When I got mine however, it had a broadcom chipset, so I had months of futzing with it before I could get wireless working reliably. Fortunately Broadcom support has improved a lot since then.

The problem is that unless you roll your own hardware, you generally have no idea what mobo, chipset, video, etc you are going to get if you go with a big name box…

IMO that's one of the advantages of Apple – they don't just shove whatever's cheapest that week in the box, you get very consistent hardware from machine to machine…

Of course, that's possibly a user error thing on my part too.

Stuff that has worked for a while (i.e. for older models, I have a couple at home delegate to server) never broke. It's only recent models I had problem with, and with the less common or recently introduced components.

Suspend/resume was on again, off again, on again, off again, probably because the new Intel chipset. So while the cycles were very quick, over the course of a year you get the same down time as Vista.

It was definitely worse than OS X, which just works, but Apple doesn't give you much of choice in hardware, and I did exercise that right when picking a PC to run Linux.

Overall, I like the shorter release cycle for core stuff. You can also build a system and keep it the same forever, no annoying critical update warnings. XP and OS X seem to have a lot of those, and you always wonder how important they really are.

But then some updates would break sound, or resume (other updates would break suspend), or the fn keys would stop working, something would go wrong and only get fixed a few releases later.

So while things get fixed really quick, they also get broken again (and again) that overall I think I was worse off than waiting longer on a non-regressing release cycle.

Even now, it's a bit cranky about changing resolutions.

OS X, no problems at all with the laptop screen plus a monitor, even better than XP, which always reset itself when I rebooted, probably a DVI/VGA thing.

So, some things are very frustrating, while others just work. I hadn't used Linux since Red Hat in 99 so this was a huge improvement for me. I love Ubuntu.

That being said, it is true that Ubuntu is getting closer and closer to the point where you don't need to mess about too much. but it still has a long way to go.

Just one small example – external monitors. I can plug my mbp into an external monitor, and after a moment my desktop automatically grows to include the new monitor, and I can continue working. it almost always guesses the right resolution, and it's easy to tell it the orientation, and it remembers the orientation and resolution if I connect to a similar monitor later.

With Linux (Ubuntu 7.10 at least), the only approach I've found that works is to edit the Xorg.conf file to have configurations and layouts for all my monitors – and then I have to kill my X session and start a new X session manually with the correct layout. Not my idea of 'usable'.

Cheers

Tim…

A friend of mine is planning to buy a new Mini and hook it to his 1080p 50″ LCD TV as a monitor. Should be awesome. I'm very happy with my 2nd generation Macbook, the white one. I upgraded the memory aftermarket, paying a quarter of what they wanted installed by Apple. It does everything I need, with a few exceptions.

My Dell is way faster running VMs on Ubuntu than it was running them on XP.

Good point about h/w, supporting more kinds does mean exponentially more driver work.

After the latest move, I'm trying to stay more cloud/backup/VM centric to ensure that I can lose the box and still be fine.