FWIW...

...I just put vista on a wretched old box to see what would happen - an Athlon 3400 with 1.5gb and 128mb shared onboard card. Awful all-around, and I fully expected it to be total shit.

Shocka - it's actually totally usable. Yeah, there's barely any free RAM - 300mb or so, whereas XP would have 800ish - but nobody ever said the thing was going to have less of a mem footprint than XP. And aside from that, it's been solid, done its job, and is as snappy as you'd expect doing heavy lifting like starting Firefox. :P

Oddly, it runs fine even with multiple FF windows open, and a few other things, despite the horrible RAM shortage. You can hear it thrashing away at the disk, but if the HD was silent it wouldn't be too obvious (ie, no "watch the screen redraw scanline-by-scanline when we exit this app").

Do I run Vista on the machines I use to run motion systems? Nope - some of the drivers crash it hard. But is it the stinkiest stinky-poo that ever stank out of a stinky place, like a lot of people say? Not as far as I can tell.

A little balance would lend credibility. And - Codge? - a little less 'blatant asshole' would win more Linux converts. I stay away from Linux just to avoid associating myself with the users thanks to guys like you.