About to give up(again) with Linux!

[Michael Shergold]

About three months ago I decided to give Linux yet another try, this time
with Ubunutu..
The Hoary distrib disk worked fairly well but it was a struggle to get some
of the applications I use regularly to work but eventually I did and my
DVDs and CDs played, Skype worked and I even managed to get the BBC website
radioplayer (RealPlayer) to work and I could print to my Windows networked
Canon printer..  Then I thought I would look at the KDE interface and since
I preferred that, decided to stick with it and tried to update to Breezy..
After the upgrade almost nothing worked so I decided to cut the Breezy
level Kubuntu disk and do a clean re-install from that..  Once again most
of the things that I had spent time getting going with Hoary failed
miserably and lots of the applications seemed to be missing (what happened
to Kynaptic).
Going backwards at every update might present challenges but is not good
for Linux..  I know now that probably if I am prepared to fool around using
the root terminal and a lot of knowledge acquired from these groups I can
probably get it all working again but it really should not be like this..
What are beta tests for?  Surely the official release should not put you
back to square one.  I'm just about to wipe it all off and re-install
MSWindows. There at least most things work without having to delve into
newsgroups and console level manipulations.  It's like going back 45
years!!
Michael (an old timer who remembers booting computers by operating binary
switches and is still not afraid to try but thinks the Linux distros should 
have
moved on. What a mess!)..