Ubuntu Linux
I have installed Ubuntu Linux v5.04 on my Dell Inspiron 6000. It is dual boot with Windows XP. I had to resize my NTFS partition with a separate program, ntfsresize, to make room for Ubuntu. That was not for the faint of heart. It took quite awhile, well over an hour. Also, ntfsresize was not on the Ubuntu install CD. I had to get a system recovery CD to find it.
After the repartioning, the install went smoothly. Ubuntu supports my wireless card only partially. WEP is not supported yet by the open source acx100 driver. I have used it successfully without WEP. I mostly am using wired ethernet right now.
The default install is a little thin by my tastes. I had to add Thunderbird, gnucash, g++, smbfs, but they were available in the various repositories. The need to install smbfs was surprising. I wanted to mount some Samba shares and I was surprised that it did not work. I could browse and find the share using nautilis, but mount kept complaining that the filesystem type was not supported.
I installed RealPlayer following the direction in the Ubuntu Guide. It installed fine but when I started it nothing happened. It turns out that RealPlayer conflicts with ESS which is on by default in Ubuntu. Once I turned off ESS, I was able to use RealPlayer.
The default desktop environment is Gnome 2.10. It looks quite nice. It is uncluttered.