Here is my Windows story (one of the couple of factors that made me try a switch to Ubuntu, which I did last summer and I've never looked back).Destructionator XIII wrote:I want to tell a quick Linux story here, that I am dealing with right now.
I had a centrino notebook and the wireless was having issues, it would drop the the connection and have generally slow connectivity. So after a lot of digging it turns out it's a driver issue with the Intel-wireless chip. Unlike with Ubuntu, there is no way to automatically receive driver updates. Not only that, but the wireless toolset that I am using is bound to the specific version of the driver I am using (customization from the notebook manufacturer). And the manufacturer says that he will not update the driver he makes available nor update the software. They just won't. Great, so updating my driver means I am loosing all the configurations I made for half a dozen wireless-networks (keys, shares, network-config etc.). I bite the bullet and do it. During the update there is an optional feature (I don't remember the name) which sounds like it might be useful - though I cannot find any specific documentation on it. So I check the checkbox to try it - you can always uninstall it later, right? (...ha!). After what seems like ages I reboot and... am not able to login anymore. Great so I reboot again, to safe mode and try to uninstall the software - which is not possible in safe mode. An obscure error message interrupts the setup-wizard. Luckily for me I had just sent my HDD in for service the same day and had a full backup (image), so that after a few hours of fiddling I just gave up and restored the backup. Given that on windows a lot of things are black boxes, there's simply only so much you are able to get fixed.
With Ubuntu my wireless-software is not bound to any specific driver or similar nonsense. The intel 2200bg wireless drivers on linux have been consistently more stable than on windows for me, from day one. The kinds of little problem where one would just run into a wall on windows, are actually fixable (if I care to find out), which is one of the big plusses. I also have an i915 intel shared chip, which according to MS and Intel will not support Aero. Yet I had beryl up and running in no time with Ubuntu Edgy (simply added a url to synpatic and selected beryl to be installed). And beryl works very well for me, and I do not see any increase in CPU usage. The increased RAM usage was somewhere between 50 and 100 MB.
The Package manager not only keeps my OS, but also all my software updated (unless I tell it to "freeze" certain applications at certain versions). While I was alwas busy hunting for various updates manually or coniguring firewalls and whatnot to get all the seperate auto-updates working, these are all things I just don't worry about anymore. My usb2-gadgets work measurably faster with ubuntu. M digital camera, my card reader, my scanner, my network printer, my bluetooth stick all worked out of the box, and those were things I bought without every giving a thought to switching to Linux. My bluetooth-stick acutally had more profiles and more functioanlity now with linux, because the manufacturer had frozen the drivers and software for it, while the opensource community is continuing to improve on the bluetooth functionality. I could go on and on. I can't imagine going back to Windows at all. Sitting down on XP today feels as "awkward and as klunky" as it used to feel when I sat down on non-windows machines in the past.
As for beryl/compiz: It looks like it's mostl eye-candy, but there is useful stuff in there as well. Even though I am the type of person that would switch XP to the "classical style", I did find the Beryl-stuff ueful enough to actually use it most of the time.
