Having tried both, neither operating system is perfect but there’s enough in Ubuntu to make a classy alternative.

Having used Windows exclusively since the days of Windows 3.1, I have to say that the last nine months on the road to Windows Vista has been full of more than a few potholes.

Switching off User Accounts Control went a long way to reducing the annoyance level (I hate it but the Mac “Cancel or Allow” ad is the funniest IT ad I’ve seen all year), but there are other things that remain broken in Vista.

Things like audio for example.

Microsoft’s decision to write out the audio functions from DirectX has meant every audio device has required new driver software. For those who are using XP-age hardware for which vendors have decided to no longer support (such as Creative’s external USB Sound Blaster Extigy for example), it means buying all new hardware.

On top of the cost of buying Windows Vista to start with, that’s a nasty sting in the tail.

Having been using the “gold copy” of Windows Vista Ultimate since late December 2006, the one thing it has been is remarkably stable. While few of my XP audio devices work on Vista, the operating system itself has never crashed despite daily use.

That said, that’s not to say there are features that don’t frustrate the daylights out of me. But with Microsoft’s draconian licensing and its now understood plan of updating its own update engine without your knowledge, I thought it high time I tried the other side of the fence and give Linux a go.

The flavour I chose was Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn and I’ve got to say, on its own hardware, this is a fantastic operating system.

But not without its own problems. For starters, my ATI Radeon 9800 Pro card would not offer me the 1280x1024-pixel resolution screen size for my 19-inch LCD monitor. And despite all manner of mucking around, I couldn’t get it to work. The option I decided on in the end was to remove it and use the integrated graphics instead, solving the problem.

But upon using Ubuntu for the first few days, I felt I’d stumbled on this utopian world where software wasn’t about companies check up on you and give you passwords and licenses, it was about creativity, about collaboration.

For the first time in a long time, computing felt like it was a hobby again rather than a global business.

One of the first things I did was build a compile of the command-line audio-video Swiss army knife, FFmpeg. I’d tried to do this within Windows XP and made a botch of it every time. But doing the job in Linux was just too easy – everything worked exactly as scripted and most amazingly, didn’t require the installation of a whole bunch of apps before I started.

Using the operating system itself was also remarkably easy. Sure, there are some similarities to Windows but that’s more just the object-oriented programming (OOP) more than any direct rip-off of Windows (which itself isn’t exactly a ground-breaker itself).

But the fact that Ubuntu (and other distros like it) comes chock-a-block full of applications that work straight off the bat, all at no cost to the consumer must go close to halving the cost of a computer. With an easy to use interface, lots of software and very good stability, Linux has plenty to offer the consumer who’s willing to take a little time to embrace a new way of life.

Linux isn’t perfect but then no operating system is – but when you compare it’s cost with Windows Vista, is it any wonder more and more people are giving Linux a go?