So tonight I took the plunge and installed Vista. Initial thoughts:

• UAC is annoying, but thank god you can turn it off (along with other Windows nags, which I appreciate)
• Network fails on boot — but request an IP and it’s good again. Step up from XP, which didn’t have a driver for my NIC by default, but step down in reliability. Maybe fixed if I get a new (non-MS) driver.
• Why do I need to do a full Windows Update to get a (very common) Sound Blaster Audigy driver? You think it’d work out of the box…
• Why can’t I turn off hiding hidden files and keep my desktop clean from desktop.ini files at the same time? XP did this…
• More reboots to get things set up than you can shake a stick at — but this is a failing of Windows in general
• So far, no incompatibility. So far.
• C:\Users! It’s like /home, but not! This is an improvement over C:\Documents and Settings.
• Whatever happened to the Run.. command?

Ubuntu worked out of the box with all this. It got my nVidia driver right. It got the network right. It got sound right. And it comes with a shitload of software. I’m not saying that’s perfect either — it doesn’t like my huge display until i edit xorg.conf, for example. And 36 updates is a light update cycle (in beta, at least) And individual apps break sometimes. But by and large, the fastest OS to install to get to baseline functionality these days is Linux, and that’s not at all the way it used to be.

Microsoft did whiff at Vista. Perhaps not as badly as they could have, but it’s nowhere near what a 6 year dev cycle should produce. Vista would have been about right if it was released with a little less graphical glitz but a similar feature set in 2003/2004.

By the by, I’m not saying Apple is a big winner either. Leopard comes out this month, so we’ll see what happens — but there they go for vertical integration.

More as I figure it out.