What are your computer’s specs?
If you’re computer is really old, then a lack of ram could explain why Ubuntu and Xubuntu got stuck on their loading screens and why mint is slow.
Sorry you had a bad experience. I’m using the latest version of Ubuntu on my 4 year old Dell laptop. It went perfectly smooth for me. Everything on my system was running as soon as it finished installing. I was on the internet within 45minutes of burning the CD.
That sucks. It’s a really cool OS IMO.
Did you check that your computer met the minimum system requirements? Most anything purchased in the last 7 years should.
1 GHz x86 processor
1 Gb of system memory (RAM)
15 GB of hard-drive space (although this can be split onto 2 drives, a 5Gb / and a 10Gb /home fairly easily)
Graphics card and monitor capable of 1024 by 768
Either a Cd/Dvd-drive or a Usb socket (or both)
Well, the only other distro that has nearly every wireless driver on it is Knoppix. Knoppix is a live CD only, although there is a convoluted way of installing it. You could also just save the live boot settings on a USB stick or internal drive, which Knoppix will read every time the CD boots.
Right-click and save this latest version, burn it, then see if your machine can boot it. The automatic hardware detection is pretty good, better than most distros.
The problem is with Linksys Wireless-G USB? And neither the rt2x00 driver or zd1211rw work?
LoL, which distro are you at now?
I’d presonally go for slack on an older machine/linux virgin combo tho. Gentoo if you somewhat know what you’re doing. For godmode users LFS or DSL. For pure speed, nothing is faster than Danm Small Linux.
Btw, if ou think ubuntu is hard… try triple booting OSX86/XP/Mandriva. 
It isn’t that old. Five years, maybe? I’ll post the specs tomorrow when looking at the thing doesn’t make me spit.
The sad thing is, I really thought Mint was nice, what I saw of it. But if I have to load three OS’s in a day and at the end am still profoundly dissatisfied, this is not a concept that is ready for prime time.
Step daughter got a company computer of cheap when they up graded. Had a whoppin 512 Meg of RAM, seriously lacked in other ways… I have lots of scavenged stuff so all is now well but when I first ran Belarc on it I was sorely disappointed…
And minimum requirements are just that. Ever run XP on the minimum? Fast it ain’t…
Get a used HD, wipe it and also double whatever RAM you have… If your CPU is decent and your FSB over 100, it should work OK…
I have done 4 Ubuntu’s, first 3 were with the CD which I ordered. I did a down load on the latest one but ordered the CD anyway just in case.
I have 5 bad CD’s I tried to burn in previous lives…
Hard wire the computer, wireless & old machines & Ubuntu = not so much…
YMMV
I do not believe in dual boot but use 2 different computers. $50 bucks will buy a lot of good stuff in garage sales and thrift stores if you can mess with the hardware a bit… IDE hard drives are free most times. I got boxes of them, many 7200 RPM…
We in the computer biz refer to such situations as “job security”.
ZSofia:
I started using UNIX on an HP minicomputer in 1988, programming in C and assembly language. I started using Linux around 1997 (Slackware).
I am a professional C and C++ developer on Windows and Red Hat Linux; I’ve written my own kernel drivers on Linux and Windows as well as plenty of higher level applications.
I’m not a newbie.
When I first tried Ubuntu a couple years ago, it took me 5 days of tinkering to get the wireless working. Another few days to get the display driver to work (I had to do everything at the command prompt until the ‘radeon’ driver would cooperate). And several months before suspend would operate as it should. (I would often be greeted with a blank screen on resume, with the only option being to hold the power switch; no doubt an obscure ACPI problem.)
I totally understand your frustration. As far as I’m concerned Linux is still geeks-only, and I consider myself a geek. It is not for those who want things to “just work”, or even for people who don’t want to add “tinkering with Linux” to their hobbies.
I sympathize with you. When Linux works, it works great. Otherwise…
But if that desktop was creeping along on windows xp, its going to be creeping on Ubuntu/Mint as well.
If its slowed over the years I would suspect a physical problem first: dust and dirt clogging hint sinks and impeding fans. Grunge in the power supply as well. Less obvious would be poor contact between the CPU and its heat sink. The heatsink grease between them can dry out.
If these are problems you will never have satisfaction until they are remedied.
Wireless: Broadcom manufactured a lot of the chips in wireless devices and their legal and financial problems caused a hell of a lot of mess in regards to their standards. I am sure that if their problems persisted it would have started affecting windows users.
I am sure you noticed that there are tons of different wireless drivers. In comparison, I have three computers with graphics cards that span 10 years of technology, and they all used the same driver at one point.
Web cameras were just about as messy as wireless, but they seem to have smartened up and are standardizing things better.
Still, making excuses doesnt exactly help you, does it?
lsusb nonsense: Its gotta go. The linux community uses terminal commands in tutorials as a sort of short hand. Its a lot easier than showing screen captures. But there are ways to find this data without that esoterica. We just need to let newbies know!
If you are still messing with things, take out the USB wireless dongle and put it in a windows machine. Get the particulars of the device there. Find out if it works at all with linux. No? Go to the store and get a list of available USB wireless devices and google them for compatibility. Cross broadcom right off the list. Sometimes spending 20 bucks is avoids a bunch of headache. In fact, you can probably get a real wireless card for that amount.
Initially installing with a hard line to your router works best. That way the installer can fetch the files it needs for the wireless if its possible. Then you dont have to mess with it. The installer is pretty smart when it can get to its online resources.
These are not the most intuitive things, I know. It took some fussing and frustration for me to learn and I am pretty geeky. I’m smarter for it though, and like you, I had a second computer. I just took it as a big adventure.
Also: we are here to help.
Strange that.
I ran Mint on my granddaughter’s computer yesterday and it had the same problem with the Linksys dongle. With Ubuntu it just worked. And increased in speed the longer it was running.
The odd thing is that Ubuntu won’t ‘give’ you proprietary drivers of the bat, you have to get them yourself (easily done from their repositories).
The difference is that the ndis wrappers etc are supposed to be included with mint, making it an easier transition from Windows.
The Linksys install buggered XP, it’s taken an age to get it working again. I wish she would just use Mint or Ubuntu, much faster (her’s is an older, inherited machine) and none of the antivirus nonsense to slow things down even more.
I’m running Ununtu on a six year old self-build and it is still faster than any Windows machine I have dealt with up to now.
Missed the edit winder 
Re: the advice on Ubuntu Forums - they do tend to give it in as concise a format as possible but where they give a command line entry, don’t type it, copy it and paste it into a terminal. Usually preceded by sudo after which it will ask for your administrator (root) password - which will not show anything as you type it, it is there though.
After that it may stop and ask for a y or n if there are likely to be any issues with the installation. Never had a problem yet.
As for Darren’s experience, although I have been using Linux for around 15 years and have had one or two problems to solve, the overall experience is that it works better than Windows and is simpler to install, damned sight quicker to install too.
The only ‘problem’, if you can call it that, was getting the printer drivers for my Brother printer.
The Ubuntu forum sorted that out in about five minutes, whereas it took almost an hour to install in Vista.
A lot of the problems do indeed come from driver support, or rather, lack of driver support. Hardware manufacturers seem to jealously guard their hardware specs, often forcing the open source driver to be reverse engineered by observing the behavior of the hardware. This is a shaky proposition at best. The open source community will (rightly or wrongly) point the finger at the closed-source hardware manufacturers, but as far as users like Zsofia are concerned the end result is it just “doesn’t work”. It’s a sad situation all round.
The most troublesome areas I’ve seen are in Wireless drivers, especially the notorious Broadcom chipsets as mentioned above, and graphics drivers, particularly ATI / AMD.
I’ve been running Ubuntu on my primary personal laptop for a couple of years now, and it’s stable. Nevertheless, each time I click that “upgrade to next major distro” button, I know that after reboot, either I’ll have a blank screen with no way to see what I’m typing, or wireless won’t work, or sleep won’t work, and I’ll have a few hours tinkering ahead of me to get back to where I was. Yes, I could “never upgrade”, but that hardly seems like a reasonable solution. My laptop is about 5 years old, but a lot of the hype around Linux is that it specifically runs on older hardware where Windows would not.
As always, YMMV. If you have a newer machine, with non-obscure hardware, Linux may “just work” for you.
Also worth remembering that in many cases, Windows or OS X are pre-installed on a computer when someone buys it, meaning the user never experiences the “joy” of installing and configuring the OS. This is unlike Linux, where, save for a few small exceptions, OEM installs are not available.
This is usually sound advice, but there’s one caveat. Some web forum software will “helpfully” pretty up text entered by users, e.g. changing plain old hyphens to something fancier from UNICODE. If you copy-paste these directly into the ‘bash’ prompt, you can get all sorts of interesting errors. I’ve had people swear blind to me that they copy-pasted exactly what I told them, but got an “invalid option” error or some such. And they had; the web forum software had tricked them.
Linux really does seem to be much more dependent on the hardware than Windows. I had a very old machine that I had built myself that ran fine under Windows, but when I tried to switch to Ubuntu I had countless errors and random crashing. Fast-forward a year later when I had a brand new computer built by professionals, I tried Ubuntu again and it couldn’t have been faster and more rock-solid.
Honestly, given that this is a collaborative project to create a legally free operating system, it’s pretty darn good, and they’re constantly improving it. Edit: Not that that should excuse poor performance, and if you had three failures in one day, that really does suck.
Installing linux on certain motherboards can be a problem, particularly I should guess with Asus motherboards. Some installs can suddenly stop and never give a clue even on a ‘text install’ when all the processes are shown flowing on the screen; and the instructions before installing are minimal — worst is when it dumps you to a terminal ( for say fscking [ disk-checking ] ) redolent of 1985 and typing HELP lists no useful command whatsoever. And you can’t get on the internet to look it up…
For Asus/Abit boards I usually have to pass parameters at the very beginning: this means with OpenSuse, one types on the line below the install options a number of extra commands one desperately hopes may succeed; for Ubuntu one clicks the F6 ‘Other Options’ button in the lower far right, which shows a pop-up screen: enter for each of the same commands ( a little x appears to each selected ) then collapse it.
The parameters I usually find get it working are *noapic *and acpi=off, but there are rather a lot of options and a much larger set of varying combinations to bore oneself rigid trying.
The problems with linux users are entirely separate to the problems of linux.
They are often highly intelligent, capable of recommending densely packed commands they assume you are willing to type into a terminal, and can often find out what the difficulty is if someone offers them pages of densely packed debugging output for detailed discussion. They fiercely despise questioners and people critical of any aspect of linux that doesn’t work.
The fact it doesn’t work is secondary to the fact that in an ideal world it would work, and work better than Microsoft — It is still amusing to write Micro$oft.
A good review of these types by a Linux journalist Caitlyn Martin: The Problem with the Linux Community.
On the other hand, they are not as annoying as Apple Devotees…
I second the suggestion of trying out various “LiveCD” versions first. If you can run off of a liveCD, then you will probably have a smooth installation. If not, then plan to spend many hours on forums receiving obscure technical solutions which may or may not ever work.
I feel your pain, and have had the same miserable first time experiences. My latest laptop is now running Ubuntu near-flawlessly (won’t suspend properly and will overheat), but it took several days of config monkeying to get there. Our other house laptop has never been able to install any distro successfully (I try every six months or so).
To give you an idea: check out Section 2 of this page for what are considered “quick install steps” in the Linux culture.
Compiling kernel modules is not exactly a common task for an average linux user. It is ages ago that I last did that, usually if you need some more recent drivers or software you can find some packages already created by someone. Then it’s just a matter of apt-get install or yum install whatever.
Your have to select your hardware carefully (or just be lucky), but then Linux often works out of the box. If your hardware is not supported by your chosen distro, you should just choose another one that supports it. If you’re running on hardware that is too new for the current distros, you’re in for some work. Especially notebooks are hit or miss, but I find most desktops work perfectly fine out of the box.
And I find shell commands much easier for telling someone how to solve a problem than trying to describe which buttons to click where.
The biggest issue IMHO is there is no real financial incentive for anyone to fix the stuff. When someone sits down and starts selling a linux/unix based OS like Apple, and having to provide support for it, they fix things and make it work.
I have heard there are support outfits who do deal with linux based OS issues for a fee, never bothered looking for them myself.
We try and we try and we try and its never enough for you people! 
If there is a trait that sums up the the linux community, it isnt necessarily high intelligence, but rather a deep and unquenchable desire to mess with things. Until the eleventh hour we are not annoyed by problems: Thats what we call fun!
Well, me anyway.
Linux is a hobby project.
Linux - I’ve got a clown coming to me about once a week to tell me, how brilliant Linux is and that it is for FREE. Fuck Mircosoft with their Windows shit and stuff and Linuz is so easy to use and the granny can use it.
Sure, my PC on Windows doesn’t crash either, doesn’t get Viruses etc…either. Why? Because I know how to use it.
But my Mum certainly does not know the USB plug from the headphone socket and what is LAN, nevermind her installing Linux on her PC.
It’s like using your car. I drive one, but when I need a repair, I’ll go to the garage. Sure, I can change my brakepads, change the oil. But what takes me hours, takes a mechanic 15 minutes. Why? Because I just don’t have the routine, the right tool and knowledge like a mechanic does.
Now, why would the mechanic buy tools, oil, pay rent, insurance, wages etc so other mechanics can use his tools for free and then has to work and help them as well - for FREE. No, he won’t…maybe for the wife, family or some friends…sure.
Same for me, I used Linux, but sure, I do not spend an hour fixing someones PC to get paid NOTHING. Then fix up their PC’s for FREE - NO. Then explain to them, why they can not use Word on it and teach them how OpenOffice works and why their Aunt can not open the files, because they do not understand what the difference is between a *.doc or *.rtf file is, never mind *.odf
So, Linux might be the best ever, but when you go to the petrol (gas) station and ask for corn-sirup-soja-wax-fuel, you will properly find, that they only stock Petrol or Diesel and if your lucky some LPG - that is, why Linux is a hobby project.