Yes yes, Windows users just don't get "it". With "it" apparently a vast blackhole of time suck spent searching endless forums for conflicting advice for why basic hardware on random machine doesn't work right, or why xyz package failed to install or abc driver doesn't work right.

No thanks, I still haven't figured out how to get the 3 days of my life back trying to share some files over my home network last year when I installed ubuntu on my old (but perfectly serviceable) computer in my latest attempt at using Linux.

What didn't work out of the box?

- Mouse (stock Dell USB mouse), never did fix that, tried 3 different mice, dug up an old PS/2 mouse and made do with that, probably some obscure usb issue, but the usb hard drives and keyboard I had connected worked from the beginning

- NIC drivers (dunnah, some regular old built in 10/100 part on the mobo), took an entire day of my life to resolve, and it kept dropping connection requiring a reboot every 4-5 hours

- Video drivers (nvidia something or other), never did work right

- file sharing (I eventually got it to kinda work after hand editing a bunch of files and installing some older version of samba, really, what's the gui there for anyways?)

- Stopped seeing one of the hard drives on the second day, a reinstall of ubuntu (and all the other crap I had to do) fixed that

- X died for no apparent reason, reinstall again

- it refused to sync properly with my perfectly cromulent monitor so I was doing all this at 640x480, which works brilliantly when half of the gui controls are off the screen, I was prepared not to care if I could just get the NIC working and remote in

- after getting everything working (kinda, with gum and duct tape), ubuntu did some sort of update that blitzed the whole thing and I just gave up, I hadn't even really gotten to what I wanted to do with it.

As much as I really tried to get it to work, and I try one of these about once every year or so since 1996 with whatever is the hot distro of the moment, and I had no illusions that it would be as straight forward as Windows or OS X, I did expect things like actually being able to use the computer enough to fire up a browser and search for solutions to minor configuration issues. Every issue I had was literally a major configuration issue. I spent those 3 days with my MBP sitting next to me so I could look up help in various forums.

By comparison, I wiped the drive, installed Windows XP, most of it was spent waiting for the files to copy, I had a thumb drive with 4 drivers on it. After install I clicked setup.exe for each driver, rebooted a handful of times. Clicked each drive I wanted to share and set it to "share" and that system is still up and running...I think I've rebooted it 3 times since then. Total time spent? 90 minutes.

So if "it" is wasting a bunch of my time for absolutely nothing in return? I can't think of any other area in my life where I would allow that kind of user experience.

Imagine this was a car, and I had to rebuild the engine or the shifter nob or pedals or windshield or whatever just to drive it off the lot, and then I'd find out it wasn't compatible with every road I wanted to go on, unless I patched it with a different windshield, but when I did that the a/c stopped working. And the brake pedal would stop activating the brake system every 6 hours unless I turned the car off and restarted the engine. Bringing in my car for an oil change might make the doors or wheels stop working.

I have pretty low expectations of technology. I don't expect things to "just work", but I do expect to have a couple pretty clear lines to resolve any issues, even if I have to get my hands dirty and change the spark plugs myself.

So if this is "it", no thanks.