for some it is. for others it's a nightmare. I hate windows, it's been so long since I've used it for anything other than testing I get irritable when I have to work in Windows for any length of time.

It is more stable and requires a helluva lot less resources to run. The amount of truly free software available is amazing. You can usually install from the distro DVD and have a complete running machine with office suite, graphics packages a couple of different browsers, email clients and multimedia packages ready to go in the time it takes to setup plain windows.