so far great. laptop boots in under 2 minutes (ver >5 in windows) and i have already set up the IM and dvd codec. Downloading Ultimate now. Only thing I need to do is get a firewall and maybe anti virus set up but I can do that next week.
there are some good 3rd party firewalls out there, but as far as A/V the only *real* threat for linux is rootkits, and if you are unfortunate and/or foolish enough to get one, there's not really anything you can do about it other than start over. another good policy from the getgo is blacklisting most 3rd world (IT sense) domain names in the hosts.deny file and making sure all unneeded services are disabled . using aptget for most of your software needs should keep you safe most of the time, and using firefox with noscript and adblock will further help.