Forget 'holy war' articles. Linux.com found the big red button.The article entitled Ten sticking points for new Ubuntu usersis a shortsighted attempt at fueling the kind of flame war that drives users away from linux.

I'll take a diversion at this point. I had an emergency call-out last night. I was roused from my semi-comatose position in order to fix my significant other's TV. Said 'TV' is MythTV controlling a Virgin Media set top box displaying through a regular monitor. To cut a long story short, one of the disks is doing the click of death thing. On bootup there's the option of supplying a root password or pressing Ctrl-D to continue. Of course Ctrl-D is the only option taken by the distressed in need of the calming effects of Hollyoaks*. The system boots but refuses to allow anyonee to watch or record TV.

Disconnecting the offending drive and making a few temporary directories until a replacement arrives was enough to be up and running.

Booting into the 'other' OS with the offending drive clicking away didn't get far, and despite the calls 'to have windows back' that get thrown around when 'linux' breaks, dead hardware is dead hardware and 'windows recovered from a serious error' is less use than no message at all. The convert sticks with Ubuntu.

Strange. A CRT that doesn't identify itself maybe? I wonder what the samme monitor defaults to on a windows install? Flawless doesn't happen, but blundering through the gnome menus for the words 'Screen Resolution' might help. I have never had a problem with monitor capability detection using any recent distro that wasn't a problem when using the 'other OS'. A hard and somewhat universal problem.All of the monitors I haven't skipped for being older than the Web seem to get round this in a nice cross platform manner.

As for boot management, Michael is probably right, a 'reinstall my MBR' option with some handy GUI might be handy. But the main problem is windows eating said MBR as a light brunch. How does one restore a Windows XP (or Vista) MBR? I'd like to see some instructions that won't involve further breakage. Instructions that a non-tech could follow and use to determine whether such action was necessary.

<Update> I had no end of trouble with Vista dong broken things like putting its bootloader on the wrong disk, which only became apparent when the old disk had its partition table rewritten. As for using GAG or Smart Boot Manager, it only adds to the complexity of the problem as (AFAIK) one still needs grub or lilo to actually boot linux. </Update%gt;

Boot time mounting of partitions with 'wrong' permissions? I've only had a problem when mounting a 'linux' (ext?, jfs, xfs, reiser? etc) partition from another install. I'll donate my hat to the firt person to fix UID-username mapping between different Linux installs. Of course allowing users to act with higher privileges a la windows isn't a solution. Sudo chown is the friend of those who know what they are doing.

As for email migration, the 'answer' may well be 'use IMAP'. Again, this is a similar problem when migrating between Windows computers.

I'm going to leave this article and move on. I'm either spending too much time massaging a troll's ego, or the article should be entitled '9 Things that are wrong with PC desktop environments, and I can't RTFM'

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* I will never understand why Hollyoaks and Eastenders seem to pacify the masses, but they do....