I spent the last three days converting my xps dell laptop from vista to ubuntu 8.10.
I had to spend over 25 hours to get it to work properly.
Things like trying to figure out how to make my dual monitor system work with only one of them rotated 90 degrees.
It took so much searching and reading to make sure that what I was doing was not going to mess up everything else up to the point.
I am no novice computer user.
The task of getting ubuntu to run right is not trivial.
Linux advocates should pay attention to the difficulties of installing and maintaining a Linux system in a modern computing environment instead of patting themselves on the back because Windows does some things worse. I gave up the first few times I tried to install Ubuntu. When I finally got it running I was unemployed and had the time to wrestle with it.
I purged my dell laptop of xp and installed ubuntu over it. Love everything about it except the loss of wireless. It even gave me 9 extra gigs on my hard disk, 6 more than the advertised disk space!
If the linux community could step it up on the driver front for wireless cards it would be a beautiful thing.
it really depends. my last install was awesome. It's really good at figuring out the partitioning for you. (I did a dual-boot, and I thought I'd have to manually partition but didn't because it knew what it was doing.)
The actual install is fast and comprehensive. It sets up a lot for you. I remember having to install X on Free BSD not that long ago (maybe 5 years).
I've had good luck with wifi cards, but that is still sometimes an issue.
25 hours seems like a really long time (Unless you're counting hours of ignoring it while it updates and installs all the programs you pick. That is pretty slow.)
I'm not sure what you were doing, but I've set it up on several laptops and desktops and never had to spend more than 2ish hours of my time getting it setup. (Maybe a little more to install and configure everything.)
