Ubuntu I’ve bought a new laptop several weeks ago. A HP Compaq 6820s. Top specs, 2 gigs of RAM. Since it’s manly for home use, I tried to put Windows XP on it, thinking it would be a piece of cake. And it was, until Windows booted for the first time. And then hell broke loose. Microsoft’s OS needed drivers for most of the components. And getting those drivers from the HP’s site wasn’t as easy as one might imagine because HP’s designers never heard of Jakob Nielsen‘s teachings.

After about half an hour of searching, swearing and downloading, I had all the drivers on the laptop’s hard drive. But wait, they weren’t tested in Microsoft’s labs and those lame warnings kept popping out. “Are you sure you want to install this driver?” Well, the decision was this: either install the untested drivers and risk system failure, or use my laptop without a wireless connection, without bluetooth, without a decent screen resolution and so on. And since I’ve paid a lot of money for those extra features, I’ve chose to ignore the warnings which proved to be another bad idea (the first bad idea was installing windows in the first place). My system stopped working. Nothing was being displayed to the screen (possibly because of the untested graphics card driver).

So I’ve decided to leave aside windows for now and give the new Ubuntu a try. I was amazed. It had drivers for all the hardware and it worked right out of box. Without any lame warnings, without any boring EULA’s and so on…

Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex – it simply works :)