What's wrong with Ubuntu?

I had hoped to have been able to report on how well the installation of the new version of Ubuntu went. I installed Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex - I kid you not) after a bit of a struggle with booting the live CD as it appears to not like my hardware, even though Ubuntu 8.04 works like a dream with it. On the plus side at least ubuntu was able to ignore minor errors, and carry on through to install and update itself. Once booted, it works very well indeed, it just takes a while to get through the boot process hanging on occasion, unlike Ubuntu 8.04 which boots with incredible speed getting to a log on almost as fast as my Mac at about 15 seconds.

Windows Vista on my laptop has an issue with the graphics card driver whereby it pauses the boot process for 30 seconds while it does something deep and meaningful. Technically I have installed the wrong driver so I don't blame Vista at all. I can't help having to install the wrong driver since nVidia in all their wisdom does not make a graphics card driver that is compatible with the card it made!

I have a Sony Vaio top of the range (in its day) GRT996VP, which has an nVidia 5600m gfx card. The driver provided by Sony for Vista does not address video ram correctly, leading to a low res display, it is also increadibly slow. The driver provided by nVidia does not recognise the mobile version of the card pointing you back to the manufacturur. By forcing the installation of the desktop 5600 nVidia driver everything works perfectly apart from a pause during boot and very slight corruption when not using Aero (Vista's 3D desktop).

Ubuntu 8.04 on the other hand automatically finds and installs the correct driver to support the features of my strange graphics card. Ubuntu 8.10 does the same, but also suffers from hanging during boot although there is no corruption switching between 3D desktop mode (compiz) and 2D.