What would cause one to leave Windows for Ubuntu?

[confused57]

Originally Posted by bodean Thanks. What is a good starting partition for ubuntu? I have a 100gb drive on my laptop

I would recommend using the desktop live cd for a period of time for compatibility with your hardware & just to get a feel for the OS. The minimum would probably be 10 Gb, but 20 Gb should be a reasonable size to begin with. You may want to wait for some input from others on the forum to help you decide.

[SorenK]

Three of my friends had the exact same experience:

Their Windows XP Home activation suddenly shut off. They didn't change their hardware or anything. It just suddenly failed and wouldn't reactivate using the online reactivation.

So they called Microsoft. The sales rep wouldn't just reactivate it-- he kept on trying to sell them Vista. One of them eventually yelled at the person and demanded that they activate his windows immediately. He told them he had bought a dell, never upgraded the hardware and had the license sticker right on is computer (they all had similar stickers on dells, a toshiba and an hp computer). They finally got forwarded to someone who took their information and actually did their over phone activation.

But the damage was done. They were shocked that their computer had suddenly stopped working and when they called in, the person who supposed to help them, instead seemed to be a salesmen trying to sell them Vista. All three ended up switching to Linux (Ubuntu) after doing Google searches about operating systems and their specific problem with false activation failures.. I had played with Red Hat and Mandrake back before the turn of the millennium so I was interested when 3 people that I know all suddenly switched to Linux, them having known nothing but Windows for the last decade. One of them recommended Ubuntu to me and I checked it out. I don't know if my XP Home installation will spontaneously shut down or not, but right now, it's a non-issue as I haven't booted back into my Windows partition since.

So that's what caused at least 4 people that I know of to leave Windows for Ubuntu.

[johnny4north]

i m leaving windows for mainly this reason, cost. Ubuntu is free and the packages(software) is free. i have spent aprox. $2,000.00 a year, on O.S's and\or software for 9 yrs{9x2,000.00=18,000.00} i have already saved money to buy a 26" sharp HDTV monitor\TV, in just 6mos. i help my friends by upgrading and installing software{also hardware}. now we will be able to afford the best hardware and software [Ubuntu 7.04].

[jdietz]

Those are certainly some tough questions.
I am a new linux user (check my post count). The feature Ubuntu has that the others don't is price: Free. Both of the others cost $$$. This is what attracted me to Ubuntu. I chose Ubuntu over the other distros because "Everybody's using it" (Admittedly that isn't a feature).
I am always going to need a Windows PC because I play games and everyone knows that you can't really play games on Linux. For my other PC, I wanted one that could perform every basic task. Ubuntu already has all the features I need: Word processor, spreadsheet, email, web.
What Ubuntu needs now is better compatibility. I use 6.10, and it was a real pain to set-up and configure. I think it needs GUIs for Net configuration (See/refresh your IP address), and wireless configuration: See available access points, configure ESSID, security type, and security key. A GUI for ndiswrapper would be helpful also, because I (and probably many others) use wireless cards that are not linux compatible. I tried the currently available one (ndisgtk) and it did not work, so I un-installed it, used the terminal for setup and it worked fine. This would help greatly, I think.

[jfl]

As the Harley-Davidson riders say: "If I had to explain, you wouldn't understand"

Seriously, we have 4 computers in the office; they were running W2K which I believe is the most stable Windoze version. We had 2-3 crashes / week.
I installed Breezy on the most mission critical machine (dual boot) and automatic back-up of the critical files on the FAT partition (and on the server).
Then I upgraded to Dapper (ubuntu 6.0.6).
This box have been running continuously since Jan. 2 or 3, used daily, without a hitch.

And also, as a DOS and OS/2 fan, I dislike Micro$oft.

It depends what you want to do; if games are your thing, stay with Windoze; if the computer is an important part of your work environnement AND your are willing to learn, then go for Linux - Ubuntu.

It is not always easy, but you have a tremendous support in these forums.

J.F. Ubuntu 606 rocks

[microsoft92sucks]

Originally Posted by kevinlyfellow Cool your jets, linux will take over the desktop market. Its not for everyone yet, but let people know you use it and that your very happy with it. The old way of developing software is being replaced with open source. Microsoft will find themselves all alone in a few years, with the same buggy os they've always had.

srry but microsoft is EVIL and there bad people.

[starcraft.man]

Originally Posted by microsoft92sucks srry but microsoft is EVIL and there bad people.

I agree that Microsoft is evil, and proved with Vista that it cares more about its corporate backers than the consumer. I wouldn't say they are all evil though, many of the coders are good people just stuck at their jobs, cogs in the machine and not finding offerings for work with google.

Long Live Ubuntu .

Remember to convert your friends ^^

[Tundro Walker]

I know it's late in the game on this topic, and I think I already posted to it once, but I just wanted to vent some more, because this is really irking me.

Last Christmas, my brother knew I was thinking of getting an mp3 player, and got me the Creative Zen Vision:M. I was using Win98 at home at the time, and it wouldn't detect the darn thing, even with USB support installed. I tried installing Creatives "special software", but it required WinXP to install. So, I had an mp3 player that I basically couldn't use.

However, since I use WinXP at work, I got the bright idea to take it in. I hooked it up, it did a little something for a while, finally detected it as "MTP" device (Media Transfer Protocol), and I was able to use it like a normal USB drive, just drag-n-drop. But, it's my work computer, with internet restriction, so I couldn't get some mp3 to load on it. Thwarted again.

So, my roomate, an IT guy, gets a 2nd copy of WinXP from his job, because they had too many (they were switching over to Vista). He let me install it on my home computer to replace my Win98. My Win98 was tweaked to all get out with 98lite for speed and reliability...it was really fast and stable, and I was perfectly happy to keep using it. But, MS wasn't happy with me still using it, because I couldn't use current software or hardware. Let's hear it for forced obsolesence. Booo!

WinXP installed far smoother then I expected, and a little tweaking and I was ready to go. I plug in the mp3 player, and nothing. I later found out WinXP will only auto-detect and use MTP devices as USB drives if you have Win Media Player 10 or 11 installed. I didn't. In fact, I got rid of Win Media Player, because I was tired of it letting Internet Explorer pop-ups and such load even though I UNINSTALLED Internet Explorer from the computer, because I don't like it or its security risks (preferring Firefox instead). So, there's another reason to drive me away from Microsoft... When I uninstall software on my computer, in this case Internet Explorer, it better darn well be gone! When I'm doing something in Win Media Player, and suddenly Internet Explorer fires off a pop-up, letting me know that it's not only still installed, but still used as default web-browser for certain things, it's like a punch in the face. So, then I'm totally questioning the Windows Uninstaller. Is it really uninstalling stuff, or is it just some pretty GUI that acts like it's doing something just to appease the user, but in actuallity, it's doing whatever IT wants to do, not what YOU want it to do. So, another issue that drove me away...I was tired of feeling like I didn't have control over my OS. I felt like it was doing whatever MICROSOFT wanted it to do rather than what I wanted it to do. And with the random slowdowns, etc while working on it, it was like someone else was controlling my computer at times. Seriously, the OS is supposed to be their to respond to me. Why am I waiting for it to finish grinding away on some mysterious task so I can finally get back to running some other program at a reasonable speed?!

Anyways, I install Creative's special software on the now WinXP computer, finally get some mp3 transfer going again, but Creative's software sucks. You can't edit files on the mp3 player like it's an actual drive (like you could if you had Win Media Player 10 installed...argh!). You have to edit id3 tags and such on your computer, then wait another 20 min to transfer your Gigs of mp3 back to the stupid mp3 player. How annoying.

So then I had a big fiasco with WinXP wiping itself out when I tried using Disk Cleanup utility to wipe out the old Win98 install files. (This borked the whole installation and then some...of 8gb I had on my disk, only 250mb was left..I know, because I was dual-booting with Ubuntu and mounted the drive to check.)

So, I ditched Windows permanantly, but I have problems getting the mp3 player to work with Ubuntu because it's an MTP player, not a generic UMS player. So, another annoyance... USB was adopted as a standard, and all OS' picked up on it. But, Microsoft didn't like interoperability, so they dream up some "Plays For Sure" & "MTP" bull and get Creative and other mp3 player makers to buy into it to create a whole line of mp3 players locked into Windows.

Fortunately, Linux folks have made libraries for MTP support. But still, it's just annoying how MS leverages the market in their favor. Because they're an island unto themselves, they can act like nobody else exists in the world. And customers are thought of as nothing more than cattle they want to keep pastured so they can constantly milk them.

Seriously, Microsoft is the play-ground bully that's threatening lunch money from people, and Apple is the play-ground defender trying to protect people from Microsoft, but only if they support Apple. Meanwhile, Linux is the hippie of the group, because it want's to play nice, provide interoperability & protability of devices and software formats, and focus on the user's best interests (because the motivation for profit has been reduced or eliminated).


...and if all that isn't good enough...another reason to not like Windows...at Best Buy, if you try to buy some regular, Joe Average USB extension cable, the box says "Windows Compatible!". It's a freakin' USB cable for crying out loud! That's like selling gas for a car and saying "Honda Compatible!", and charging a buck more because it's "special". Seriously, I think just some good, old-fashioned consumer education would help clear up a lot of the Microsoft annoyance.

Thanks for listening...

[lotacus]

Well, I left Windows because I was bored of it. All the different versions of Windows used to suffice my boredom, however, this time wasn't the case. I tried a few different distro's and there was always something that made me switch back to Windows. One day I decided to give Ubuntu a try. I previously didn't bother with it because it looked like a very boring distro with it's boring looking GUI in it's screenshots. When I got it installed, everything I had worked out of the box, except for the video card. Now, I don't know why this is. I mean the Live CD will install the accelerated drivers, but once I installed it permanatly, accelleration wouldn't be enabled.

The only thing that was next, was to optimize Ubuntu for my liking and along the way, even though it was tedious and frustrating at times, I had fun learning all the basics that Linux users now would probably take for granted. Not to mention, every problem I had come across, or every question I had, was found in the forums, or on some Wiki.

Now, because of being hesitant with Linux, I always had a dual boot thing happening with my system. Then one day, I just had enough of Windows. I didn't see the reason why I should have both Windows and Linux on my system if the tasks I did could be done on either operating system. So I got rid of Windows, and for the applications that I needed that wouldn't run on Linux I just used a VM. Though, now I am not dependant on those windows only applications anymore and don't use the VM much. Maybe twice a week for a very short time, say two hours, and only for things that I could live without, but would rather not. LOL.

I think the thing that is keeping me with linux is the fact that I always have something to do. I am always finding problems which need fixing, or things that need to be installed or configured or what not.

It's a lot of fun learning. I just hope I don't get bored with Linux the way I got bored with Windows, else I just may end up with a console system typing dir all the time.

[freebird54]

One cure for boredom - try to figure what *OTHERS* have done to their systems, and help them on here

I know what you mean - I wasn't on the computer much for quite a while except for work, as it was uninvolving with Windows - and it was so hard to find out what it was REALLY doing under there when it screwed it. That, and 20 reboots per fix... (after having the OS in ROM for so long )