Comment 947 for bug 1

Windows is easy to install and Linux is 'too techie'?

A common misnomer - quite the reverse of reality.

Installing things is never going to be as easy as having everything pre-installed and packaged nicely - which is why Linux must be easy for a total noob to install. Being fast, informative and attractive is also crucial as it will often be the persons first experience of Linux.

I have installed Ubuntu and Windows quite a lot of times now and have to say that Ubuntu totally beats Windows in terms of time taken to get a working desktop and in how useful that desktop is. With Windows there are no office packages built-in and it tends to destroy any existing data.

My latest story...

Windows has taken weeks to install and get working properly on my dad's boat. 'Luckily' we had the original legal discs which most stores are reluctant to let you have. After installing Windows we then had to install MS Office and the Windows Service-Packs, again i was 'lucky' to have them on disc. We also had to upgrade the web-browser in order to be able to update other things and install the Windows installer package (?!). Then there was all the flash player, dotNet and other stuff - luckily i had some of these on discs too. We then needed to defragment of course.

Only after doing all that did we reach the point that most Linux distros start from and were able to start updating from the internet.

In Ubuntu and many other distros you can just click on the 'Mark All Updates' type button and then 'Apply'. All the updates told us what they were for and linux was happy to let us deselect any or all of them. Sometimes it's also worth looking in the System Administration menu for Hardware Drivers but it's unlikely to find anything that isn't updated by the standard package-manager.

In Windows almost all the updates are just called 'Security Update' and are compulsory, many force the computer to have to restart (or suffer a recurring pop-up-box that is difficult to work-around) and many couldn't be downloaded at the same time as other ones (at least it sorted that out though by deselecting everything i'd just selected, requiring me to select them again later). Then we updated all the drivers for the hardware and for some of Window's own creations - just right click on 'My Computer' (a childish name - sounds like a stroppy brat) go down to Properties then in the pop-up-box choose the hardware tab and click on the 'Device Manager' button, in the new pop-up-box expand a category by clicking on the cross then right-click on an item and choose 'Update Driver'. Not updating the drivers isn't always necessary unless you want your computer to work well. Not installing the updates/upgrades means a balloon keeps alerting you that you need to update.

Many of the Windows updates seem to be for Microsoft's security rather than being beneficial to the user, the ones that are useful often seem due to threats against a flawed design?

There's still some data that we still need to copy off the old drive but from obscure locations such as Application Data - Outlook - hunt the psi file (pst?), or boot the old drive and export everything from all those packages that may not have been used in ages and may not have an obvious way of exporting such things as address-books or bookmarks.

Linux really needs to install well and mostly succeeds in being so radically far ahead of Windows that to consider installing Windows rather than linux is quickly shown to be absurd.

In summary
Ubuntu would have only taken a couple of hours in total but Windows still isn't quite there after weeks of hassle.