Thanks for the tip, though on my system it seems to be alt-middle-drag, not right-drag. Still, Windows has the right idea with reserving the bottom right corner of windows for a big grip triangle that’s easy to hit.

BigBrother:

You seem to have misread the tone of my post, and if I didn’t make it clear, I’ve been a sporadic Linux user for several years. I wouldn’t call myself expert or even experienced, but I have, for instance, read through the whole BASH Advanced Scripting Guide and even compiled my own kernel once (though it didn’t fix the problem I was experiencing).

Before now, I’ve usually just had Linux installed but avoided booting into it for one reason or another. Not all Linux config problems can be solved with determination, and I always seemed to have the wrong hardware (probably because I generally have gaming-enthusiast hardware, which tends to be ahead of the Linux support curve). Because key features like sound and ethernet often didn’t work on my system, using Linux was just not acceptable.

My point about GRUB was that Ubuntu needs an easy way to configure it out of the box that doesn’t involve menu.lst.

My apt issue was that this lock prevented apt to function at all, either from Synaptic or the command line.

Also, I’m aware Linux drivers are kernel modules, but I’ve never heard anyone object to calling them “drivers”.

I’ve never gotten the x86-64 version to install either (fedora or ubuntu). So until you can simply run an installer and it installs, Linux is a total waste of a desktop.

(I’ve been using linux since ‘95 btw, programming dot clocks for my video card in the old days btw.)

To me after reading this article and sadly countless others I feel that you are regarding Linux an a novelty OS. Something akin to “aww how cute, people think this will make it. Are they coding drivers? How precious”

You like to say that the icons in Gnome looked like “ugly turd” I hope you do realize that if you don’t like the icons you can download MUCH better and cleaner icon sets. Same with Fonts.

You are saying there is a flaw in grub, this is silly. Grub has one purpose, to call a bootstrap. You can edit the names and even add a background image if you want. They are simple.
/boot/grub/menu.lst that’s the file you need to know to change the “scary names” in ubuntu and remove the scary kernel version number. There is a GUI way to edit grub and fix all of this if text scares you http://web.telia.com/~u88005282/sum/index.html It’s called StartUp Manager.

You can fix issues with apt quite easily; but because you are still new to linux I will tell you the GUI way to do it. Go to System > Admin > Synaptic package manager (this is different than add or remove programs) and it will allow you to see packages with broken dependencies, resulting in the locked package manager and allow you to use it again. I agree the repos are full of older version of software. Left over from the Debian days I suppose. I use a website called getdeb.com to grab the newest versions of programs. You can equate the .deb to .exe, the .deb is after all, all that APT downloads unless you specify it to download the source.

It’s good when people move to open software, I’m glad that you decided it was for you. The ubuntu forums are a great place to get help, also the IRC channel.

P.S. Linux doesn’t have drivers, what you are calling “linux drivers” are actually kernel modules. Common mistake

Just my 2 cents; I don’t think UI is necessarily such a big deal any longer. It was when all we had was fvwm2, but gnome/KDE is more than enough today for the desktop.

Look to the openSUSE Build Service to see where the future is in smoothing the path from the open source coder’s vim session to the user’s desktop.