I’ve done it. After 14 years of using Windows, I have switched to an alternative. I’m now running Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon on my main computer. I’ve been thinking about it for a while, so it wasn’t as drastic a change as it could have been.  (I’m still running Windows XP on an older machine for games.)

Of things that matter to me, there are only a handful of things better about Ubuntu than Windows:

1. It’s free.
2. It’s open source, so I can modify it. (I probably won’t.)
3. Add/Remove Applications is very slick and Windows really has no equivalent.

Beyond that, everything else is pretty minor. There’s a few oddities here and there, but the same could be said about Vista. As far as what I can do with it, there’s not much difference.