I installed both Ubuntu Jaunty 9.04 and Windows Vista yesterday and was reminded how one is light-years ahead of the other in installation procedure. I was also reminded of Dell's retarded manner of installing drivers. It shows you a set of drivers on the disc that apply to your system, and then you have to click some 5 times to reach the standard installation screen, from where you can click Next, Next, Finish. For each driver. And there are some 10 or so. RETARDED!
Meanwhile, throughout this whole procedure, I'm stuck in 640×480 unless I install the graphics driver. Ubuntu gives me a full 1200×800 window during installation of the OS, and installing the graphics driver was a slick 3-click job (except the damn progress bar was inaccurate) afterwards. Everything else worked out of the box (except the fingerprint reader). To top it all off, my Vista Home Premium partition is 18 GB full (excepting the swap file it creates, that makes it 15 GB at max, but maybe half of this is Vista's backup feature) while my / partition on Ubuntu is 2.6 GB full, and the system is already completely usable. I haven't installed anything but the Dell drivers and Firefox.
Frankly, the Ubuntu installation experience was satisfying because at the end I had a nice usable computer. The Vista experience sucked, partly due to Dell, partly due to Vista not giving me more than 640×480, and partly because it was boring (I could browse the Internet off the Ubuntu LiveCD). Oh, and one installed much faster than the other, guess which?