On another note I installed the xfce-desktop package and have been running that for a day or so and it seems to work great. Doesn’t have all the eye candy that KDE 4.2 does but I’d runs much faster.

XFCE has its place, its pretty stripped down though, not many people i know like it or prefer it, usually they use it out of necessity; but if you want a simple interface that’s fast, its perfect!

I’ve been very tempted to try Xubuntu. I’m currently running the latest version of Kubuntu with KDE 4.2 but unfortunately there’s some video card issues I’m having. I’m not the biggest fan of Gnome so Xubuntu might be something to try.

Windows is just easier to use since its the only thing supported at work, so i spend 8 hours a day using windows and very little time at home on the computer so i just use it to get stuff done, not play around and try things anymore…

I hear you though, so many options with Linux/Unix, can practically run any type of system with a version of Linux depending on your needs. We had an old Pentium II 400MHz 64MB laptop that had Win98 on it, only supported ie5 properly, all the software was very dated. So, i tossed in another 128MB of ram (total of 192MB, still useless for a modern varient of windows) and installed Xubuntu (similar to Ubuntu but with XFCE desktop instead of gnome) It works great! supports the latest version of firefox, its great for email, web browsing, chatting online, watching youtube. Essentially, it does everything that the majority of the computer users out there use their computers for. my brother now uses it when he doesn’t want to lug around his gaming rig…

the Linux feature of using text based config files is awesome! windows needs tricky registry hacks which can really mess up your system if done wrong, Linux you can simply swap out the config files if you’ve messed them up and you’re good to go! i’ve mainly used this for setting up stereoscopic 3D graphics with nVidia Quadro cards in SUSE, the operating system with the best stereoscopic support (oh ya, nVidia drivers work in Linux, in windows, there’s always something broken in their drivers for their professional series of cards). You can enter a ‘modeline’ for the graphics parameters in the xorg.conf file, restart the x.org graphics engine (ctrl-alt-bksp i think) and your new settings are applied, if you get them wrong, back to command line and edit the modeline to fix it, no complex fixes to get it back up and running if it gets messed up!!

So personally I think i’m going back to Linux, probably Ubuntu Studio or SUSE for my main machine, my gaming machine will stay windows though, just easier… servers will remain freeBSD/ubuntu, although my new media server will likely be windows home server, supposed to be quite a solid OS, worth a try…