I can believe Ubuntu is faster than Windows at booting, especially considering they focused on it in their last release, but for me the much bigger issue was flaky Sleep/Suspend-to-RAM and Hibernate/Suspend-to-Disk support. I suspend my laptop several times a day but only reboot on updates.
It it should be 'dead and buried' by now then why does it persist ?
It seems that there are enough people that share these experiences (not necessarily your own) to stop that from happening.
My own take is that it is getting better, but it isn't there yet.
One thing that I personally don't understand at all is why the industry did not long ago standardize on ECC RAM, the cost would have been marginal (due to the increase in volume) and the potential benefits in perceived stability would be huge.
Servers have it pretty much as a standard, any bit flipped in critical RAM can cause an OS crash (both for Linux and for Windows, RAM failures are OS agnostic).
Re: ECC ram, my non-server, "consumer" linux boxes typically have uptimes of 100,200,300 days. They only go down for hard drive failures and OS upgrades.
I'm a designer and programmer and was stuck on Vista for a little over 3 months after starting my current job. Photoshop required at minimum two reboots a day. Absolute hell.
Of more concern to me is shutdown time, as in "eternity", and when I have to just hold the button button to force a machine off. Each time there is a real risk of corrupted drives (I'm recovering data right now from a drive corrupted because something hung Vista and I had to power off the box).
Each time it refuses to cleanly shutdown there is nothing displayed to tell me why.
Is there even an option to have windows show what it's doing when it shuts down instead of the often untruthful 'Windows is shutting down' message?
Also, as you mention, drivers cause problems occasionally. I think twice Windows suddenly stopped recognizing a wireless mouse, not sure why. It worked on a different USB port.
Disclaimer: I'm talking about XP. Also, I have little experience in Ubuntu, but quite a bit in FreeBSD on the desktop. Once it's set up, it works quite nicely actually - apart from some quirky behavior while suspending to RAM.
Windows swapping algorithms suck big time. After coming back to work I need to wait for windows to swap eclipse/ff to ram... Wtf was it doing overnight that warrented a need for disk swap? Heavy thinking?
After leaving ubuntu on all night the performance tomorrow is as if I never left the keyboard.
Last job windows shutdown took 3 min, startup took 10. The system did suffer from memory leaks or appeared to since after like 2 weeks it had to be rebooted or it worked like crap. Coulda been antivirus pos software though. Reboots were also needed at times, just the nature of not having kill -9.
Another complaint: can't delete open files. Our av program broke our build caz we could not run cleanup scripts where applicable.
In any case after 3 month of bliss I have nightmares that next job ill be coding in windows. Maybe 7 aint so bad...