My son bought me a RPi for my birthday just before Christmas. I'd read about it months ago and marked it down as something to look at down the track but like many tech items these days, you just never get the time to check out every product that comes along. In the back of my mind I think I'd already filed it in the toy/gimmick/cheap/no practical use/boring folder. So when I opened it my first thought was that it would give me something to play with over the holidays. Like most of us, my first port of call with something new is Professor Google, and I was surprised by the vast number of websites for such a fairly newish product. I must admit that I was not too inspired by the stock Rasbian OS that came with it even though I'm a fan of Debian and have been running Mint Debian Edition on my desktop PC for quite some time. I tried a number of OS's including Risc OS which made me feel like I'd warped back to the 80's - no offence implied but it was a very quaint experience. The RPi was growing on me and I started to think about it as a media centre. The many postings I'd read about RPi media centres were putting to rest my reservations about the RPi's small size and limited power. At that point I downloaded XBMC, flashed it onto an SD, and booted up the Pi. During the set up it did a number of reboots (just like in the world of Windows,) and then everything was just working exactly as it should. Prior to this I'd used several media centres and there was always something that wasn't quite right. Whilst Mythbuntu has some excellent features, I personally found it a little bloated - not as bad as Windows MC - but sometimes a bit on the slow side. Our need for a media centre is driven by a massive collection of music, photos, and movies totalling almost 2 Tbytes. My conclusion is that the combination of the RPi and XBMC makes an excellent MC. The proof of the pudding being that my non-tech wife took to it in an instant and has so far failed to break anything. 
