Ubuntu Stuff

I recently took the jump and installed Ubuntu linux (Hardy Heron, specifically) on my work laptop.  Here's some of my thoughts:

• The install was super easy. I had left some unpartitioned space on my hard drive after installing Vista, so I just had Ubuntu use that space.  Apart from that, everything was really simple.  Gone are the days of having to tweak the bootloader install location, manually screw with the grub.conf to get it to see the windows installs, etc.  The installation was easier and faster than any Windows install I've ever done.
• Ubuntu looks nice.  It's been a couple of years since I've played with any flavor of Linux, but the Gnome desktop is configured out of the box for clean, simple, operation.  I'm not a fan of the brown, but that's just me and that's easily changed.
• Sun's VirtualBox is some nice virtualization software.  As a developer, it's nice to be able to start and stop multiple machines with different configurations with ease.  Added plus: when Windows crashes, it doesn't take everything else with it.  And I can save a safe snapshot of the machine config to combat the "oh crap I screwed everything up now what do I do" problems.
• There is no great media player.  Everything I looked at is okay, but sub-par compared to iTunes and WMP.  BMPx looks like one of the better contenders, but I can't get it working right now.
• Firefox and Flash make for a volatile combination.  I get crashes all the time.
• No good native Microsoft Exchange client exists for Linux.  If you don't use Exchange there's a plethora of solutions (a plethora, jefe?) but otherwise you're out of luck.

So, bottom line, I like Ubuntu.  I'll probably continue using it for now, especially since I can use VirtualBox to run Visual Studio, NetMeeting, Outlook, and all the other windows-specific crap that my company hasn't gotten away from.