I think I had a vision of hell the other day, being stuck on a flight next to a colleague who was having problems trying to get Ubuntu up & running. I must admit my own experiences have been mixed with it as well.
Having seen your post, SoundBarrier, I've just tried Linux Mint & on first sight I'm very impressed. Even when Ubuntu has worked reasonably well, it's still been a chore to get the multimedia up & running, but LinuxMint just worked straight out of the box, especially a Flash application. It installed quicker too, and with the system monitor swicthed on it's using less memory & sharing the workload across the CPUs far more efficiently than Ubuntu was doing.
I've always had a beef that Linux would always have a problem competing with Windows until you could get Linux straight of the box & it works as well as Windows. So far, Linux Mint has been it so thank you for the recommendation.
Now, dare I offer the install CD to my colleague....?