I finally did it! I moved from Windows 7 to Ubuntu 14.04. It’s not entirely great but it’s working and I can make as many changes as I want.
Problems
Unity Launcher - Honestly it’s damned annoying, I hate how I can’t move it to the right hand side of the screen which would be much better with my dual monitor configuration.
2nd Sound Card didn’t work - Troubleshooted it and for once everything actually seemed ok. I had to install a 3rd party mixer to find that the card was muted and worked.
Default Ubuntu still looks butt ugly. Fixed that with a new theme and some tweaks that I’ll cover later.
Weird font issues in Firefox, there is a bug report going back to 13.04 but no movement on it.
Solutions and Tweaks
Unity Launcher - I’ve hidden it and switched to using Cairo Dock which acts as a nice copy of the OSX dock. Still need to figure out how to get it accross two screens.
I’ve installed the Numix theme and Unity Tweak Tools to configure my desktop. It’s looking a lot nicer now.
Solarized Dark and Andale Mono font in terminal, also disable bold font in terminal preferences as it just doesn’t look good.
Netflix in Firefox - You can get netflix to work in firefox by using Pipelight I followed this guide - http://www.webupd8.org/2013/08/pipelight-use-silverlight-in-your-linux.html - you’ll also need to switch your user agent for Netflix to work. I’m currently watching Sword Art Online in another Firefox window (I’m hoping the story gets better!)
Hopefully I’ll post more tweaks later for reference. I’m still getting used to a few things and there’s still a lot more learning to do.