Recently, I stumbled upon a this article, and from there went on to reading this, and I thought, how about giving Linux another try.
I installed debian on a spare 30 GB partition on my notebook, just to try it out; turns out all my complaints from previous endeavours (Ubuntu 9.04, Fedora, Mandrake) are now void. Anything I need is available and works, flawlessly even:

• wireless

• internet connection through my cellphone

• firefox with all my favourite plugins

• netbeans (with C/C++, java, and php platforms)

• mysql, php, apache, and the whole unix stack

• mercurial (for my newer projects) and subversion (for the older ones that I'm too lazy to migrate)

• connecting to the VPN at work and RDP-ing into my development workstation (running vista :-P)

• standby

I don't have Visual Studio, obviously, but I don't use it much for personal projects anyway.

And apparently, even my US122L audio interface is now supported, although I haven't tried it out yet.

Except a few minor roadblocks, everything went surprisingly smooth.

As a result, I hardly ever boot into windows now - I think I may have spent about 15 minutes in windows grand total during the last two weeks. Windows feels very dirty now, and at work, I get frustrated more easily when Vista decides it is time to have me waiting... again.

What about your graphics driver? Did you have to risk installing nvidias junk and have that awful feeling when you cant boot into your OS. I had that happen on fedora and could not figure out a way to "unblacklist" my nouveau driver, hence could not start my OS. I reinstalled everything just for kicks, yay!

I tried to update to fedora 13 and during the installation the whole thing stalled and became unresponsive. I tried to reboot, the OS went nogo at the last screen so I tried fsck which ruined my directories even further, so I lost all my data (no backups) and reinstalled fedora 13. I didnt lose anything important though.

I've been using Ubuntu 10 ever since my NVIDIA RAID died on Windows. (Actually I think one of my drives is bad, because I get scary messages on boot-up with my Linux RAID.)

The only thing I miss from Windows is flawless Flash support, but Ubuntu's is good enough. Okay, I also miss MSVC, but I rarely write in C/C++, so I don't really care about that.

But for my world of non-stop !@#$#@!$ web development, Ubuntu is way nicer than Windows.

You might enjoy kdevelop4. I've loathed IDEs for a long time, but kdevelop4 is the first one I don't hate. It has some bugs, but nothing serious, it just makes the auto complete "intelicrap" stuff a little finicky sometimes. At most its a little annoying, but it works more often than not, and saves me a heck of a lot of typing.

Also welcome to the wonderful world of "Shit that just works"(tm) and Debian.

A piece of advice wrt debian though. Stay away from sid/unstable unless you want to fight with the package manager from time to time. Sometimes all you can do is wait for problems to sort themselves out, and others, you have to force remove a package you think you need, just to convince apt-get/aptitude to un-bork itself. (just install it again after the updates its trying to do)

So, how is ALGOL 68 treating you?

ALGOL doesn't come with the default install (for my favorite distro anyway). Just C, C++, Java, Python, Clisp, Jscript, several assemblers, on and on and on. How many of those come with the Windows installation disk again?

Does kdevelop4 support code refactoring (at least identifier renaming)? I use C::B right now and I lack this ability. Also the autocomplete is a little finicky as well. On the other hand I'm quite satisfied. I've also seen latest NetBeans and it looks they've managed to get rid of that horrid Java widget look so now it blends better with the environment. Something one can't say about KDE4 look, which looks amateur and uncanny in my opinion.

All in all I'm quite satisfied with Ubuntu 10.04 at the moment. Two thing still bug me:

• Suspend/hibernate issues - tree suspends in a row = need for a hard reset.

• ATI driver issues - OpenGL apps randomly kill driver which then takes whole system as a consequence. I was quite pleased to see it crash in the same manner even under Windows Vista during Call of Duty 2.

I'd wait for 14. I remember netbeans giving me trouble just before I tried to upgrade 12->13 and I basically typed some command to skip them.

I should have said there's no practical way for me to make it bigger the way my disk is organized. I'd have to move a lot of stuff around or do some weird voodoo magic or something...

I felt antsy between the time the old uninterruptible power supply died and the day I saved enough to buy a new one. Of course, disks themselves can fail, but that's possible anytime.

I'll probably look into that, because that's the thing C::B lacks and it's one hell of a pain in the...

While I'm using Gnome for quite a long time I prefer to use Kate for large text editing and small programming projects. Besides I use Amarok and for my taste it doesn't look nice (it's also on the screenshots from kdevelop4). I can't tell exactly but the weird roundness of the boxes and buttons etc is what really bothers me. It's probably more irrational hence I say it's my opinion. Sure Gnome isn't really super, but even my Vista installation is switched to W2k look.

Yep, I know. Unfortunatelly I don't have time to fiddle with the kernel code. Anyway I know that it happened during transition from Ubuntu 9.04 to 9.10 so I think a diff of the suspend code between kernels used in those respective distros could provide some clues.

Don't even tell me I hate that stupid driver, but I need it. I own Mobile Radeon HD3430, I need working 3D accel with GLSL1.1. Last time I checked the OSS radeon driver it was w/o 3D acceleration. At least judging from the inability to run desktop effects^[1] and framerate in glxgears.

I'm aware of the fact that the closed source driver could be source of various issues and hence I'm not whining on Linux forums. All in all it tends to lock up system on random occasions when some OpenGL application is running (kind of a fun to debug my semestral project...)

That must have been quite a while ago then. Netbeans has been looking pretty polished for the last few releases (I started using it at 6.4 IIRC, they're at 6.9 now). IMO, Netbeans does a much better job at autocomplete than other IDEs I've used (Visual Studio mainly); they seem to have sorted out the whole multithreaded thing quite thoroughly - everything that can run in the background does, and the IDE remains responsive all the time. There's autocomplete in everything, even PHP and SQL, and obviously a good "rename" function which highlights the word you're changing everywhere as you type the new name. It'll even rename Java class files for you when you rename the class itself.

Somehow I get the impression that the Ubuntu team includes new versions of things more aggressively than the debian folks with their two-distros-ahead scheme (you know, testing becomes unstable becomes stable). Ubuntu seems to have a more marketing-aligned agenda too; their logo is more polished and a lot of work goes into rebranding and extending the look-and-feel of the desktop. Which probably fits their mission of bringing linux to the masses.

That's one of the nice things about laptops. They have a UPS built-in, sorta kinda.