[ygolo]

I've used both for years. My home system is now exclusively XP. But when I get enough cash that I consider discressionary, not earmarked for other things, my next will likely be some Linux variant. I may be dating myself, but the last time I used linux for my home system was a Mandrake install dual-booting with Windows 98. Before that I used slackware, and Windows 95.

I kind-of agree with you. I have lost my patience with sys-admin activities. I was never very good, I just followed directions and they generally worked. But when they don't work, I am not really sure how to debug (other than trying various versions of modules, and searching for FAQs, manuals and User Guides).

For school, I had to deal with Ubuntu in two different occasions.

Once was to attempt to set-up an Ubuntu Virtual Machine on my laptop, and I couldn't figure how to give the virtual machine acess to the network through my firewall. Time was an issue, so I had to gain access to the code for the class in a different way.

The second-time was when I was trying to get the CUDA SDK to run on Ubuntu runing on a project partner's Shuttle PC with an nVidia 8600 GTS card. Beyond the very simple examples in the SDK, I kept getting crashes--suspect something about configuring video memory. After fooling with the drivers (both CUDA versions and 8600 driver versions) for a while, I got into a state where the card was only being recognized a generic, and not even as an nVidia card!! Anyway, we were running out of time, and we could access to CUDA runs in a different way.