I've been an avid Linux user for many years now, starting with my adoption of Red Hat on my old beige box HP, going down to running Ubuntu 7.04 on my old Gateway 15 inch hunker of a laptop, and now on my 14 inch Dell Vostro 3450. I've at least tried every version of Canonical's famous community-supported OS since 2003. And I've also experienced such distros as Fedora, Mint and MEPIS. Needless to say, I've certainly gotten my feet wet in the Linux world, so using Ubuntu has never been anything new or odd to me. There's just something so intimate about using Linux, from the installation, to boot, to use- everything feels more personal, more customized, more free. And isn't that the very purpose for the existence of Linux distributions? This in itself is one of the main reasons I typically recommend Ubuntu over other linux distributions. It works with incredible consistency, is supported by an unbelievably large community of devout users, is super easy to use,