I have been a lifelong user of Windows ever since my family had a computer. I remember putting coins inside a Windows 95 machine and the frustration it brought to my mom. But I digress. Since starting college, I have always used Windows 10 because it is what is available to me. It came with the laptop I am still using to date. It is the operating system I was familiar with and honestly, it is the most well-documented and supported operating system because of its popularity among all demographic. But to everyone who used Windows, they already know that it has its share of problems, too. Those problems might make a developer look into other alternatives like Linux or macOS, but the pressing question is, why Linux or more specifically, Ubuntu? Is it even worth taking the risk?

The first reason why is reliability. Since I purchased my laptop, my experience with Windows 10 has been mediocre to kind of disappointing. Even with a lot of improvements with the previous Windows 10 updates, Windows still feels a lot buggy. The most annoying bug I’ve encountered is the battery bar in the taskbar not showing up consistently every boot up. No user would ever want to go to the Setting app and look for the battery settings just to see the devices battery status. This isn’t a problem in Ubuntu. Every time I login to my computer account in Ubuntu, everything you expect to see is there and it just works. In Windows, almost every cumulative update brings a bug along with the fixes and new features they have added. It is a breath of fresh air to just have reliable software.

The second reason is speed. Although Windows start-up speeds are still significantly superior to Ubuntu’s in my experience, in-app experiences feel a lot quicker on Ubuntu. Unlike on Windows where you have to wait for several years just to see Google Chrome open, on Ubuntu, launch times are much quicker, you do not have to look away from your computer screen just to wait for an app to open.

This is just the first part of my series about using Ubuntu as a student. Stay tuned for the next part of this series where I discuss bigger reasons for switching to Ubuntu 19.04 if you are a student developer.