Here's a cool app for Linux. The six-axis emulator.

http://hackaday.com/2011/05/25/ps3-c...ps-and-bounds/
VIDEO: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MyxK8...layer_embedded

You can use your Linux box's keyboard/mouse to emulate the playstation's controller. Should work well with FPS games.

I must say, Ubuntu is nearing a "real" desktop experience for consumers very quickly. Although many (including me) will complain about the increase in hiding configurations and choosing form over function, it's all the general public can handle - I mean, the iPhone is popular, right?

Having been a Debian user for 10 years, it's great to be able to live boot, install and have a functioning system within 10 minutes that takes little to configure and looks semi-decent. I am very much over building huge packages from scratch and waiting 9 hours for a bootstrap and compile.

Yes talk about fast install, i have my remastersys 10.10 and it is full of programs (or APPS as the modern user would call them) to do video/audio edit and many other things.
I recently bought an 60GB Vertex II, to replace my 30GB Vertex that now in my labtop, and installing my Frost_10.10 from a USB stick to the 60GB Vertex II took only 5 min!!!!, i timed it
And the Frost_10.10 is a 1.2GB install, after install i just have to rearrange the panels, disable screensaver and power settings and thats it, so with all the small changes etc, then it takes under 10min.

My two main distro's for the past x years, Ubuntu and Gentoo.

I used to love Ubuntu, not only for it's easy installation but most and fore all because of it's stability. I really appreciated their quick release cycle while maintaining a decent desktop experience.

Somehow, after 8.04 things went downhill for me. Less stable, more bloat and inconsistent UI approaches throughout subsequent releases.

Never a fan of KDE I have used Gnome for quite a while, but in the end I preferred E17 over any other.

So, when 11.04 came out, and I upgraded the install running on my laptop. I was willing to give Unity a chance. It wouldn't run, telling me my hardware wasn't sufficient. What? A dual core machine, 4 Gigs of RAM, 256 Mb on my graphics card. That is not enough to run a silly thing as Unity on a modern day laptop?

So I am looking into Gentoo again, even though, just like another poster here, I feel I've had my fair share of bootstrapping. Ubuntu seems no longer able to satisfy me the way it used too.

I still use Ubuntu for evangelism, that is, I install it on the machines of people who bore me to death with their constant virus and spyware problems with their Windows installation. For that, it seems good enough. And if they are brave and willing to learn, I install Bodhi linux now, a slimmed down version of Ubuntu with E17 as WM.

After some use, my 11.04 + gnome really works well. Fast and smooth, stable, not candy but sexy enough. I am completely satisfied. (some issue with bluetooth, but it was worse in Vista).

Xfce on the other hand does not seem that responsive, and is still down on features.

Just so nobod says this thread is out of place you can ubuntu on the n900 howto available for 9.10 and 10.04

I'm interested to hear this. My Ubuntu is not terribly stable, but I now suspect that its due to some interaction between Chrome's WebGL and Unity. Sometimes when the screen is waking up (after timing out), the UI freezes completely, and I'm forced to restart.

Just a bug, though somewhat annoying. I hate having to restart my desktop to access apps, and sometimes it comes at the worst possible times. Eg. I use a sip phone and Twinkle to make/take calls, and freezing up in the middle of one and requiring a restart is not cool.

Well, this is the competitor forum, so it should be ok. Ubuntu is not Maemo afterall, and even if they share similar roots, they are indeed competitors.

Have you tried sshing to it when it freezes (and kill xorg, or anything more subtile)? My server used to not boot properly, and would not respond to keyboard input (even SysRq), but I found out it would still let me ssh into it and at least poweroff it properly (and debug/solve if I had the courage, which I generally don't).

Yes, it's just wayland (unity's graphical shell) and the keyboard/mouse still work, though I can't do anything in the UI. I can go to a pure text tty (eg. ctrl-alt-f1), and linux is humming away allowing me to do what I want. I just restart the box, rather than restarting Wayland, as the former is done at the flick of a switch and they both amount to the same thing and take roughly the same amount of time.