Why I switched from Windows 7 to Ubuntu 10.10

In early February I posted here that I had reformatted my laptop hard drive and installed Windows 7. Well....this week I reformatted again and install Ubuntu 10.10. Why? Well, I use my laptop mainly for school and rarely at home (usually use my desktop computer while I'm at home) and I decided that Windows was just to costly. I realized that I always have to do virus scans at school because their network isn't exactly the most secure, Windows was very heavy on RAM and CPU usage, it was slow to load in some cases especially when I had a lot of tabs going or when i needed to run more than one application at a time. So, I decided to get away from the mass marketed OS and switch to something lighter, more cost effective, funner, and something that would teach me new things.

All this lead me to Ubuntu. The most used Linux distribution in the world. The transition was fairly easy as most things that I didn't know were just a short Google search away. I must say, my laptop's battery lasts about an hour longer (sometimes more depending on what I'm doing) even with all the desktop affects. All my documents for school can be saved with the window's extensions so the teachers can still open and read them. Everything pretty much worked as soon as I booted up. The only real thing I had to do was install flash and get it working in chrome, which took me about 15-20 minutes. I've been tweaking different things here and there since I installed, but none of it is necessary for most users, and I've been learning alot. This may have been the best decision I'll have made all semester.

For those of you who like the look and feel of Windows 7, you can install themes that give your Ubuntu installation the same taskbar, you can run commands allowing you to have the Windows Snap feature, and you can even allow your wallpapers to cycle. The Ubuntu community works hard to make everything as easy as possible and to provide options for every user to customize their setup, as they see fit. They are also much more helpful than Microsoft's online support.

All in all I believe I made a good decision in switching to Ubuntu. I even got one of my best friends to switch to it on his laptop.

If you want to know more you can go here and read up on Ubuntu and what features it offers. You won't be disappointed.

If you want to keep your Windows 7, or Vista, or XP or whatever other operating system you are using then you can always burn a "Live CD" of Ubuntu which you can use to load the OS on your system and give it a "try-out" without installing it. You simply run it off the CD and you can then test drive it yourself and see if you like it. If you decide you like it, but you play games on your Windows PC, you can download Wubi here and install Ubuntu on a separate partition on your hard drive, along side your current Windows OS and then choose which OS you want to boot into at startup. This way you keep your Windows OS for whatever reason (games, editing, etc) but you can play with or use Ubuntu whenever you like as well.

Also, let it be known that Ubuntu gets major revisions in April and October of every year. These are optional if you like the current version but often add most stability or support. Like windows however each version of Ubuntu is supported for 2 years after deployment. This being said, the current version 10.10 came out in October of 2010. In April of this year 11.04, code named Natty Narwhal, will be released and many communities on the web are expecting great things.

For further help websites like Lifehacker who this week is actually doing segments on fresh installs of Ubuntu and how to get your OS the way you like it, as well as Ubuntu Guide, and Ubuntu's own help page will be of great help to a new user. As always Google can assist you, and the vast Ubuntu community is always somewhere willing to help.

Tell me what you think and if you switched in the comment box and let me know how you like Ubuntu, or why you think Windows will always be better :).