Apparently, I have way too much “designed for Windows” hardware and that causes some serious issues.

I have had repeated problems with my screen card and sound card, and have finally turned back to Windows.

If you are still interested (and there’s no reason you shouldn’t be), it goes like this:

For multimedia playback there are about 4 major lines of software, use what feels good to you. There’s basic support for open-media codecs, such as Ogg, and any others must be installed (there’s some automatic software for that).

File-sharing: aMule for ed2k network and Azereus for BT – there’s also a nice DC++ client. The file transfer speeds were a lot better on Ubuntu than they ever were on Windows.

Hardware: You will probably have basic support for most of your drivers out-of-the-box. The fancier functions might require a lot of tweaking – but then again, it might not.
BlueTooth is usually well supported, as most network cards. Phone are trickier – see here for other people’s experiences.

The way I see it, if I had more “standard” hardware, I’d still be running *nux – and I’ll probably go back someday, when I plan for the hardware.

But a good way to just give it a test run and see if your major hardware is recognized (screen card, network), download the latest Ubuntu Desktop CD and boot it. It’s a LiveCD that will let you get a quick preview of the system before installing it. – Oh, and take into account that NTFS drives are a little tricky as well – if you can, convert them to FAT32 before installation.

And the only reason I’m asking you and not Google is because you offered. And because your answer (I hope) would be more refined than Google’s

It might be quite a good solution for networks. A Linux+Crossover workstation is much cheaper then a Windows workstation.

But, as a workstation by itself, I don’t think Linux is ready for the real world yet. They are quite close, I’ll give them that.