I don't get how automatically detecting hardware / finding drivers is supposed to be some huge acheivement, but I think we can all agree that right now, Windows and Linux install equally easily, provided that you don't use obscure hardware (however, Vista was able to automatically find and install drivers for my TV Tuner, whereas with Linux, it took me hours of hunting before I got a driver that required a complicated install process that almost made me cry). The major problem with Linux is the programs.

Let's start with the package manager. I liked the centralization of everything, however the part I didn't like was how I was relying on Ubuntu's cooperation in making sure their packages are constantly updated. Usually, I had to wait a few days, if not weeks, before the latest version was delivered to me (I went 3 weeks without realizing that there was a new version of XGL (Which is a pretty popular program), so I decided to add the official XGL release repository to my sources list, to which then it caused conflicts and broke apt-get, to the point where I couldn't install any programs. I managed to get it working again, but it wasn't exactly a fun process).

Well, for the times when the package manager WAS working, installing programs was pretty easy. Just go into a terminal (Grandma: Will I have to type for this?) and say sudo apt-get install _______. The part about it wanting my password was a bit irritating, but I didn't break my back over it. I went with the advice on www.ubuntuguide.org to assist me in choosing which program was best. What I found was that on top of a flawed program delivery system, the programs themselves were crap. Talk about homebrew pieces of shit, almost all of the programs were waay underdeveloped (especially visually). Even if they did appear complete, they were much buggier than they should be. For instance, Blender and Firefox crashed far more often than their Windows versions. The only FTP program I could find was gFTP, that crashing monstrocity, the only IRC client I could use was Xchat, which developed some weird character bug in which ugly unicode characters with hexadecimal in them surrounded people's nicks on every line (I later resorted to mIRC in WINE, because I started needing decent logs for stats and stuff).

There was more but I don't feel like recollecting any further.