Quite sincerely, I just tried switching to Ubuntu 13.04 (from Win7) on my gaming machine (4GB Ram, some Nvidia card that I can play BF3 very well), and it doesn't "Run" like Windows either.
Chrome is slow to start, videos don't load properly, ejecting the pendrive fails...
The situation described by GP is so ridiculous that it's unlikely to be true, which is why I wouldn't recommend anyone to waste their time trying to solve the mentioned "problems".
I mean, really, why would anyone switch from Windows to Ubuntu on a gaming machine? Just think about it for a sec.
(Videos not loading or USB not working are issues the OEM are supposed to handle. The fact that someone like GP can't tell even the series of their GPU hints strongly toward them using a prebuilt computer - yet expecting to be able to work as their own Linux OEM, which one could argue is more difficult than being a Windows OEM.)
(I don't really care about the specific model of the board, because there are dozens to chose from. But I checked my email, its an Evga GTX650 1Gb DDR5. Oh, I avoided ATI because of past problems with Linux.)
Why Linux? Because coding (web stuff) on Windows sucks. Expandrive hasn't been working that well for me, makes explorer sluggish, etc.
Of course I didn't replace Windows - Ubuntu suggests you to install it along Windows (that part works really well these days).
See, the other day someone posted on HN that their Unity experience was bad because they had used a slow computer; I bought that idea and tried on the PC this time. (Then I went to XFCE, as usual. Which also failed on me, as I mentioned about the USB drive problem).
I should have videotaped myself installing and using Ubuntu - its just dozens of tiny UX mistakes that make me mad.
The problem is that everything has to work really well for a "power user" to use a computer happily. I can't believe someone that says the experience/aesthetics of Ubuntu matches that of OSX.
I absolutely don't want anyone to help me solve the problems (they were examples, there were dozens)[1] which you consider imaginary - my algorithm regarding Linux on the Desktop is to come back every 6 months and try it again).
(BTW, VLC works very well, I meant web based videos.)
[1] Small example: When I clicked "Install" on Synaptic, the button state didn't change until several seconds had passed, then the box asking for the root password pops up. By that time, I had already clicked it again several times.
Actually, opening this very tweet shows me squares instead of characters in some places. (It migh be "my fault" since I installed something called Infinality to improve font rendering. Oh well.)
I installed ubuntu alongside windows on my alienware, and I'm quite happy with it, I only switch to windows to play dota 2 and amalur, for browsing, other games and miscellaneous tasks I use linux.
Well I did. So far I have close to 100 native games and I have been able to play a lot of recent games with playonlinux. So not bad at all. One of the few things missing is decent Everything clone for linux - something that reads directly from the journal and is able to find files instantly by names without useless indexing of the contents.
Everybody has different hardware etc., but for what it's worth, OpenSUSE never let me down. So if you feel like you have another go in you before you completely give up on Linux, try that maybe.
As for the videos, if you aren't already, use VLC, it seems to have a trillion obscure codecs baked into it.. I would go so far to say if it doesn't play in VLC, there is either a problem elsewhere, or it's not a video file.
Chrome is slow to start, videos don't load properly, ejecting the pendrive fails...