Well, here’s an interesting little tidbit. My home box is dual boot with Windows XP SP2 and Linux Ubuntu 8.04. My motherboard has been playing up recently so I got myself a new one, a Gigabyte GA-G31M-S2L. This is a budget board with a pretty plain-vanilla collection of peripherals.

After installing the board I chose to boot up Ubuntu first. I thought I’d probably need to install some drivers for the onboard audio, video and Gigabit Ethernet but no, it just worked! I was amazed. It would seem the days are gone when getting new hardware to work under Linux was a massive chore. I was so stunned I had to write a blog post about it. Even 3D acceleration worked immediately, no mess, no fuss.

Then I tried booting into Windows. Ha ha haha ha. Did it work straight up. Did it hell! I had to spend an hour mucking about with loading drivers and rebooting a million times.

Nowdays we have many cross-platform applications such as Open Office, GIMP, Firefox and so on. Add to this the increasing stability and simplicity of the Gnome desktop, Ubuntu is very much a serious competitor for Windows, not just some time in the future but right now.