I think you're confusing Ubuntu with Linux in general. Coming from a Windows/Mac world, this is a common mistake to make, as the operating system provider is also the kernel provider.

An operating system as several components, and the kernel is the portion that interfaces between the hardware and user applications. Linux is this kernel. For a complete operating system, there are other components needed, for example the file system, or desktop environment. In Windows, the file system is NTFS, and I'm not sure what the desktop environment is called, but they're both distributed by Microsoft. With Linux distributions, this is not the case; for example, with Ubuntu, when installing you can choose from file systems like EXT4, NTFS, BRTFS, XFS, all distributed by different groups. The desktop environment can be either GNOME (Ubuntu), KDE (Kubuntu), Xfce (Xubuntu), or whatever, and again these are made by different people.

So where there's only Windows XP, Vista, 7, etc, etc, there's literally hundreds of Linux distributions; the only thing they all have in common is the kernel, every other part is a wildcard. As for Mac4Lin not working, in general it's best for Linux newbies to stick with the big names, like Ubuntu, Fedora, or OpenSUSE.

I had problem with Flash video too, less serious, it didn't crash the PC, but it totally muted audio. It happened the first time I installed 10.04 upgrading from 9.04 through 9.10.

I solved the problem doing a clean install and immediately applying every patch available before doing anything else. It looks like the upgrade had left a lot of old audio devices confilicting with the new ones used now. And no suggested solution I tried worked, changing devices priority didn't help, resetting audio worked only until another flash video was played, and often a rebbot too was required, only the clean install (obviously keeping intact my old home directory) worked.

I installed 10.04 on a 3-5 year old desktop to replace XP, and no regrets.

I grabbed my laptop, put 10.04 on a flashdrive and within 20-30 minutes it's running on my desktop.

It basically worked out of the box, except there seems to be a problem with the wireless drivers.

Pros: Quick Installation, Much faster than XP, I like the interface better.

Cons: Some getting used to after using windows my whole life, still some missing files but I can download those off the internet.

Anyone can install it, but you'll need a little bit experience and don't be scared to use the terminal a few times.

Windows 7 > Kubuntu > Ubuntu > OS X

Linux has really dropped the ball on this thing. I have a brand spanking new PC with a 6gb/s SATA interface. It has been how many months now and there is still not support for this? I had to go buy a whole new HDD just so I can get lunix to work on my PC. If it wasn't for some of its usefulness I would never have even bothered with this.