Ubuntu Wonderful?

There are some non-glowing reviews, some people prefer PCLinuxOS or MEPIS or whatever -
however, Ubuntu is really pretty good these days, what with its combination of focusing on
usability with a Debian-derived core using APT.  Hardy is the first version of Ubuntu that
recognised the right graphics card to use in my PC (ignoring the built in i810), configured
maximum resolution automatically, and generally 'just worked' (although there was a boot
problem on the Live CD initially - fixed by editing boot options from LiveCD menu.)

I have been using Ubuntu (actually Kubuntu) since Breezy and it's really come a long way - no
more tweaking with fonts and many other details, most things really do work out of the box.
However, the nicest thing is simply the huge repository of packages that work well - it's very
quick to go from the 'command not found' error (which points you to the package name in
Ubuntu) to installing the package.

It runs well on rather old hardware, particularly with the amazingly fast Firefox 3 - e.g. a
Pentium III 700 MHz/512 MB is very usable these days, and with Xubuntu I can use a PIII laptop
with just 192 MB RAM.  Unfortunately this removes one of the reasons to upgrade, but
fortunately Compiz (which also worked out of the box on my old ATI 9250) is a good incentive
...

The key thing for me is that one Linux distro or another succeeds massively - it doesn't
really matter long term if it is Ubuntu or not, but having one really popular distro that
works well for newbies means that hardware vendors and maybe even commercial app vendors will
start taking Linux seriously.  Hardware support is highly cross-distro, and will help all
distros, so even if you don't like Ubuntu it's good that it is doing so well.