Why do you choose Ubuntu over Windows

[jasonrisenburg]

You had me at free...Free.....FREEEEE!

Free OS
Free updates
free software
and great forum support.

Not to mention the only way it gets virus's is if you allow it to happen. I have never had a virus on my Ubuntu Lappy. My wife and I have had several viruses on windows. I comes down to what do you want to pay for. games and virus, or stability and free safety.

[TeamRocket1233c]

Whatever you wanna use, it's your choice.

[capricornday]

ubuntu is for human beings, a lot of bug, but a lot of help from each other.
every 6 months have a surprise
windows is so borring.

[dave2001]

I remember starting with a Commodore 64 and a 300 Baud Hayes modem and after a couple of years buying my first 386 PC with 2 megs of ram, man was those the days. You could crawl faster then chatting on a BBS back then. After using Dos 3.1 ( I think it was called) then to windows, then onto Win 95

Ceratopsia

Heheh, those were the day indeed! Days of typing a command, and then waiting... and waiting some more.. and maybe getting a sandwich.. before the command finally completed. I remember getting my first 386 PC and thinking it was a big box of futuristic awesomeness. It even had the fancy new 3.5 inch floppy drive instead of the old huge kind!

Makes me wonder what we'll all be laughing about in another 25 years. Maybe Ubuntu will have completed its bid for world-domination by then, and we can chuckle over the demise of Microsoft and Apple.

[yataketumbe]

The terminal

[Mingolinux]

I was running ubuntu on a live cd back in 2006 and like it. I decided to install it beside windows on my laptop. Ubuntu installed fine,but when I tried to boot into windows I got the blue screen of death. I took my new $1500 Sony laptop back to the dealer, with my extra special warranty and recovery disc that they made for me(paid extar for these) to get window reinstalled. they told me it would cost about $100 to do this. Since I was not in love with windows anyway I left with my ubuntu laptop. Years later I now run windows in my virualbox for netflixs about once a week. Microsoft should have fix my computer for free before I found out it wasn't broken. Just better

[PhoenixM]

1) Free software.

With the exception of Adobe InDesign (of which there is no direct substitute to my knowledge in open source), everything needed is free and updates are available for a lifetime. Bring a college student, that is certainly inviting.

2) Faster to reboot,

Took two minutes to boot up Windows 7. Probably took 30 seconds max to reach the Ubuntu login screen.

3) Easier incident recovery.

Something go wrong? Just need to plug in a flash drive under a decent wi-fi connection and I'm back where I started within 90 minutes without it costing me a dime for software. As long as file backups are kept on my external drive, I'm a-OK.

4) Viruses

What viruses?

5) Malware

See #4

P.S.: This is from a relatively green guy. I'll probably have a treatise answering this question in a couple years,

[alfu]

Here is the biggest reason for me: ever notice how ******* keeps thrashing your hard drive? What the hell is it doing? For one thing, it is surfingf the web continuously whether you are or not.

An associate of mine had to replace his HDD twice at work, because he was leaving his computer on all the time, and the drives just wore out.

Ubuntu doesn't do that.

[na5h]

the terminal

+1

[zombifier25]

I'm really surprised how Ubuntu can bundle a lot of goodies like gcc, mplayer, compiz, etc. and still manages to be much lighter than Windows.