1. Display settings: yes, there is always a high change to get a headache when configuring dual monitors. You have to blame Nvidia and Ati for not making configuring settings any easier. They both do have a graphical user interface to control settings (did you try it skint?), but they are far from perfect, or like what you have seen in Windows world.

For configuring XORG there is for example “dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg” which is a wizard like dialog. That should satisfy basic needs, like mouse setup. But then again it’s also quite low-level editor. I’m suprised though that your extra mouse buttons didn’t work? Or did they work but you couldn’t remap the button actions? Did you try search for other Linux users experience with your mouse model? I’m sure someone knows a solution.

Anyway, the thing is with configuring display settings that unfortunately if you want something special, you need to know what you’re doing, and it will take some time. I’m eagerly waiting for ATI to finish it’s awesome Catalyst Control Center Linux version. That should be revolutionazing, if it’s at all as good as Windows one.

2. You chose 64bit version, but we talked about this already. 64bit scene just is still in the beginning.

I remember when I started using KDE I was also cursing when I didn’t find any working partition manager. Then somebody told be that use GParted, which actually is a Gnome software, but it’s used eg. on Kubuntu install. But since it’s so powerful and Gnome/KDE software can be used together, solution to that is as easy as “apt-get install gparted”. Of course text based fdisk is quite easy too when you get the hang of it.

Things can get mega annoying sometimes indeed, like I finally managed to fix my sound not being available in certain applications yesterday, but now that I know what my problem was, it’s logical and I learned something again and will not do the same mistake again.

Maybe get back sometime in the future when usability has yet improved more. I’m just the kind of “explorer” guy who likes to follow the progress and evolution so much that I couldn’t come back to Windows, even if I tried. It felt like all the “evolution” stopped right there when I was in the Windows world again, so I had to come back.

My only issues at the moment with Linux are that laptop doesn’t power down properly (ACPI support being under development) and sounds are lagging when running programs under Wine.

It’s a pain to have difficult issues but it’s such a victory delightment when you actually find out what’s wrong and fix it. =)