Ubuntu is a Linux Distribution designed to be easy-to-use and user friendly, unlike many other distro's which require much command-line hacking to keep running.

The latest version "Gutsy Gibbon", is the most "polished" edition yet. As for the naming convention, they are going through the alphabet, and picking an adjective and an animal, so the next version pretty much has to be called "Hungry Hippo". ;)

Anyhow, Gutsy contains the much awaited "compiz fusion", which is a hugely improved graphical interface layer to provide powerful visual effects much like Windows Vista. Some of it is fairly useless, but quite a few of the options are actually very useful.

As for installation, I have to say - the installer was extremely impressive on my test machine (Dell 6400 laptop). After installation, absolutely everything worked, right down to the wireless access. I was expecting to have to configure things and hunt down/install drivers, but amazingly, it was all setup for me already.

The test machine just has an onboard intel graphics card, but it handles the visual effects beautifully.

Wireless was almost the only area I could see some improvement. The default "network manager" seems very limiting, and seems to only allow a single wireless profile. It also seems to flake out and refused to re-connect if you hibernate the computer (re-entering the details seemed to force it to however). I had a play around with wicd (an alternative) but although it connected the first time, it refused to connect again. It did provide all of the extra options required however.

All in all, I think we're extremely close to something that can be a viable alternative to windows for the average user. Give it another year, or maybe two before it's perfect, but it's getting close!