I have Ubuntu installed on VirtualBox, and use it occasionally for development purposes. I have to say linux has come a long way in general, which is encouraging. The fact that Ubuntu has become more user friendly is also a big plus, which means more people with less computer experience are willing to use it.

Oh, I should also point out that my wife quite happily uses our Ubuntu Laptop and she is far from a technical computer user. As soon as I had installed Skype she accepted it as the way we were going and we haven't looked back. Talking about package deployments, I have to say that the Ubuntu Software Centre makes it trivial to install applications based on what you require, and for anything more complex apt-get or custom builds tend to work well and are usually documented for Ubuntu specifically these days due to the large uptake of it as an OS.

I try so hard to like Linux... The closest I came was with Fedora (and Tiny Core Linux for a bit). Ubuntu actually wouldn't even install on my system - reached an unrecoverable error and froze every time, even after multiple attempts to repartition etc.

Even in Fedora, I had a hard time installing a lot of the applications I wanted to use from the internet - the package finder/manager was the only reliable place for installing anything and even that can be confusing for someone who doesn't exactly know what they need. The dependency checking is great, but the disconnect between a website (and its accompanying product descriptions) and it's package in the package manager can be confusing.

Fedora and a few of the IDE's I used were also extremely slow. Made my computer feel ancient. I was looking forward to a less bloated feeling and felt the opposite. Netbeans seemed like it was so busy trying to process its code completion that it couldn't keep up with my typing.

Frustrations with drivers, development tools, and compatibility issues sent me right back to Windows 7. Now I just have Fedora on an old scrap PC so that I can build for Linux. It certainly isn't a nightmare, and I enjoy it because it's "different", but I couldn't do my daily with Linux.

KUbuntu FTW!

I use it for work, and I find it very nice to use.

At home I use Windows &, partly because I paid for it with the laptop, partly because its a fine OS, and finally because some of the software I like to use doesn't run on Linux. I could find serviceable replacements for most of the software, but I might miss some of the games even though I play them very infrequently. I'd miss Visual Studio for C++ development though. But I think I could easily get by on just Ubuntu. I know I certainly miss the Unix command line when I'm on Windows 7 (I know you can download the utilities, but meh...).

My only negative experience has been in the past I've had issues with getting wireless cards to work. I can usually get them to work after fighting with ndiswrapper for half a day, but even then the authentication screens tended not to "just work". I'd have to manage it from the command line. This is more a driver/hardware problem though, you cannot exactly blame Linux/Ubuntu for the hoops they have to jump through to get a driver to work legally.

Though I must say the last time I installed Ubuntu on a machine with a wireless card it picked it up and connected to the network all by itself. I would hope this means that a lot of effort has gone into detecting and handling these problems.

I found it very impressive when I managed to squeeze the then current version of Ubuntu server onto a P120 with 48 Megabytes of RAM and less than 5 Gigs of disk space (about 3 years ago). It randomly dies from time to time, but I suspect that is the geriatric hardware faulting or overheating or something. I use it as a remote SVN server mostly, and it does the job admirably while it is alive.

My only negative experience has been in the past I've had issues with getting wireless cards to work

I used to have a so called Fritz! USB WLAN stick (from back when I used windows) which was tad clumsy through ndiswrapper. I later bought linux friendly hardware, and with Ubuntu and some other distros, it couldn't be easier to configure wlan access. In fact I ran Ubuntu live, clicked on wlan configuration at the top, typed in my access data, and could browse, without having to go to CLI or even installing drivers. Everything was built in and as intuitive as it can get.

Dunno Windows 7, but Ubuntu (+ some others) make WLAN far easier to configure than on Windows<7, if you have the right hardware. Literally 5 minutes (mostly depends on DVD ROM speed) from pressing the boot button to surfing the internet on a virgin machine can't lie.

My only negative experience has been in the past I've had issues with getting wireless cards to work. I can usually get them to work after fighting with ndiswrapper for half a day, but even then the authentication screens tended not to "just work". I'd have to manage it from the command line. This is more a driver/hardware problem though, you cannot exactly blame Linux/Ubuntu for the hoops they have to jump through to get a driver to work legally.

This has pretty much been solved now as the last major wireless manufacturer (broadcom) has released open drivers (included in all new kernels so their cards work out of the box) and even joined the Linux Foundation, some manufacturers require proprietary drivers but Ubuntu handles these more or less automatically (you just need to press the yes button when it asks you if you want to use those drivers)

Overall the success of Linux on the embedded market has greatly improved hardware support, the main problem areas today are graphicscards (amd and nvidia are a bit of a pain since the proprietary drivers have to be re-installed after a kernel update and amd has way too short support cycles) and printers/scanners (While most work out of the box or have drivers available many will lack alot of advanced features available in the Windows drivers).

Personally i still like Ubuntu, but right now i only run it in a VM for development purposes (I run debian on 2 machines though). If you've allready payed for a windows license i don't think there is any compelling reason to switch and dualbooting is imo too much of a hassle.