I was surprised that I spent nearly a year running Ubuntu on my desktop, netbook and laptops at home. Unfortunately for Ubuntu, I brought back an iPad from the US after my 7 week trip. The iPad immediately replaced my eeePC that ran Ubuntu on it. Once I bought the iPad, the poor eeePC never saw daylight again. Yes, I love Android but I fell in love with the iPad, I have not put it down since. For the first time in a long time, I could play games on a computer with the iPad. I enjoyed it.
Then back in February, I bought a Macbook Pro. It replaced my ageing Thinkpad T60 notebook. I also stopped using my desktop. Both were running Ubuntu.
Yes, I have some friends mocking me since I was very anti-Apple just a year ago. I hate to admit it, though, I really like running stable systems. Ubuntu was pretty stable, but not stable enough for me. On my desktop, I kept having problems with xorg and sound. Normally this would not be a problem but normally these problems accord when I was about to watch a dvd or listen to some music. I only had these problems with Ubuntu, never while running Arch Linux or Gentoo on my desktop.
Another death kill for Ubuntu with me was when I decided to use CentOS on my Linode VPS back in the US. I was going to use Ubuntu Server until Chris Dollmont scolded me. Chris is a Linux/Unix Guru in this part of the world. CentOS, as well as Scientific Linux, were both more secure than Ubuntu Server. Hence I started using a Red Hat environment more often. I was beginning to like it.
At work, I decided to replace Ubuntu Desktop with Fedora Core 14. I have never looked back since. I entered the Linux world with Red Hat 7.3 back in 2002 so I guess I kind of returned to it though I give Gentoo Linux credit for making me an active Linux user.
Thus, was Ubuntu really worth it? Of course, it give me a nice bleeding edge environment to work on for nearly a year. Problems were easily fixed with only a few exceptions (xorg and sound). I never had anything to complain about. It is just that when compared to a Mac, it just does not compete. In short, I primarily used Ubuntu for my entertainment, I no longer need this now since I started using the iPad and Macbook Pro.
For my working environment, I prefer to run Linux. Fedora Core at my office, CentOS/Scientific Linux on my servers and Arch Linux (or Gentoo) back on my desktop. Why would I use a geek distro at home you say? Quite easy, with both Gentoo and Arch Linux, I can still use my two graphics card and sound card with little problems. I also miss using them as well. Arch and Gentoo were fun and both have been relatively stable in recent months.
Overall though, I am still a Linux/Unix user, that is all that counts. I got one instance of Windows XP running somewhere…