They're not "Ubuntu drivers". The fglrx proprietary drivers are not exclusive to Ubuntu and if you're talking about the latest release 9.04 then I'm afraid the proprietary driver won't support that card as it's now considered legacy.
I know they are "Ubuntu drivers" lol but the way fglrx is implemented into Ubuntu, it detects my ATI in one machine whereas in other distros I must manually find and they sometimes don't work/weird bugs with the rainbows and sleep. Sure it's ATI's fault, but at least Ubuntu gets the best results.
Nvidia has good Linux support not good Ubuntu support. You're confusing what is Ubuntu and what is GNU/Linux.
Ubuntu is Linux, and if I asked any novice what Linux is they'd either say the penguin, Ubuntu, or they'd be totally confused. As for the NVidia support again, Ubuntu installs an NVidia control panel and in other Linuxes you must manually find.
Sorry to burst your bubble but this is because of HP's pretty good Linux support and not Ubuntu.
Other Linux distros I installed did not place the HP icon in my toolbar and I couldn't use all the features without manually finding a method, yet again. It's the way Ubuntu sees the big picture with automating what what would be difficult processes to the average user.
Once again you're confusing the issue. Wireless is still an issue and it depends almost entirely on which wireless chipset you have. Later versions of Ubuntu have simply shipped with updated wireless drivers. If you had a wireless chipset that doesn't work so well then you would be thinking very differently. Again the credit goes to the
developers of such open source drivers and not Ubuntu. Other distributions also have these updated drivers. Debian 5.0 supports my wireless adaptor and loads the same kernel module for it that Ubuntu 9.04 does. This is because this functionality/support in Ubuntu has come from upstream.
Ubuntu is Deibian based so it's bound to share smilarities. Ubuntu/Debain ships these built in wheras in other non-Debian Linuxes it's a manual find/download/install & re-load modules or reboot and pray there's no problems. The wireless I had troubles with was BCM4300 (I think) and it works fine in Windows/OS X/Ubuntu like 8.04 or higher, any Ubuntu lower or other distros I'd get random disconnects etc. so it's something they did in Ubuntu to fix it.
I have given it a shot. I've used it since 6.06 and I am now in the position to know that it's nothing special - mostly hype. The 64 bit version is not stable, neither are any of the Ubuntu releases stable. It's based on the unstable Debian release. Most distros have 64 bit releases, including Debian, so I'm not sure where you've got the idea from that Ubuntu is unique in that?
I know some distros have 64-bit releases, I wouldn't say most. Slackware's 64 release as I said has funny results vs the 32 bit. As for Ubuntu's 64-bit stablility, I have had no crashes whatsoever. Even when my NTFS was corrupted from un-clean mounts in Win7 and causing BSOD's until I finally fixed it, and OS X was random panicing for god knows why (hackintosh glitches possibly), the only OS working fine was Ubuntu 64.
Very vague... the non detection of the CD is not unusual. This happens in windows all the time. The solution is often rather complex. It's probably down to you having a SATA CDROM drive. Such distros as slackware are very stripped down so you can't expect them to fully support every piece of hardware.
Yes but the thing is, with 32 bit Slack, it installed and worked fine when installed on this one system I have with 4GB of RAM and Q6600. Slam64 however (which to my understanding is Slackware w/ 64-bit kernel) booted to the installer from the disc but during the install process it could not find the disc! So I tried network installs from removable devices, etc. and still the same error. Spent a few hours in IRC trying to get the bottom of the problem but everyone was puzzled). Windows 7, Ubuntu, and Leopard all saw the drive fine, along with the BIOS.
So from personal experience as being a technology enthusiast working with a variety of machines w/ different hardware, Ubuntu now the way it is, has the best results from a fresh install as a Linux distro, not to mention a Live CD which many but not all distro's have. Drivers load from the Live CD out of the box so you can test a new machine and it's hardware compatibility, it's a nice clean UI so it makes for a great rescue disc you can hand to friends that are non-technical, support is always there if not on the forums, in IRC (which I admit is pretty bad because of the flooding of "newbs" and their questions). Even from a fresh Ubuntu install to a newcomer, they will still need help until it reaches the point where out of the box, "everything works".
Just a few hours ago my friend couldn't delete the songs from his MP3 player in XP so I plugged it in my Windows 7 laptop and they still wouldn't delete. Booted into Ubuntu 9.04 Live CD, didn't see the player so I unplugged it and plugged it back in, detected it, auto-mounted, double clicked the icon and cleared the MP3 players contents fine. Sure, all Linuxes that support mounting FAT/whatever the drive was, but I could easily tell which partition the drive was because it showed with an autorun dialog and the icon of MP3 player and it even detected the brand.
My 2^2 cents.