Certainly your experience is not an uncommon one - I’ve heard lots of people say this and for a time, it was my experience too, however, it’s getting to be more and more the case that the software I want is already listed in Synaptic (which handles dependencies automatically, most of the time), or I can find a standalone .deb package which will install it for me. When it works (which is happening an increasing percentage of the time), installation of software under many Linux distributions is easier and more reliable than it is on Windows.
If you want to install something that is only available as source, and it requires a whole bunch of different libraries from here, there and everywhere, then it’s hard work - impossibly hard to the Windows user, doubly hard because you can’t always find an experienced Linux user with the patience to explain it to you.
I certainly can sympathise with the situation described by amarinth. One thing I’d love to be doing in Linux is sound recording and audio processing, and I’ve made numerous attempts to get set up to do this. But despite my external sound module being recognised in Ubuntu, it causes Audacity to crash…and the thread I started on the Ubuntu forums has been along the lines of “me too”.
Oh, and my laser printer doesn’t work.
Apart from that, I love Linux 
There is an interview with Ubuntu’s producer Mark Shuttleworth in You Tube:
Well damn, you Linux people sure showed us PC fan-boys what an immediately useful and productive piece of software Linux can be!
Also, is this the DRM issue being alluded to by others?
I don’t see how Linux would be better off if it can play HD content at all that has been encrypted with HDCP.
Eh? What is this ‘PC’ thing that you present as an alternative to Linux?
I like the expert’s comment “if something goes wrong, who do you call?” With Windows, isn’t that normally your workmate’s-son-who-knows-about-computers, or similar?
I’ve never owned a Windows PC, but even The Rest Of Us don’t really have brains as part of our computer hardware 
Congratulations, though, for trying something new. May it serve you well.
But that’s exactly what he said. So how was his comment “unfair”?
My Ubuntu box is currently torn apart for some hardware reconfigurations, but I like it waaay better than Windows. Yeah, it’s got some quirks and I’ve got this 1,000 page book on it that I haven’t had time to go through and read yet and I haven’t figured out how to get it working with a WiFi connection yet, but hell, it took me a while to get the hang of Win95 when it first came out.
IMHO, one of the coolest things about Ubuntu is the package manager, if I need to update a program, I use the package manager, it goes out, grabs the program, and any other software I might need to run it and installs it all. Tres cool.
Oh, Captain_C, if you ask around on the Ubuntu forums, there’s emulators specifically written to allow you to play Windows games. You won’t be able to play the latest high system demanding games, but apparently, you can get a good number of them running under Linux/Ubuntu.
I’ve also heard, that one of the “features” of Vista is that it immediately seeks out other PCs running Vista and makes “friends” with them. Supposed to be more sophisticated than simple file sharing and what not. I’m thinking that this is quickly going to turn out to be a major security hole.
Cite?
Given all of the attention paid by Microsoft towards security in recent patches of XP SP2 and Vista, I rather doubt this.
It was discussed on one of Leo Laporte’s podcasts, which one and when it was “aired,” I don’t remember. And while Microsoft has improved their security practices as of late, they have completely written the network stack for Vista from scratch (rather than building upon that in XP), so it’s vulnerabilities in the wild are somewhat unknown. I’m sure that Microsoft has done their best to make it secure, but until Vista’s been out and hammered at by hackers from every angle, we won’t be able to say how secure Vista is. Same with any OS that’s undergone a similar development process.