Replies

Your experience pretty closely matches mine. I really want Linux to be a viable alternative to Windows. I think every product does much better with strong competition. But Linux just ain't it yet.

I had to go through three different "live" CD distros before I could find one that would even run at all on my machine. (Slax finally fit the bill. Works nicely. But you have to do a bit of command-line typing before it starts into a GUI.)

I have very mainstream hardware. (ECS motherboard with nVidia nForce chipset, AMD Athlon XP CPU, 1.5 GB RAM, nVidia GeForce 7600 graphics on AGP, IDE hard disk, DVD ROM, Multi-DVD RW, USB, etc. etc..)

The hangup was usually on the graphics, of all things! I mean, come on people! You can't get much more standard on a PC than an nVidia graphics chip. But over and over again, X (or Gnome, or KDE) would tweak out and splatter my screen with garbage.

Windows has been successfully detecting correct resolutions and refresh rates for graphics for years now. Couldn't someone in the FOSS/Gnu/Linux world figure that out too?