Well, I finally got around to installing Ubuntu myself and I have to say it is just as easy as everyone says - maybe easier. I put this under Web 2.0 just because I think that is a huge part of Web 2.0 - simplistic, less friction, easy. Ubuntu is the poster child. It took about 30 minutes and most of that was to format the 160GB drive. I think I had to answer about 6 questions and Ubuntu did the rest. I was browsing the internet with Firefox immediately. What was even more impressive is that I could connect easily to my Windows workgroup and print on my Windows shared printer - without having to configure Samba! I am really impressed. I need to do more port scanning to ensure the thing is really safe, but a quick ShieldsUP! scan indicated things were good.

I haven't tested it yet, but a good friend told me that the latest release of Solaris 10 asks the same number of questions before installing flawlessly. It will be interesting to see how well Ubuntu performs as it pursues the server market, but I'm relatively sure that the user experience I'd have if I installed Solaris 10 instead would be quite different. After all Solaris 10 is intended for the server market, not the client market, so that is to be expected.

The browser does seem a bit slower for some reason, but what fun would it be if there was no debugging :-)