record HD TV, burn to DVD, playback DVD's from a great GUI, play NES, SNES, N64, PSone, Megadrive, Amiga games, launch PC games, all via HDMI on 42" plasma. Total set-up time: under 3 hours.
Windows gets bagged for all the spyware and viruses, as if their existence is Microsoft's fault. These things exist because 98% of computers use windows, and therefore the writers of malware have a huge incentive to write malware for windows as opposed to Linux Or MacOS, both of which are not immune to malware either.
Don't get me wrong: Linux is very good for a free OS, but its not a Windows replacement for the average user, yet.
