ANY linux OS for everyday desktop is no no, its ok if u want to try something different but sadly its not good as winXP
for example,
i've got brand new custom budget PC at home for my girlfriend
Intel Celeron D 2.4GHZ
Geil 512mb ram
Abit SG-72 (onboard SIS graphic card)
DVD-RW
Maxtor 80GB ATA hard drive
installed winXP and updated, every fast, perfectly for surf internet, play DVD, divx movies, MSN, few simple games, even play farcry well at low resolution. 1280x1024 on desktop, CPU always at 2 to 4% if i scroll down/up website, smooth drag box around the desktop etc etc
now, formatted
installed Ubuntu 5.10 Breezy, rebooted, detected onboard graphic card perfectly,but resolution was set at 1024x768, spend 30 mins finding out how to config the xconf file, got it working at the end. The original sources.list doesnt work well so i had to config the sources.list to download all updates. but the CPU always goes up 70 to 80%, DOESNT MATTER what i do, scroll down/up website, move box around desktop. Ubuntu already had driver for my logitech webcam but i still had to spend about 10 mins to get it working (why Ubuntu cant do it for me?) which winXP installed driver for me in less than 10 seconds without driver CD or needed download driver from microsoft update thingy.
installing multimedia codec was biggest pain for me, but got it working at the end, i had to add a repo in sources.list to get w32codecs via apt-get but got it working afterward, but when playing movies by totem,mplayer and others, movie shuddering all the time, totem crashed, movie plugin for Firefox never work well, no matter what i do, i had all help from Ubuntu forums, no better. one linux expert guy said i'm having problems due my onboard graphic card is out of date!!
other said its cos my CPU is too slow. PC at work got better spec with ATI 9600 AGP graphic card, same problem
Multimedia is biggest let down on ANY linux OS, i've tried SUSE 10, Fedora Core 4 and Mandriva DVD 2006, no difference. its can be fun to try them out to make yourself feel like a linux geek
but they're not ready for everyday use.
so i formatted and re-installed winXP, all problems disappeared, me and girlfriend are happy again.
its not that cos we're M$ fans, we use winXP cos it doing all jobs very well for us. we stay with M$ OS cos they're only company in the world that provide a good and stable OS.
my 2p