No, seriously. What's the advantage to Ubuntu or any of this stuff? It seems like a helluva lot of work. If you like that sort of thing, fine, but otherwise? Just hatred of Redmond and/or Cupertino?
.........
At this point, it's only a helluva lot of work if you want it to be.
Some personal Linux history...
I've done a full tour of duty with the hard way. I reported to the Slackware forwarding operating base many years ago and eagerly transferred to Knoppix, Suse, CentOS, Red Hat (before the enterprise days) and Fedora.
I've traded fire with stubborn drivers, been beaten to submission by NDIS wrapper and tumbled, like a mocha Alice, down a rabbit hole made of configuration files.
Then, years ago, just as I was about to toss it all in (I think it was when making a simple print job go turned into a project as complex as building a fusion reactor) a friendly gent came strolling into view.
'Ubuntu!' He shouted. 'Come get your freshly baked Ubuntu!' Right, another distro, I thought. But like a Bunny Ranch customer who can't get enough of that funky stuff I pointed my weary browser towards ubuntu.org and downloaded.
...
Fast forward to today.
I'm typing this from a Dell XPS M1530.
It's running Ubuntu 8.04 long term support (or LTS, as insiders say). The OS was installed and configured by Dell. Driver support is 100% solid. The connection to my home network is wireless which also works without fail. The machine, overall, works without a hitch. If I need to use Win32 or 64 (and often, I do) I launch the Virtual Box virtual machines (VM) hosted by my Dell. There are two VMs: one is WinXP, the other Windows 7.
The M1530 was configured with 4 GB of RAM, a Intel Core Duo 2 T6600 and a 320 GB HDD. By choosing Ubuntu instead of Windows Vista (or, the preferred down/upgrade to WinXP Pro) I saved a few hundred dollars off the price.
The machine's delivered cost was just under a thousand dollars.
...
Chuck's problems -- which make Ubuntu look like a hell of config this and cat that write a script to do the other -- are, as Ravi and Bill wrote, due to the age of the version he's running, the way he's configured it and (I'll cheekily add) the fact that he's a two fisted, roll up your sleeves, take the tough road old bird who came of age in the early atomic age.
It's really not that hard anymore. Unless that sort of thing is your mug of mojito.
.d.