The realization of tremendous improvements

It's nearly four years since I've been playing with Linux on my personal computer. To be honest, the experience wasn't that good and that's the reason why I'd abandoned the idea of using it in my free time. Overall, it's much much behind Windows in terms of installation, quality and user experience. However, this morning when I was installing Fedora Core 4, I found that a lot of improvements have been done over the years. It took me about the same amount of installation time comparing with Windows, and finally almost all the devices are literally being "auto detected". Other than that, surprisingly I managed to connect to the Internet seamlessly. The look and feel is so much similar to Windows (a good strategy) and the distribution comes with openoffice.org 2.0 beta as a bonus. In short, everything works just fine.
As usual, first impression always mislead people, I could only possibly realize the real problems (or advantages) when I'm really using it for my daily tasks.