I’m approaching 6 months of use of Ubuntu on the Dell Inspiron 9400 at work. I remain completely digging on it, and I have shocked more than one person by suggesting that I find this a pretty comparable substitute for my iBook. If that burst in flames tomorrow, I wouldn’t find moving to an Inspiron with Ubuntu a disappointment.
One of the things I like about this laptop is that it has multimedia keys. There are play, pause and launch buttons. When I’m playing MP3s on the laptop, I can pause from either the external keyboard or the laptop itself. One bummer of the default 6.06 setup is that the “music player” application is hardcoded in this version to be rhythmbox, which is a pretty rudimentary application that I’m not so wild about. I much prefer amarok and wanted to make it the default when I hit the music note button. I tried and failed to change the default and finally ran across this bug report on the issue (by way of this forum.) Long story short, you have to make a symlink early in the path so that the system is tricked into opening amarok when it thinks it is trying to open rhythmbox. With this little hack, my badass laptop became measurably 17.2% more awesome.