I downloaded the 64-bit live CD and ran it up with a spare HDD I had. Installed away and it all went well - the install worked perfectly. I tried to setup the Active Directory authentication, but when I tried the first login - it failed. Because of this i had to CTRL-ALT-F2 to get a shell, and login as root. Once logged in I created a user and then went back to the gui to login as the sub-user.
First thing I noticed was the proportion of the screen - it just didn't seem right. I have an ATI PCIe graphics card and a 22in widescreen monitor but everything looked stretched. It was already set at the maximum resolution, so I couldn't do any more.
I downloaded Chrome 64-bit (why don't we have this option on Windows???) and that worked fine, but Flash kept telling me it needed to be installed. It always did install but never worked. I presume this was down to the fact flash is 32-bit and my browser was 64-bit.
Next - install Skype. Easy peasy, except it won't run. Again its a 32-bit app and my machine only had 64-bit libraries. Again buried in the Skype forums was how to resolve this issue by installing the 32-bit libraries it needed.
OK, now KeePass. Keepass for those that don't know is a secure password store. Its used on Windows and is open source and allegedly cross-platform. Well it is, sort of. I had to install Mono to get it working, which it did. However the main function of it was missing. In windows you right click on the password, and copy it to the clipboard, and then paste it into the window of your choice. This function doesn't work on Linux :-( I could of course install KeePassX - which doesn't read v2 files. So I was left high and dry with this one.
So, to summarise, On the surface you could easily swap from Windows to Linux on the desktop. But when you start using it, you end up having to do lots of tweaks to get 90% of the way there, and have to compromise. In the end it was too much for me. I couldn't afford time tweaking things to get it working, and the lack of full KeePass functionality just killed it for me.
Back to Windows 7 I went. Until its made for ordinary people and not people who love tweaking things, I will stick with Windows.
