@snoogins: $30 for Win7? Ah, right, an OEM Win7 Home Basic version, which:
- can't use 3D acceleration for the GUI
- can't connect to an enterprise network
- can't handle dual CPU socket machines (it can handle multicore, but SMP system owners: tough!)
- can't be moved to a different machine
- phones home every week or day
- can't update all installed software in one go, except if you get all your software from MS
- can't have more than one language installed.
So, yes, Win7 has its limitations. That's why I discarded it, because I would need Ultimate to do the above (and I do need the above) and it's a bit more than $30.
Ubuntu (or any Linux distro, as it stands) does it all out of the box:
- Compiz: 3D compositing
- multilingual: it's built-in (I need English and French, my wife needs Chinese and enjoys Italian)
- enterprise network connectivity: Samba+Evolution+NFS FTW
- standard number of CPU or CPU cores (it doesn't discriminate) supported out of the box: 32, kernel can handle up to 1024 (yes, it needs a recompile, but if you own such a system, then you probably can do that)
- license RECOMMENDS installing on several machines
- phones home only if you ask it to
Now, this improvement is for testing: Ubuntu 10.10 provides a framework that makes interpreting multitouch gestures easier - meaning that all programmers won't need to reinvent the wheel every time a new app is written. Moreover, if it's not used, then it doesn't hurt: apps will keep working as if it wasn't here.
About the speed issue: one of the most glaring problem is that Firefox took a hit with GCC 4.x (the C compiler used under GNU/Linux): a bad optimization makes Javascript execution twice as slow, and since EVERYTHING in Firefox is done through HTML+CSS+Javascript (GUI and pages), it slows it down to a crawl (try an official Mozilla build and compare with the built-in version in your distro).
About install issues: Linux is a secure system that doesn't allow apps to be installed globally by a user. So, when you install, say, Google Chrome as a user, it gets installed in your user's home directory. It may set up the environment variables so that it loads right after that, but if you don't make those changes permanent, the variables will be unset on next logout. Check your shortcuts and use absolute paths to launch your locally installed apps.
About install issues (2): the menus in GNOME (thus, Ubuntu) are generated dynamically every time an app is centrally installed; local apps can also notify the system if they have a launcher. However, sometimes the menu fails to refresh. Login off and then back on may fix that. Moreover, some Linux apps are purely command line driven, and will thus fail to appear in the menu! If you want to use mplayer, for example, it is a command-line media player: it won't appear on the menu, until you install a GUI for it (like gmplayer).
It is a good thing to read a package's description before you install it - at the very least, it'll tell you where the binary is, so you can try to run it through the terminal. This has the advantage of telling you WHY it fails to start if it, indeed, fails.