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I think experiences vary wildly and that itself speaks volumes about quality of Vista. You've had a good experience, some people have had bad.

Personally, I don't like it. I bought it installed on a new laptop. UAC is annoying, but not overly so.

However, I have had a Vista-specific process run wild and take up over 2 gigs of RAM. When I looked it up, audiodg.exe (for those who want to know), it turned out to be a process solely concerned with the DRM protection scheme of audio coupled with video. Neither my wife and I have watched an HD movie on the laptop nor consumed any form of media that would kick this process off. It just sat there, sucking up ungodly amounts of memory. The kicker is, if you killed it, you'd kill sound for the entire machine!

I'm sorry, but when I hear shit like that, it immediately turns me off of the OS. I don't care about any niceties it might have, if this is what happens just so MS could pander to RIAA and MPAA.

I really made an effort to get used to UAC. The concept is good, but in the end I just got so sick of the pointless pop-up dialogs that I had to turn it off. None of my Windows installations has had a malware infection anyway going back to 1994, so I don't think UAC was doing much for me.

All those observations are coming from a technical person's point of view. One thing that MS doesn't seem to get is that first impressions matter, they matter a lot. I bought a computer that came with Vista. It took me close to 5 minutes - I'm not kidding - to start up the machine to the point I was able to use anything. And it was very slow even afterwards. You just can't convince a regular person, after having such an experience, that Vista is great. You can't wash away those bad feelings with an SP or with your positive testimony. You just can't. Regular folks are far more emotional than that. This is something we as developers have to remind ourselves every day.

You just can't convince a regular person, after having such an experience, that Vista is great.

I wonder how many "regular" users jumped on board at the very beginning while there were still issues? I rarely have talked to someone who has actual experience with the problems from Vista (other than it being included on a system with poor performance, which was an issue, I'll admit).

If Vista really was a poor OS, then Windows 7 would be just putting 'lipstick on a pig'.

It will largely depend on how well MS can control the vendors. In other words how they can prevent the vendors from installing crap on a computer. For the longest time computers would ship with 1GB of RAM with tons of applications in the startup. You really felt like you bought a car for $20K that can only go 20 miles per hour. Don't underestimate the importance of performance.

I've had the opposite experience. I don't use it myself (I even opted to buy a new laptop with XP over Vista) but I'm responsible for looking after a Vista laptop where I work and I have no end of problems. Networking issues, compatibility with Outlook 2003 issues (every now and again it just stops working, has to be rebooted to be able to send/receive mail again), it's incredibly slow even though the laptop is new (decent spec).

Based on that I wouldn't take the plunge to use it as a primary OS (even as a Windows user generally.)

My experience is the same. I really feared Vista, to the point that I put off buying a new laptop. Then I started a new job, and behold, I have Vista on my work machine. It works fine. It's not amazing, but it is not even close to the nightmare the Mac ads or the rest of the rumors I'd heard would have me belive. It just works, and that's what I need.

That said, I'm probably going to get a Mac for my next laptop. My XP laptop died a week ago and I've heard so many developers rave over the Mac, I'll likely give it a try.

I'm torn. As I write this on a Vista box, I keep thinking that I should finally cut the cord, suck it up, and start using Ubuntu as my primary OS (it's installed on a VM now). However, I'm worried about the short-term loss of productivity.

But, like you said, Vista ain't that bad. Most stuff just works. I actually like UAC as a protection mechanism, but I understand why the questions posed are important.

Ubuntu and Mac OS X will, similar to UAC prompt you for your password to do certain things. This is not as easily disabled, especially on Ubuntu. UAC is Good and Wrong.

on Vista the password prompt looks different depending on why you are needing to elevate privileges. This struck me as a pretty huge bug, as anyone who managed to spawn a popup window might seem equally credible to the one generated by the OS.

Ubuntu's is exactly the same each time and looks very clearly like part of the OS. And it's not annoying in the least.

The networking dialogs in control panel, especially setting up wireless, were a nightmare worse than any phone tree. Also, my wife's laptop locked up so bad that she had to take the battery out to shut it down. After a week of doing this every day, she got a MacBook Air.