Ubuntu - a positive experience

I installed Ubuntu x64 on my backup drive, and the experience has been really positive. I had a bit of trouble getting the latest NVIDIA drivers to install, and there were conflicting solutions on the Web, but all was right in the end. I can't believe how fast it loads and runs. It now takes over two minutes for me to open Outlook, so instantaneity from Thunderbird was really refreshing. Loading a dissertation in OpenOffice took half a second, and there was no delay when paging through it. (I have more than enough memory, so Word swapping is really unacceptable.) And the OpenGL screensavers are working twice as fast as in Windows; that's really important. :-)

The only things preventing me from using this as my primary system are that the revision tracking in OpenOffice needs to be one level above where it is now, and there is the occasional formatting glitch when importing Word documents. Oh, and there's no Flash or Helix for x64, let alone iTunes for Linux xanything. I think the Helix people have burnt out.

It's nice to have something good to report, for once.