User frustration with Vista prompts Ubuntu test-drive

I was relaxing, reading personal email on a leisurely Sunday afternoon when a note from a long-lost friend brought work, and Linux, front and center. The friend, from whom I hadn’t heard in years, reported that her husband, frustrated beyond belief with Microsoft Vista, just bought a new laptop specifically to test-drive Linux. “Which operating system?” I had to know. “Ubuntu,” she responded in a follow-up email. “We want to be ready to abandon ship when the next Microsoft OS comes out … or seriously consider jumping overboard.”

How can Microsoft be so kludgy as to create an operating system so bad that users race back to the previous OS (Windows XP), and Microsoft’s response is to discontinue support for XP? she asked.

“James [her husband] is learning to use Ubuntu. Actually he’s still learning to install it,” our friend writes. “So far, it recognizes that we have a printer but not that it ought to run it.”

As James struggles to learn Ubuntu, he keeps reminding himself that Vista “is a flaccid, overstuffed OS that has crashed in the middle of every task he’s tried to do. [Microsoft] will be lucky if the whole planet doesn’t go Mac and Linux.”

I’ll bet there are many Penguin fans out there who would be happy to help our North Carolina friend. Anyone?