I finished my ubuntu experiment today and went back and wiped my family computer and reinstalled Windows XP. It’s not that I didn’t have a good ubuntu experience, but it’s just my family kept wanting to install programs that only ran on Windows. I finally gave in when my daughter got a Barbie MP3 player for her birthday that only ran on Windows and my wife and I didn’t want her monopolizing our laptops to play with it.

In review here’s how our four months with Ubuntu went…

• Easy to do a basic install and update. Took some work to get my pci wifi card, but installing a wireless hp deskjet was easier on Ubuntu than windows.
• Everyone could sit down and use it without additional instruction– even my three year old.
• Did all the basic great– web browsing, opened word documents, spreadsheets, powerpoints.
• Ran all of the above much faster than Windows XP on my family computer with less than a gig of RAM.
• Free operating system and free software– even used GIMP to edit photos.