Kubuntu has been very good to me. All of the recent installs I've done have worked very well with minimal fussing around (sometimes I have to re-get the DHCP address just after rebooting, but that's about it), but I've not yet tried to restore /home or anything else into a fresh install.

The tools for installing new apps have worked very well and I appreciate being able to choose from 25k-some-odd applications with just a click.

But there are some things that I haven't been able to work out in my occasional searching and in the time I've been willing to spend:

1) I did something to Kubuntu on my Fujitsu P7120D such that the VGA bootup screen is now much smaller than it was originally. Probably something to do with trying to enable 1280x800 or whatever "non-standard" full screen the P7120D screen is in X.

2) Sleep/Hibernate/whatever doesn't work out of the box with the P7120D - with the lid closed, the system doesn't go into a sleep mode. It got hot enough once to melt the plastic mouse buttons at one point (it doesn't have a fan).

3) Firefox will regularly close up and die without any explanation when refreshing tabs with the Adobe Flash player (not the latest) enabled on all of my laptops with Kubuntu. I'm sure it's something to do with me because I would think people would be screaming bloody murder if it was common, but it's annoying. Remembering to disable Flash before refreshing all the tabs is annoying.

4) I don't understand enough about the file system permissions, etc., and I have no backup strategy for Linux. It's a learning issue for me obviously, but the benefit for learning that stuff doesn't seem to be worth the investment at this point.

5) I was bitten recently when an important Excel 97 spreadsheet ended up being changed in an obscure way such that it would crash Excel 2007 on Vista. (I eventually narrowed it down to a particular tab, but was unable to find the offending cell/graph/whatever.) This started sometime after I made some changes to it with OpenOffice 2.4. It might have been a coincidence, and the changes were most likely made with OO on Win2k, but it made me nervous. For critical stuff, I need to be able to use Office97 or later (and yes, much of it works on Wine).

At the moment, the benefit in using Linux on my laptops just doesn't seem to be there. I recognize that I need to invest the time for the future (when I eventually get a new machine without XP), but it's not worth it to me at the moment.

Another thing that's bothering me is after lots of fits and starts I managed to get a MythBuntu box working. But when I went back to it a few weeks later to actually see about scheduling some programs to record - you know, to actually start using it - I seemingly ended back where I started. I get a blank screen and the keyboard becomes unresponsive when I tell it I want to "Watch TV". I don't know whether I'm being bitten by the mysterious "2 GB backup of empty libraries" problem I had earlier, or something else. But it's annoying. So, I'm probably going to have to start over with a fresh install of that. :-(

I'm the first to admit that I am flailing around on some of these problems, and a few hours of dedicated searching and reading would probably take care of some/many of them. Trouble is, I've got eleventy-seven irons in the fire and it's difficult to spend the time.

So, dedicated partitions for Linux that get in the way (by reducing available storage for work files, etc.) are going to have to wait for a while.

I hope this explains a little better where I'm coming from. :-)

Cheers,
Scott.