A week into using Ubuntu Desktop

As I had mentioned in my earlier blog, I switched to Ubuntu a few days back and thought I'd give a quick follow-up.
So far, the server seems to be working just fine. However, some 'not-so-great' user experiences are slowly showing up. Here's a quick list.

1. Remote Desktop: Most times, I connect to my server from my laptop. With Windows, this was done using Terminal Services, which gave a fairly seamless experience. Ubuntu has an in-built remote server that can be enabled just as easily as Windows, but I find that the remote experience is far from optimal. I have tried three programs now - Real VNC, Ultra VNC, and Tight VNC - and all of them give a choppy experience, especially at full resolution. Tight VNC is by far the best and that's not saying much. Given that I am connecting within my local network, this is very surprising.
2. Fonts: The desktop fonts are awesome, much crisper and better to read than Windows. However, the fonts within programs, especially Firefox, seems to be a little off. The anti-aliasing doesn't seem to be working properly.
   
3. Mouse scrolling: The scrolling within Firefox also seems to be a bit choppy and not as smooth as Windows.
4. FTP Server: This was surprising for me. Being a UNIX system, I was expecting great support off the bat for an FTP server. True, Ubuntu comes with a number of FTP server options, but none of them were exactly user-friendly, especially for a newbie like me. Compared to this, FileZilla server in Windows was a breeze to work with. I started with the basic FTPd, switched over to Pure FTP, then to Pro FTP, and finally landed up with vsftpd. Pro FTP is recommended in many forums. It even has a nice GUI, but for some reason, it would not list directories once connected I am assuming some permission issue. Anyway, I found vsftpd to be more easy to configure and was finally up and running with it after 30 minutes of configuration.
5. Mail Server: This was another surprise. I was hoping that there'll be a cool mail server built right into the system, but it was not (at least not for a newbie again). The most popular one seems to be Postfix. There's a great how-to for Postfix (combined with 4 other packages for firewall, antivirus, and spamming) from someone in the net. I tried to religiously go through the post, but gave up after the 3rd package. It was just a little too complicated to setup a mail server that was optional for me anyway. I wish there was a server with a more easy to use GUI.

That said, I should also say that I am quite happy with the installation so far. Compared to my earlier attempts where I was forced to uninstall Ubuntu (or Fedora) a couple of days later because of some major function not working, I was able to get almost all my needs taken care of right away. I was even able to get my Scanner (Brother MFC3360C) to work with Ubuntu quickly. So, I think Ubuntu 9.04 is a great step in the right direction to convince users that UNIX can be user-friendly.