Me and computers haven't been getting along very well recently. My laptop croaked, my grad student's laptop croaked, my desktop motherboard keeled over, the Windows XP install on the desktop harddrive only boots in old hardware, and a power supply on an important research machine bought the farm. Sigh!
In any event, I rescued the Windows XP drive, and plugged it into an older unused machine. Meanwhile, having had enough of XP for a while, I installed Ubuntu Linux on the old machine's disk. Wow! Desktop Linux has come a long way since I made my last pass at living in front of UNIX about 5 years ago. Note that I use a lot of UNIX machines, just haven't sat in front of one on a daily basis for a long time.
The installation was smooth as silk and in under an hour I had a nice graphical desktop that recognized all of my hardware. OpenOffice was installed by default, so I could deal with the inevitable MS Office attachments. Even after I added a cannabalized graphics card and some memory, post-install, the system was straightforwardly updated. There was even a couple of easy to install packages that supported accessing my iPod with no fuss.
Obviously, the true test will be continued use, so call me back in a month to see how things are going. And I still believe MacOS X is the best solution for us UNIX heads who don't want to think hard about a GUI and professional office applications. However, Ubuntu, and I have to believe a number of other Linux distributions, are well past the bleeding edge stage now. This is especially important for disadvantaged or underfunded groups who might be stretching their computing budget by buying or receiving two generation old equipment.