I've been using OSX and Win 7 for the last several months but I was pleasantly surprised by how nice the experience in Ubuntu 10.10 has been.

On my laptop that runs it, I did not have to once manually configure anything. No command-line magic, no struggling to get random things working, zip. It all just worked.

The experience has been very fluid, with notifications floating down along the right side, update notifications from Synaptic, etc. I am not a Linux fanboy by any stretch, but for once it isn't completely off the mark to say that Linux is catching up in the consumer space.

I tested this notion out recently when a (non-tech) friend wanted to use my laptop for something and did not even realize that he was using Linux.