Every once in a while, I decide to try to use Linux as my main desktop OS at home. I cannot use it on my work laptop for obvious reasons.

So I decided to try Ubuntu. I already played with Ubuntu in VMWare Workstation and I kinda liked it. I made an image of my Windows XP desktop machine to revert back to it if needed. I used Norton Ghost for that and backed up my drives to a 200GB USB hard disk.

Needless to say, five days later, I am typing this on my Windows XP machine at home. Why? Well, the same thing as the years before: lacking support for hardware. By the way, restoring images with the Norton Ghost bootable CD works really well. :-)

My home machine has a D-Link wireless card based on the acx111 chipset. Although Ubuntu comes with a driver for that one, it does not work very well. After a while, I got the wireless card to work fine (I thought), but some time later it just stopped. I unloaded and loaded the driver and then it worked again. Sorry, but I do not want to spend days to get a stupid piece of hardware to work especially since it works like a charm in Windows XP.

I decided to compile a driver using the instructions found at http://acx100.sourceforge.net/. I also used http://www.houseofcraig.net/acx100_howto.php. That made it work a little bit better but I lost the connection to the access point once in a while.

Second problem: I have an NVIDIA Geforce 6200 card, a cheap budget card. I don't play games that much so I don't need anything fancy. Although Ubuntu supports that, the support is not as good as in Windows XP. I also had some problems with large parts of the screen turning red and pink. And I hadn't been drinking. I also think that the rendering of fonts and graphics in general is not up to standards (and Ubuntu actually has quite some improvements in that area).

To cut the story short, using Linux as a desktop does not quite do it for me. It is just too much of a hassle to get everything to work. I also don't want to bother with having to install library X to get program Y to work etc... I like Linux for everything that is in the server field, but the desktop? Naah, don't think so.