On the brighter side of life, I can happily report that I have installed a NEW copy of Linux of an old laptop for my girlfriend. She will continue to use Windows on her personal laptop but will use my old stuff for familiarizing herself with Linux. She is considering a switch but wants to be sure she can be comfortable and productive in an open-source environment.

I definitely hope this works out better than my attempt to convert at work. :-)

I decided to start her out on Ubuntu. It's stable and well-featured. Because of this I have decided to switch my main platform back to Gnome (Ubuntu) rather than my usual KDE based environment. As much as I like KDE, it can be overwhelming for new users and Ubuntu's Gnome implementation always seems to feel more polished than it's KDE equivalent.

So, although KDE 4 looks AMAZING, I'm going to go with "works" for right now. If/when KDE 4 becomes as solid as Ubuntu's Gnome, I'll try it out again. In the mean time I have several thousand pictures that aren't very well organized at this moment because of F-Spot's rather crappy import. It REALLY should be able to label photos with EXIF tags.

Oh well. Maybe I'll start from scratch and move along.