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Leave it to the free****ots to come pouring out of the woodwork in defense of their tinker-toy desktop environments. No offense, but I still maintain that *nix is for servers, windows is for desktops, and varying from that formula invariably is made of complete and miserable /FAIL/

About a week ago on a forums I posted my experience with Ubuntu 9.1 and compared it to a windows 7 installation on the same machines (one desktop, one laptop) - lemme share that here:

System 1 - my primary workstation
Q6600 CPU overclocked to 2.7ghz (1200FSB, 3:2 timings), undervolted to 1.1825
4 gigs RAM
1TB WD Caviar Black (OS)
1.5tb Seagate (media)
Pair of Samsung F1 750 gig mirrored (work)
Linksys (atheros chipset) wireless adapter
Ge260 GTX driving left 2 displays (24" 1920x1200)
Ge8800 GTS driving right 2 displays (17" 1024x1280 portrait)
Audigy 2 ZS Platinum

System 2 - My laptop HP NC8000
1.8ghz Celeron M
2 gigs RAM
120 gig WD Scorpio Blue
Radeon 9600 mobility (15.4" at 1400x1050)

Ubuntu 9.10 on workstation
LiveCD boots, but installer 'locks up'. CD image is FINE, so burn out an 'alternate' text based installer CD and some three hours later we actually get to the OS. Wireless not recognized without restricted drivers, doesn't let you install restricted drivers without connecting to run the update. So drag it in from my garage/office and physical wire it, and ETH0 doesn't configure right so I have to manually dick with it from the command line - FINALLY get online, spend two hours on updates before I can get wireless working...

It only sees one display and won't set anything but 800x600 even WITH the nVidia restricted drivers and all displays connected via DVI. After four hours of dicking with xorg.conf I FINALLY get all four displays on, in order and native resolution. There's zero support for rotated displays the same time as non-rotated with the font aliasing so you are stuck with ugly fonts - NOT that freetype is a prize in that department to begin with..

Twinview is useless for more than two displays so have to run Xinerama, which means I can kiss off the composite extension and welcome to the world of the slowest OS video on the planet. Scrolling any long page in FF or Opera has horrible tearing, often mis-renders, and at times it appears you can see the page being updated one pixel at a time. Of course as with every linux install I've ever used the visual cues for if a program is launching are nonexistant, so I click to open FF, nothing happens... wait 30 seconds, click to open FF, nothing happens... two minutes later five copies pop open at once. QUALITY.

Sound card support only allows for 2 channel output no matter wild claims by others of it working. Other devices like the webcam are also 'recognized' and 'supported' - but not FULLY supported (320x240 max on a 4 megapixel camera for example). Mouse (logitech trackman marble+) cuts in and out and doesn't support the scroll wheel via PS/2 (since I'm on a KVM...) and only really works right via USB.

Fullscreen OpenGL applications only open on the left-most display since x.org has no concept of a 'primary display' - have fun dicking with config files to get them to open 'pushed over'. Running in a window the only openGL I can run is the piss poor slow MESA library, so pretty much anything graphics related (like blender) is not even really an option.

Video playback even with VLC is a joke since VLC does all CPU decoding - welcome to horrible tearing, sync problems and other issues that take HD playback and turn it into choppy crap worse than watching Hulu fullscreen under XP.

Ubuntu 9.10 on Laptop
Live CD comes up with the classic corrupted video that you have to force to 16 bit rendering during boot... at least in this case though the installer on the live CD functions as expected. Open source drivers also seem to need to be forced to 16 bit to even work right, so closed drivers are the only solution though again, I have to drag it over to a landline to run at least one series of updates before it will let me put restricted drivers in.

Audio recognized but neither the microphone or headphone jack work. It's fun when you plug in the headphones and they neither come on nor kill the internal speaker. This can be fixed by dicking with the alsa-base file and forcing the realtek driver manually - so long as you don't mind ALL playback being at half the volume it is in windows, making the internal speakers about as useless as they are on a netbook.

Plugging in USB devices causes a kernel panic, if you boot with them installed it's fine, but don't plan on plugging any in once it's up and running. No sign of bluetooth or IR support or any means of configuring them, and attempts to add software to control them have so far been for nought.

Wireless appears to work unless you happen to have the laptop go to sleep, in which case the instructions to reset it from the command line do jack ****, so you pretty much have to reboot.

... and video playback? VLC can barely manage fullscreen DVD and completely chokes on HD content in VLC at any size render target.

Again, typical linux 'supported but not fully' nonsense.

Windows 7 x64 on Desktop
Install the OS, boots up 27 minutes later with all four displays enabled and in their native resolutions!?! (all I had to do was adjust their order and tell it two of them are rotated) Audigy recognized, playing sounds, fully configurable for speaker layout. Wireless also recognized and logs right on to my WPA setup. Windows Update will grab the latest driver versions, though it's nice to install the nvidia stuff manually so you get the support applications. (as well as the 'audigy support pack' by danielK).

Windows 7 x32 on Laptop
Install the OS, boots up 40 minutes later in the native resolution. Audio working, headphone jack working, IR working, Bluetooth working after windows update, no wierd problems with USB...

... and in Windows I actually have font rendering meant for SCREEN with kerning that doesn't look like it was done by a sweetly retarded crack addict. (and yes, I know how to enable better hinting with the XML file, helps the glyphs but NOT the spacing between them!) I have hardware overlay and some hardware decode support so the lappy can even manage HD playback OVER THE WIRELESS... I have direct access to USEFUL applications instead of half-assed tinkertoys like OpenOffice and the GiMP that are akin to a trip in the wayback machine to Windows 3.1 level functionality.

"Free" software - all I can say is "Rah rah, fight the power and the evil corporations" - when, as Carlos Mencia described most of your 'corporations are evil' whackjobs "every weekend you get together and rent movies from BLOCKBUSTER and order Pizza from Dominoes"

I do seriously wonder what the **** is in the Linux Kool Aid so far as using it (or freebsd, or opensolaris) as a desktop is concerned. Servers where everything is either command line or via HTTP panels, freaking brilliant OS. Hang an X11 implementation around it's neck like a dead albatross and call it a desktop OS, and the result is not quite so brilliant.

Windows 7 on the other hand - freaking brilliant - mostly because I don't have a laundry list of complaints... and I have access to COMMERCIAL applications who's quality blows most of that free nonsense out of the water. Cakewalk Sonar (try running that under Wine!), 3ds Max, Hell, I can even run the decade old Paint Shop Pro 7 with it's image optimizer I have yet to see the equal of - without jumping through any goofy hoops.

If I wanted to spend time dicking around on the command line for the simplest of tasks, I'd still be running Xenix on my Trash-80 model 16.