Before I got into the École Centrale Paris, I almost knew nothing but Microsoft Windows as an Operating System. I even knew many tricks about Windows, and learned some of the things that would inevitably make it unstable... I then thought that Computers just had to be that way...

The real question...

Fortunately, I am not such a narrow-minded guy, and I definitely wanted to know why many scientists and engineers hated Windows, and chose to use something else, such as Linux. Entering VIA Centrale Réseaux, the organization which provides a high speed internet access to more than a thousand students in the Residence of the École Centrale Paris, was a real revolution to me... In order to be able to manage the organizations' Debian Servers, as a member of the Root team, I had to learn quite fast what Linux was, and how to use it with a command line interface. A few months later, I had become some sort of a geek who wouldn't want to use Windows at all... But, putting the ideological fight free vs. proprietary aside, you might want to know what was so great with Debian or Ubuntu (the Linux distributions I use) for a simple user.

Windows is very buggy

I think that the best thing with Linux is its stability. Haven't you heard any Windows user saying things such as "I need to format my C: drive once more..."? This is not a myth: as a former Windows geek, I knew that starting all over again was, most of the time, the only solution to get rid of Windows instability. What I mean by instability might simply be error messages which pop up just after login... And once again, I experienced this sort of problem: my Mom has a computer with both Ubuntu and Windows XP. For your information, I always make sure not to install software that is not really needed on Windows, and this computer hasn't been really used on Windows yet: it's just there, in case of an urgent need. Indeed, my Mom uses exclusively Ubuntu, which she likes very much.

A few months ago, I decided to boot Windows (such a rare thing now!), in order to upgrade it to the SP3. Not only did I have to install 15 upgrades and to do the classic reboot before Microsoft Update would suggest me to install the SP3, but after this very long upgrade another Microsoft program became buggy... I had the pleasure to welcome a wonderful "2771 error" from Windows Live Messenger... What can you expect from a firm which doesn't really know how to upgrade its OS without affecting its other flagship products? Fortunately, after 5 minutes of googling about this error, I found out that I just had to uninstall Windows Live Messenger, and to install it again.

Yet, can we say that such problems must be accepted by all users? Can we really say to a grandma that using Windows is simple, and that she wouldn't have any problem? Can we really say that such bugs are acceptable? You might say "but the solution to your problem was so easy... anyone would have thought about it!". But I won't agree with you: I progressively understood that most users are not so comfortable with technology as I am, and for some users, those things have no logic at all, and they may be completely clueless when facing such a bug.

Software management

On top of that, haven't you already heard someone saying to a Windows user, talking about a non-Microsoft program: "but this feature is available in the new version of the soft, you just have to upgrade it"? Such answers simply reveal an enormous problem in Windows: software management is not uniform at all... What is so great about Debian, Ubuntu, or other famous Linux Distributions is indeed the Distribution concept itself.

From what I understood, a Linux Distribution is an operating system based on a Linux Kernel, and a set of coherent software, which may have been adapted to the distribution's main choices and organization, with a common tool which makes software management easy. With Debian or Ubuntu, we can think about APT, or its Graphical User Interface Synaptic. Although Linux Distributions are definitely modular, its software is really coherent, and one soft just works well with the other distribution's softs. The great thing about this way of managing software is that all software can be installed, removed, or upgraded with a single tool: the distribution's package management system. Even better, APT is very good at managing dependencies, or conflicts between software. This way, with such a Linux Distribution, you can manage your software very easily, and be sure that everything is up to date at all time. Isn't it simplicity itself?

Furthermore, when using Microsoft Update, I always get angry when I realize, once more, how slow upgrading Microsoft programs is. Indeed, APT is much faster for that, and it is able to upgrade the whole system without asking to reboot in order to install the rest of the available upgrades, which occurs quite frequently with Microsoft Update...