Any ubuntu users out there?

I had her buy a Dell with it pre-loaded. It had some driver problems right out of the box with the monitor. The reason I bought from Dell in the first place was to avoid driver problems. After banging my head on the wall for a few hours and doing research, I got the proper video driver installed and working (and I am very comfortable working with the command line and works with a Debian linux distribution, which Ubuntu is built on).

Once that issue was cleared up though, no problems at all. She uses it to get on the net and check email and play an occasional flash-based word game on a website.

I would not recommend it for professional work as not enough applications will run on it. If you've got some skills, maybe you can check out WINE which emulate Windows and lets you run some apps on it.

I had a similar experience -- needed to do a little fiddling at the outset (the great thing is I could get all the tech help I needed by googling my problems). Since then, no problems and many things -- adding software, for example, seem much easier.

Which applications do need for which the linux substitutes are not sufficient?

I had been using dreamweaver, but am getting used to Bluefish and Quanta Plus. The ease of doing ftp straight from the Places menu is great, too. (Maybe I could have done that in Windows, but I didn't know how.)

Mainly, though, I like the idea of helping to propagate open source.