How is Ubuntu? Is it pretty stable? How about compatibility with hardware? I was looking at it a year or 2 ago.
it's a lot more stable now than it was then. it recognized everything on my notebook immediately. wireless, sound card, graphics, even the media buttons above the keyboard (i have an HP dv6000). i constantly use stuff from the "unstable" and "testing" repos, so a program will go grey once in a while but the OS is surprisingly stable overall. no problems at all.
they have a liveCD for it now, so you can take it for a test run. i have to admit a lot of the fun is just the visual effects.