Until a few weeks ago, that would have been me.

I tried Linux about four or five years ago, and that was enough for
me. In the 80's, I fooled around with just about whatever there was.
TI, Apple, Commodore, Amiga, CP/M, MS-Dos, Mac, and even a Novix
computer that ran a native Forth system. At one point I wanted one of
everything, and spent many an hour getting data from one system and
format to another.

However, in the mid 90's the computer groups died, the computer had
become an appliance and the point for my interest was no longer the
computer but what you could do with it. So I quit focusing on the OS
and the innards, and was busy playing with graphics, video, and
getting peripherals to work well.

When I tried Linux, and I did try a couple of flavors, the graphical
interface appeared amaturish compared to Mac and MS. My sound card
didn't work. My video card didn't work at full resolution. My
scanner didn't work. And there were other dissapointments. To be
fair, I only played with it for a few days, and probably could have
gotten most everything working if I would have spent the time to find
out what I needed for drivers, and edited configuration files
appropriately. I felt then, and I still do strongly feel now, that to
be a viable operating system the OS should install, find everything
that is hooked-up, install the drivers, and away you go. Now that
being said, I also appreciate it if I can take manual control to tweak
things and get better performance. But just like my other hobby
(photography), I want manual override, but sometimes I just want to
take a snapshot and be done with it. I don't want to have to fiddle
when there isn't time to, in order to catch a fleeting moment for a
good picture.

Sooooo, about a month ago..... We had a project here at work, where
we needed to back-up images of SCO Unix and HP Unix hard drives. We
had tape back-ups, but our customer requested copies of the drive
images for safe keeping. Our resident Unix/Linux guru suggested
trasferring the images to DVDs. Well the Unix machines are about 8
years old. None of them have a DVD burner. So, our resident guru
says we can do it with Linux and Windows. Linux to make images and
get them on a USB hard drive, and Windows to burn the images to DVD.
When he told me that we didn't even need to build a Linux box, I was
very interested and a bit skeptical.

In he walks with a Knoppix live CD, and boots the machine off of the
CD. Impressive! The computer did have an Adaptec SCSI controller
installed, so we hooked the drives out of the Unix computers to the
SCSI controller, one by one, and used the amazingly powerful DD
command to transfer images of the drives to a NTFS formatted USB hard
drive. Then hooked the USB drive to a computer with a DVD burner and
burned our DVDs.

Add to that, that the graphical interface was beautiful and that
everything worked! Graphics were at full acceleration, sound was
working, all from a CD.

My Franken-puter has hard drive racks that are removeable. (I make
DVDs of some of the stuff off my satellite dish from time to time, and
it saves wear and tear on my cables.)

I installed 8.04 on one of my drives, and again just about everything
works. I will have to play with drivers and configurations to get my
Epson R280 working properly. (I like the way it prints to printable
CDs.) And I will have to get my Canon scanner set up.

But still, this appears to be an operating system that is ready for
prime time and one that I can live with.

And to tell you the truth.... Though long ago I declared that, "I just
want to be able to use my computer to do things, and not be fooling
with the OS anymore.", I have to admit I am having more fun with my
computer than I have in over 10 years. I used to miss the early days
of personal computers and all the flavors and choices. Looks to me
like the choices and the fun are back!