Boot Ubuntu...

Well, finally wiped the hard drive on my main machine, partitioned it off, and tried to setup the dual boot Windows XP and Linux Ubuntu. And while I realize I'm a newb that doesn't know what he's doing in Ubuntu, my first impression is not exactly a good one. I formatted and created 2 partitions, and got Windows installed no problem. Then I threw in the Ubuntu CD and booted it up. Went through the install stuff, and thought it wasn't too bad. Then I hit the infernal paritions section. I wound up circling that particular roundabout for a while till I did some forum help searching online and got some usable advice from another newb that had posted. About the only way it would go and make any sense was to delete the partion I had setup for it, back out 3 screen, and wade back in selecting to install on the largest continuous free space. It finally took over from there and did what it had to do. How was I to know you need 5 partions to install Ubuntu? (slightly exaggerated, but to a newbie, the prompts on the screen made no sense whatsoever - I had a partition ready, install to it! You'd think that'd be simple enough.) So I finally got out of partition hell and got the dang thing installed. Remarkably, the dual boot thing setup on it's own, so I didn't have to fool around with that. Right away I had Ubuntu and Windows XP boot selection. At least that worked. So now that I finally had Ubuntu installed, I booted it up to play around with it. The boot up is actually slower than Windows, which surprised me, but it's not that much of a difference. Once loaded, it seems to have most of what you need to use - until you start to use it. On first impression, starting programs up is rather slow. In Windows, I fire up notepad and it's right there. In Ubuntu, I fire up gedit, and I actually had to wait a few seconds. Huh. Then came more bad news - I fired up the mail and Outlook clone called Evolution (I think) and it actually looked pretty good. Until it crashed during first use. What the? Ok, whatever, I started up Firefox 2.0 and started surfing and somehow managed to have that crash on me during its second use. What the hell? This is more unstable than XP at this rate. Started Firefox again after a reboot, and while it didn't crash, it was so sluggish trying to log into Blogger (the flash like login in part) that I gave up. (and yes, I installed Flash) Now, I don't know if it's Firefox 2.0, or Ubuntu, but on the whole, it's a helluva bad start to this little experiment. And I didn't even mention that I had wanted to use a different video card that I have here with a S-Video out and thought now would be a good time to swap it being I'm doing a rebuild. Well, with that card in, Ubuntu wouldn't even give me a screen to look at - I just got a black screen. So it obviously couldn't handle it, and I had to go back to my other one with an RCA jack out. Oh, and the sound volumne is half of what I get out of Windows even with all the settings I can find cranked. All this, and I haven't even tried to play a DVD or burn a disc or rip some MP3's yet. I can only imagine what that'll be like. I'm going to keep messing around with it, of course, but on a first look experience, I am so far not impressed at all. If Ubuntu is the beginners way into Linux and they're trying to convert Windows users with it, they gotta do better than this. Stay tuned, I'm sure I'll post more of this weird parrallel universe of computing I've stumbled into where things look like what you know how to use, but don't actually work that way...