Okay, I like Ubuntu.

http://www.ubuntu.com

The latest version does everything I wanted it to do, and it hasn't broken on me since I installed it.

It just worked. Just like that.

No more Microsoft on this machine.

and MUCH easier to set up, everything just worked here as well.

and was thinking of upgrading. Glad to hear it went well.
How is the video playback? That is the only issue I have had.

Not this time.

For novices: Ubuntu does not install most common video drivers by default since most of these don't have a license compatible with Ubuntu. To get video to work (for example to play mpeg's), you have to go to Add/Remove Applications, check "Show unsupported applications," select "Sound and Video" and install the GStreamer plugins.

mine, not so much. So, I am interested in the newer version for aht

A caveat to my reports is that I have multiple computers and spare hard drives.

If I break something I can fix it without leaving the house. At this moment there are four working computers on my home network. I'm not silenced, or even greatly inconvenienced, if one computer goes down because something I try doesn't work.

The codecs used to encode video are, by and large, licensed in a way that cannot legally be distributed with a software package that doesn't have a licensing agreement with the patent holder. Native support for proprietary MS video files in a purely OSS distro simply is not going to happen, not because of Linux in and of itself or the distro, but because of Microsoft. In fact, a distro was recently presented with the beginnings of a lawsuit from Microsoft for providing native support and as a result was forced to shut down and remove the distro from its servers.

Having said that, it is possible, with minimal effort, to get video to work in *any* Linux distro if you install the codecs. Getting those codecs, at this point, is a trivial matter because every one known to exist is packaged in various packages. Mplayer's site tells you where to find them, and they can be found on a lot of servers in various forms.

I have yet to find a video file I cannot play, excepting those encoded with DRM, which I don't bother trying to view anyway. (I don't mean DVDs. I have no problem with DVDs either, once I installed the proper library to deal with them, which, again, cannot legally be distributed with the distro itself.) This may become more of an issue in the future.