[Bloody Sam Roberts]

I just got done installing and testing Ubuntu Feisty Fawn on my Dell laptop.

I'm not thrilled with certain aspects of it so I'm wiping it and will be loading Simply Mepis 6.5.0.2 next week.

Among the things that I didn't like was the whole "nanny-distro" thing where root access is not granted to any account unless using sudo. I was able to give root a password and tell Ubuntu to let root login...but still...kind of a pain. It also was a struggle to get it to use WPA for my wireless....after I spent an hour getting my Broadcom mini-PCI board to work.
I did like the apps that came with it and the Add/Remove wizard was quite nice as well.

All in all I think this is a good move by Dell. Ubuntu won't be as easy for some as an OEM Winders install...but it will expose it to a LOT more folks.

[bigdcaldavis]

I have Feisty on my 2-year-old laptop, and it runs great. I have Compiz and Beryl installed, and surprisingly my laptop runs Compiz and Beryl without any significant performance loss, although it seems Compiz is less memory-hogging. But everything works. I downloaded Sun Java 6 JRE last night via Synaptics without having to add an extra repository or something like Automatix or EasyUbuntu.

[goldstategop]

The point of a Linux certified computer means everything should work perfectly without needing to fiddle around with any settings. Linux IS compatible with broadband. On older computers, you need to download and install ndiswrapper to make your wireless card work. On a Linux certified computer you can just set up your Internet connection immediately.