Greetings, Since the 1990s I have developed a love-hate relationship with Microsoft products. Their instability and poor performance has made me wealthy. My clients demand their products and I am paid lots of money to keep them running. If they didn't switch to a Mac then they had no choice but to depend on me. In my personal life I have hoped for years that some alternative would arrive. Something I could install and use without feeling like I was giving up some functionality. I would fire up the various LiveCDs and always find one problem or another. My digital camera wouldn't mount.. my computer would go into standby but never return.. poor vpn implementation preventing me from connecting to my client's networks.. printers that would only occasionally work.. hours with xorg.conf trying to get some esoteric multi-monitor configuration working properly.. etc.. etc... One time I fired up a LiveCD and it wiped an entire hard disk! That was scary.. forcing me back to Windows XP.. A couple of days ago I decided it was time to join the modern world and upgrade to Windows 7. I logged into my TechNet account and downloaded the DVD. At the same time I decided to download Karmic Koala because I saw a post on Digg that it had been released so I wanted to try.. try again. I swapped my XP drive for a blank one, plugged in the CD, installed Karmic and rebooted. Wow... - My dual monitor setup? Just a few clicks in the NVidia XServer Settings utility, click APPLY, dual monitors! - My Nikon D60? Mounted! Oh.. and not just one interface either.. 2! I can use GPhoto2 from the command line or F-Spot from the GUI. - My printer worked right out of the box. Seriously. I turned it on. I printed. - Blackberry backup? Check. MP3 player? Check. VirtualBox with 3D support? Check. VPN? Check. - Suspend mode actually suspends! and returns! The only thing missing is Linksys QuickVPN. On the off chance I need it.. wow.. VirtualBox is a beautiful thing. The last couple of days have been spent migrating files and folders from my XP partition, installing applications and tweaking the configuration. The machine has not crashed once. It is fast and responsive. Everything just works. KDE 4.2 is so beautiful. Debian is so stable. No driver disks. I just wanted to take this opportunity to thank everyone who made Karmic Koala possible! As a child of the 80s.. this is the first time in a very long time where I had a real choice. If this is the product being released next to Windows 7 then Microsoft better get moving otherwise this is just the first nail in their coffin. Oh.. and my girlfriend says she's switching too. :-)