One or two weeks ago I afforded myself a new PCs (ordered only the components and built it myself). For the current time it's a rather new and powerful system, with a an Intel Core 2 Duo processor and a Geforce 8800 GT graphics card. The mainboard supports SATA, so I got a SATA harddisk and DVD drive, too.
The system itself works great, but software is where the troubles begin. What operating system should be installed on a brand-new PC? (Of course there was nothing pre-installed. I built it myself, remember?)
My first try was Windows XP as I wanted to test some games and graphic demos. Bad idea, XP doesn't like my hardware and crashes every second startup. Otherwise runs fine. I'll probably have to afford the time and money and switch to Vista.
It gets worse with free operating systems. After the Microsoft one ran just ok I tried my luck on FreeBSD 6.3. The fresh installed GNOME desktop hung on startup and I still don't know why. I reformated the partition and wanted Ubuntu 7.10 next, but the standard installation process (LiveCD) died just after copying the files.
After all this I had a thought. With my powerful processor it should be possible to run Gentoo without getting mad. Seems I was wrong. The initial installation process took me two days or so. Another two days for installing (that is compiling) my favourite programs. And, one week later, another day for the first system update (recompiling ~40% of everything). After that, glibc decided to not work anymore and my Gentoo was dead. Note to myself: Gentoo sucks.
Today I gave Ubuntu another try. This time with a minimal CD and a console install. Guess what, it worked! Took me only a couple hours to get 3D acceleration and the Ubuntu graphical desktop to work. Runs perfecly now (I'm posting this from Ubuntu).
Another thing: I'm currently running a pre-release of Firefox 3.0. Be sure to upgrade once it gets out. While Firefox 2.0 was a major stepback, Firefox 3.0 is a huge improvement in almost every aspect.