I got a little desktop (Acer Aspire X1700 with a Q8200 quad core and 4GB RAM, ATI Radeon HD 4350) and after I was done with installing that, I also installed a new Ubuntu 9.04 from a LiveCD. This was a nice way of installing by the way because you can just boot to Ubuntu and then start the installer there once you're ready evaluating the Live environment that runs from DVD. After I figured out the partitioning (I wanted to take away 100mb from my second partition and give that to linux - took me a little while to figure out, but I managed it) everything else was a doodle mostly (except stupid stuff like wanting to update Firefox 3.0 to 3.5.1, which for some reason Ubuntu doesn't want you to do very soon - if you want to keep up to date there's a special tool to upgrade before Ubuntu wants you).
So far I'm pretty happy and mentally am continuously pitching it against Vista. I have Ubuntu now as default bootup, because its much faster, because I want to try and see how far I can get with it (I originally considered trying to buy a new machine somewhere without a Windows licence and just get a pure Linux box), and because I haven't tried figuring out yet how to change the default boot in Grub (which is currently Ubuntu of course
).
I also got VMWare working in it, so it seems like basically I could do all my Windows related work on this box no problem, which is cool (we work within images pretty much all the time).
I installed the ATI driver, but I have no idea if it works - when I tried opening some kind of control panel for it that crashed. Installing latest Catalyst drivers gave me BSOD on Vista as well, kind of disappointing.
Just use the restricted drivers manager built into Ubuntu.
As for privacy, simply disabling 3rd party cookies in your web browser should be sufficient.
Yeah, that's what I used.
On the other hand, my old Graphire tablet works great with GIMP under Ubuntu, whereas GIMP under Vista has some kind of weird bug it seems. Then again the pen-tablet support works with the Graphire on Vista, which is pretty neat. On the Ubuntu side again, our old Epson 1200 scanner works great under Ubuntu, but isn't supported at all under Vista.