There have been several passing references to Ubuntu in comments recently, so I thought I'd ask the question: what have people's experiences been?
I've been running Hoary on my work box, and Warty on my old-ish Dell laptop at home. Both have been fine, and work out of the box during install. (Anyone remember the pain of installing Debian Potato back in the days?)
About the only gripe I have is that the freeze policy on stable means the distro gets out of date quickly - so that useful packages tend to have old versions. The most annoying example for me is R, which in Warty is 1.9, whereas current is 2.1. The effect of being a major release behind is rather painful.
Comments
This from Alf Eaton on Ubuntu
This from Alf Eaton on Ubuntu: certainly the closest Linux experience to OS X that I've had. That pretty much sums up my experience so far with Ubuntu. Most of the tools I use regularly on Linux are there by default which is also nice.
Distro freezes are very Debian and I've learnt to live with them, either by installing software from source, using unstable or more recently apt pinning (thanks dopey!).
As for R, self abuse is not really my thing...