I'm currently triple booting WinXP, Ubuntu 7.10, and Fedora 9 on my desktop. Most of my time is spent in Ubuntu. I think it is a fantastic OS and I play TF2 in it quite often. I would even say that I play TF2 in it a large majority ( > 90%) of the time. I try to boot into XP as little as possible. I have been a Linux user for roughly 8 years however and have tried Slackware, Redhat/Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, Mandrake, and a few others so I'm no stranger to Linux.
ubuntu isn't to friendly with custom built but works fine on mine.
I couldn't disagree with you more on this statement. Go to any Linux forum (or more specifically, go to the Ubuntu forums) and start asking about hardware. I guarantee you that you will see just about every x86 processor, every motherboard brand, and so on represented. I don't know anyone that has had a problem installing Ubuntu simply because it was on a custom built system. I think it's blanket statements like this that help scare people away from Linux. I can only assume that it probably runs well on Dell systems since they (I'm assuming) explicitly tested Ubuntu on their hardware before shipping it, but that doesn't mean that it can't run on other hardware.
For those of you wanting to try it and not have to worry about messing up your hd. Get wubi
http://wubi-installer.org/
I just read up on this and I'm intrigued. I'll have to try this and see what this does. By default, Ubuntu comes on a live CD so you can pop the CD into the drive, reboot, and it will launch and run entirely from memory. It does not touch your hard drive. Furthermore, even if you do run the installer, if Windows is already installed on the drive, then the Ubuntu installer repartitions your hard drive automatically for you. It offers a very intuitive little slider that allows you to drag it left or right (left to shrink the size of the Windows partition, and right to shrink the size of the Ubuntu partition. It of course also shows the size of the partition and the percentage of the drive). It also properly configures the menu.lst (grub's config file) for you. So you can dual-boot Windows and Ubuntu without doing anything but running the Ubuntu installer. It sets everything up for you. So I'm interested to see what Wubi does. Thanks for the link!