I've been hearing a lot of good things about Ubuntu Linux for a while now.
I'm a debian boy and have been for years (I can't remember whether it was bo, rexx or buzz that I first installed… whichever was earliest). I am plenty happy with my etch box, and have no problem keeping up with the various packages, etc directly using apt-cache and apt-get; however I share the PCs at home with my wife and son and have recently started wondering whether the Debian based Ubuntu distro was worth a shot.
I've done two installs of Dapper (Ubuntu 6.06) now, both under vmware (workstation and server). The workstation install I did first was an absolute breeze; I was thoroughly impressed both with the ease of install and the default selection of desktop packages. Blimey, I thought, the hype's true. And mostly it is. I found way they have tuned GNOME gives a similar feel to MacOS X.
I was running the first test on my work PC (left it installing in the background while working in my etch vm). Once it finished the install I could more or less switch everything straight over. I found that a few packages I use were a bugger to find (pretty old git-core and no cogito, found it with some tweaking of the active repositories). Found that the evolution and nautilus installs were a breeze for working with the corporate windows network.
Installing on my home etch box under a vmware server vm was trickier, didn't realise the memory requirements of the desktop live cd. The 128M VM I was running under just wasn't up to the job. Eventually after some googling I found that I needed the alternative CD, and the text based install went fine.
I now need to do some serious thinking. I've been a debian evangelist for years; I think it was in 97 when I suggested to the boss that the slackware distro wasn't up to much and we should look for a change. He couldn't get his head around dselect, but I immediately saw the power of the strong dependency tracking in the deb package format and was hooked. Now I'm seriously considering moving my primary home pc away from Debian. Although at least it's still a distro based around deb and apt suite at its core.
Going to be away from the computers for the next week at my grandad's place in Wales. I'll use the time to consider the options very carefully.