After a hard drive crashed a few months ago, I made the switch from Windows XP to Ubuntu on my work laptop. I’ve used Linux for a long time but hadn’t run it as my primary system for years and especially not at work. It’s really been great and I’ve been able to integrate with our Windows-based office network and apps fairly easily.

I still run XP in a virtual machine but only for Outlook and the odd corporate application that hasn’t made it out of the stone-age and onto the net.

Of the few annoyances I ran into after the switch, slower network performance had me pulling my hair out until I found a fix for a 2.6.x kernel problem.