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Comment by larrykubin | Hacker News Reader

A while back my wife bought a cheap Lenovo. They pre-installed a lot of crappy software and Vista. It ran painfully slow.

I formatted it and installed Ubuntu 9 and she's been computing happily ever since. Here's what she cares about:

1) Does it run relatively fast? Is it stable? Is there a noticeable delay because I am waiting for some unnecessary GUI special effects?

2) Does it run Firefox? Can I read reddit, watch videos on YouTube/Hulu, and check my email?

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shrug

I'm using Vista as a Media Center PC on an ancient T43 Thinkpad maxed out to a whopping 1.5G RAM. With all the GUI nonsense effects turned off, it runs just fine. Seems about the same as XP. And the Media Center is quite good. (Myth wasn't an option since there were no Linux drivers for my capture card, but I like the Media Center interface better anyway)

"Seems about the same as XP."

Not exactly a great reason to upgrade.

Agreed. The Media Center is a lot better. Otherwise I wouldn't have bothered.

This is the big part of Microsoft's Vista problem: without software which uses the many system-level improvements, users don't see a benefit. As long as developers are targeting XP that's not going to change - it'd probably be worth it for them simply to give away free 7 upgrades at this point just to boost demand.

Does flash run well on 32-bit Ubuntu nowadays? I have a hard time with it on my 64-bit PC. Ubuntu and Hulu didn't play nice last I checked.

It works fine on firefox with 32bit ubuntu.

I've not had a problem with Flash on Linux in the past 6 years or so.

Yea, same here until I did this:

http://riteshm.blogspot.com/2009/05/fullscreen-flash-problem...

[edit: specifically it jerked in fullscreen]

How does it handle printer, camera, other devices requiring drivers?

Ubuntu handles older devices better than Vista, for the most part.

Most newer ones are fine, too. I installed Ubuntu on my mother's laptop and she's been very happy. Her camera works fine, just plug it in and it works. I've not had any issues installing printers.

They had a GPS device they wanted to use, and that didn't work since the driver is very specific and it's not very common. For most purposes, though, it's quite easy to set up.

Even though it's gotten a little better in recent years (presumably because more vendors are releasing Linux drivers), the trick is really to make sure whatever device you want to use is Linux-compatible before you get it.

Following that rule, I haven't had any problems recently, running Linux on a machine that doesn't come with it pre-installed.

That's very true. And here I am, such a dunce for buying a scanner without checking for compatibility.

I figured Canon would be up to speed by now, but unfortunately not so. Fortunately scanners are cheap. No more Canon for me.

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