I don't understand the hate for windows vista. I used it happily for years; XP didn't work on my motherboard. It was basically windows 2000 with a stupid skin on top, but so was XP.
Vista was such a clunky OS, a transition between XP, which was snappy but required lots of configuration, to something that worked well from the start (Windows 7). That's why I am not touching the next Windows OS, it's another transition and to me an OS should be virtually invisible, not a nuisance.
I can tell you from personal experience that there are many concrete reasons to dislike Vista. My family runs a small business out of the house and I was the go-to tech guy for all the laptops in the office. This can't be anything but anecdotal, but all the time that I spent trying to figure out how to configure things, how to explain kludgy "innovative" interface quirks, and in general dealing with a beast of an unresponsive OS? I do not believe for a second that that time was a result of some bandwagon hatred.
The annoying interface that gets between you and diagnosing internet problems (beyond the 'giant X on the line between you and "internet"' diagnosis) was frustrating. Ok, I get it, I'm not on the internet. Where do I go to get more information so I can start diagnosing it?
For the sake of 'usability', Windows Vista hid a lot of functionality behind 'ease of use' features that served only to provide the user with less information, making tech support more difficult for no real benefit. Users still have no idea what's going on, but receive no error messages that indicate why.
Vista also added helpful features like the whole 'Let Windows find a solution!' concept, which is great in theory but, in my limited, anecdotal experience, has never once actually provided any sort of solution. The closest I've seen was yesterday, when Windows 'found a solution', tried to implement it, and failed.
They spent a lot of time and engineering making a 'usable' OS on the surface, but all it was was a pretty sheen over top of an OS that didn't, at its core, work significantly better in a lot of areas.
Windows XP was an OS I disliked strongly, but tolerated grudgingly. Windows Vista was an OS I actively discouraged people from getting. Windows 7 is the first version of Windows I've ever recommended people upgrade to, but Windows 8 looks like another step in the wrong direction.
Imagine if Apple released the iOS device, but the UI responsiveness was like Android pre-jellybean.
Sure, Vista works (and had for many many people), but XP set a responsiveness standard that Vista did not meet - and to be honest there were real, major issues pre SP1 (file copy crawling while music playing was the most egregious).
Meanwhile, Apple was slowing getting better and better with OSX, and right around that time, the Linux-powered netbooks first hit the stage and were quite good for the time and price.
Thanks to DWM (the compositor) in Vista, if you had decent enough graphics card, it was way faster than XP. Most of the UI issues were either that the GFX card was crap or the classic theme was enabled.
Vista was from a technical point of view, like going from MacOS9 to OSX...
They introduced a new kernel transaction manager, entirely new audio subsystem, new scheduler, new network stack, SxS, UAC, new display driver model, entirely new graphics stack, new power management stack, new crypto API, a whole load of new fonts and a proper stable 64-bit environment.
