Hi Tony, On Wed, 2007-06-20 at 22:41 +0100, Tony Travis wrote: > Have you ever upgraded Windows? > Or MacOS? > > Believe me, Debian/Ubuntu is much, much easier to upgrade!
A very good point. I think often we take for granted some of the features of Linux (specifically Ubuntu) that are just light years ahead of Windows. * Software installs. A straightforward way to install, remove and upgrade individual packages and their dependants. Something Windows doesn't have and never has. * Release upgrades. As Tony points out, Windows upgrades are pretty painful. A significant number of applications break after an upgrade, at least comparable with the issues reported by Norman. Note it's just not possible to boot an XP kernel on Vista to resolve a "scanner not working" issue as he had. Worth noting that as a result of it upgrading well, and because Ubuntu runs on lower spec hardware, people are _more_ likely to upgrade than under Windows where the hardware requirements go up tremendously with each release. The vast majority of Windows users never upgrade their operating systems so when they move to Ubuntu and complain when something breaks in an upgrade, they often don't have a comparison under Windows because they've never done it. * Fast installs. Installing Ubuntu is way faster than Windows. Even installing from a recovery CD is painfully slow. Some suggest as a counter argument that "nobody ever installs windows" (due to it being pre-installed) which is of course incorrect. Many Windows users reinstall their desktops repeatedly during the life of one computer, often due to malware infestations, viruses and general system slowness. * Upgrades of _all_ software in one go. I recently _had_ to install XP (to apply a BIOS update) and once the product recovery CD had done it's work (which incidently took around 4 times longer than an Ubuntu install on the same host - and installed one 5th of the amount of data/apps) there were applications shouting at me to update them. With Ubuntu you just have one little icon to worry about - the update icon on the task bar. * Flexible installs. With Ubuntu you can take a backup of your /home, and a list of packages you have installed and can reinstall (or install a new version) and get back to a running system very easily. I did this recently. I plugged a USB hard disk into my ubuntu laptop, booted to recovery mode and copied the entire /home onto the drive. I wiped the internal disk, installed XP (as detailed above) and then copied my /home back from the USB drive. All my data, settings and preferences were retained. * Moving disks to another machine. I recently had a motherboard failure in my wifes old computer. I just yanked the IDE hard disk out and put it in another computer. I only had to reconfigure the (different make and model) of video card - _no_ reboot required - and it Just Worked. And all of this is without even mentioning the fact that it's free and open! How marvellous is that!? Let's try to remember some of these fantastic innovations when we draw comparisons with other operating systems. Cheers, Al.
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