Ubuntu

Typing this on one of the pre-release versions of Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon. It ran nicely enough on some other machines, so I took the slightly drastic step of dropping a spare 20gb hard drive into my main Dell Precision 450 and installing it on there. It installed cleanly but then gave me a boot error on restart. This caused a huge outbreak of swearing as I couldn't even get back into the Win2k install. But then I realised the 2nd hard drive was disabled in the BIOS which GRUB didn't like at all. Now it works.

I've even got it working with the Nvidia Quadro and dual monitors, though that took some fiddling. However for some reason it installed a non-SMP aware kernel so the second processor isn't working yet. Selecting an alternate kernel got the second processor working but borked the graphics. Even with one processor though, it seems a heck of a lot faster than Windows 2000.

And for the first time EVER on Ubuntu, at least for me, Firefox downloaded and installed the Flash plugin all by itself, without any intervention.

Further experimentation will be needed, I think, once it's finished downloading the 500mb of updates it wants.