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I hope you don't tell people that survival is all it's good for. I spend much of my working life in vi, and for making ad-hoc changes quickly there is little to match it. Add Firemacs to Firefox and not only does it give you Emacs keybindings, you get vi keybindings for free too! C-x k to close that window, h and j to switch tabs - it's dreamy. Pick the best tool for the job though, sometimes sed is the better tool, sometimes a perl script.

Firemacs rocks. Look: Firemacs!

1) nVidia's drivers cannot be bundled by Red Hat for licensing reasons. If you want them to be bundled and auto-installed, petition nVidia to release their drivers as free software.

2) New hardware isn't exactly an advantage when using Linux, because support for it is often provided by volunteers and needs time to get mature. If you want official Linux drivers, petition the manufacturer. This is not a problem of Linux, it's a problem of any OS that wants to compete with a monopoly OS. A Linux-preinstalled machine does obviously not have this problem, but MS has so far prevented dual boot Windows/Linux machine sales through OEM pressure.

3) Users who want to install the latest software from source or CVS should expect this to be a non-trivial procedure, regardless of the OS being Linux or Windows (the latter of which comes with QBASIC and VBScript as its only development tools, the better one, QBASIC, is no longer part of recent releases). If you want to install software that immediately runs, use your distribution's packaging and installation system. In the Red Hat case, this is called up2date and is commercial. You can also spend time instead of money and install something like apt4rpm to make package installation simpler. You can also use Ximian's Red Carpet for free (but it is primarily geared towards GNOME applications). Other distributions like Debian (which you can try out using the fantastic Knoppix) provide even more sophisticated mechanisms.

4) I have used OpenOffice Impress. It's somewhat unstable but imports PowerPoint presentations reasonably well and has most of PowerPoint's features (and some of its own). I have found the script-based MagicPoint more satisfying in getting quick and pretty results (example pres I did about Mono). If you get over the fact that it isn't yet another PowerPoint clone but actually a different way to do things, it's pretty cool.

KPresenter may eventually bcome the best graphical presentation tool, but is not there yet. You can run PowerPoint nicely under Linux using Crossover Office and, probably, with some tweaking, under the free WINE.

5) Homemade karaoke VCDs: Exotic end user stuff like that usually takes extra effort on Linux because too few people care about it to develop free, easy to use apps, and desktop Linux is not yet sufficiently wide-spread to be commercially targeted for such applications. Obviously, the best way to change this is to stop using the monopoly OS and to use Linux instead, or to fund development efforts.

6) 3D speed: I don't play FPS, so I can't comment much on that. Last time I tried 3D stuff under Linux, it worked as intended, so I didn't check the FPS. DirectX is obviously a quite sophisticated API and the Win32 drivers are highly optimized, though, so until Linux game companies start targeting Linux as a major platform, I wouldn't be surprised by about 10-20% speed differences.

In conclusion, your problems resulted from you doing stuff that basic users shouldn't do unless willing to spend the effort (trying to install software from source), not using one of the free or commercial software installation tools, and not checking hardware compatibility properly. Many of the problems are not problems of Linux as an OS but problems of a market dominated by a monopolist. Therefore, your attitude that you hope that Linux will "fix" these problems is somewhat naive, the way to fix them is to support Linux so there is no longer a monopolist who imposes market conditions under which much of the software you miss so dearly (drivers, Karaoke, games) can be developer.

Obviously, you can also continue to use Windows. It's sufficient for basic desktop stuff, and Microsoft has some very interesting and powerful features coming up, like "trusted computing". But while you continue to buy their software, you are part of the problems you criticize.

Now comes the important part. in a month, I'm switching over to a completely linux system, and I'm gonna need a replacement for Office. so who's it gonna be?:)

OpenOffice looks good, but when I tried it several times during 2001 it was slow and crashed all the flaming time. I'm sure it's improving but I got bored waiting. Therefore:

To replace Word: KWord looks cool, but I couldn't get equations to work properly. LyX is really nice if you take the time to understand the concepts behind LaTeX and WYMIWYG. LyX especially rocks for editing equations, but it'll do everything else you could want too, and the output is beautiful. Abiword isn't there yet (tables etc.) but might be one day.

To replace Excel: Gnumeric.

To replace Outlook: I actually use IMP, a webmail application. I retrieve pop3 email with fetchmail, make it available via IMAP (one of Debian's IMAP packages) and access it with IMP, on apache-ssl for security, from home and anywhere else with an internet connection. Best thing about IMP is it's the fastest email client I've used! I have folders with hundreds, some with thousands, of emails and the likes of Balsa or Evolution can take forever to access them (if they don't crash). IMP takes seconds, and it never crashes! (I use Galeon for my web browsing/ IMP access). The HORDE project of which IMP is a part is actually an entire groupware suite, but I've only used IMP.

PowerPoint: MagicPoint looks pretty good but I've never used it.

Access: Postgresql or mysql should more than meet your needs. There are nice GUI tools available for both.

Best of luck.

Ok so it's not gnintegrated, but MagicPointrocks.

Achtung is vaporware at this point. Linux is making very few inroads on the laptop. The most robust slide presentation software is MagicPoint. Another relatively stable piece of slide presentation software is Kpresenter . Staroffice is the only version to allow Powerpoint imports.

Of course, you could do all the slidemaking in postscript and use just about anything to present it.

Yeah, Dia will rock when it's done. Wow! They've added a LOT of stuff since the last CVS snapshot I grabbed. Does anyone know when the next release will be?

While we're talking about non-MS productivity apps, I'd like to also mention that

MagicPoint

rocks!