I think so far everybody agrees that Vista is not one of Microsoft's best products. Recently I've had a look at Ubuntu, and I must say that I'm quite impressed by their whole model. Here's a quick comparison.

Obviously Ubuntu has the price advantage, since it's free. The price for Windows XP was not too bad, considering that it's quite a good operating system, but paying for Vista is just beyond me. I've worked with Vista on brand new PCs with much better specs than my 2-year old XP machine, and Vista was considerably slower than XP on my machine.

Then there's the matter of release frequency. With Microsoft, you wait 2 to 6 years for a new version. With Ubuntu, you get a new version every 6 months. Maybe it doesn't have as many new features then as a new Windows version, but the incremental improvement model appeals to me so much more. And support for Ubuntu is given at least 18 months for each release. But if you upgrade every 6 months, you don't need the support for that long anyway.

I haven't installed Ubuntu on my PC yet, but from other reports it seems it's quite fast. Especially the one derivative fo Ubuntu, Xubuntu, makes old PCs seem like the newest out there. But Microsoft seems to have taken a step back. Vista really is slower than anything I've ever seen. I tried to delete a 90MB file once (moving it to the recycle bin), and it took more than 2 minutes to complete. On my XP machine this kind of operation takes at most 2 seconds.

And then there's the software issue. On Windows, most good software is commercial, and you need to pay. More good free software is constantly emerging, but for Linux there's so much more! You have thousands of software packages to choose from. Because almost all Linux software is open source, the competition is much greater, and that's why you have more choice. Granted, you won't get open source software with the complexity of something like Photoshop, but that's just a little price to pay.

And then my favourite issue: it seems to me that you can install Vista on your machine only once. Or twice, at the most. This is totally contradictory to anything I would expect for a consumer product like that. It's like buying a book, and being told you're only allowed to read it once. Of course, with Ubuntu, you don't have this problem. If you buy a new machine, or you just want to re-install, you can do this without thinking twice.

Considering the fact that XP will soon not be sold anymore, and that Microsoft is increasingly trying to force Vista onto everyone, I think I might convert to Ubuntu sometime in the near future. I've been looking at compatability with the software I now use, and surprisingly there are some good options. From what I've seen, I think I can safely switch to Ubuntu without having to sacrifice any type of software that I'm using on Windows now. I do a lot of .NET development, and have found that I can do that on Linux too (with the Mono Project). And that even allows me to write software that's compatible across Operating Systems. That's quite inspiring.

What do you think about this topic? Feel free to give us your thoughts.