I was reading how PC World named Vista the #1 technology disappointment of 2007 and having used it I agree.
Performance: In my opinion the point of an operating system is to run your programs, and the OS should be as lightweight as possible. My new laptop uses a “AMD Turion(TM) 64 X2 Dual-Core Mobile Technology TL-66 (2.3 GHz, 512KB+512KB L2 Cache )” with “2GB DDR2 System Memory (2 Dimm)” and it is noticeably sluggish. Usable, but sluggish.
Compatibility: Right off I wasn’t able to install Visual Studio 2005. Plus, DX10 is not backwards compatible, which has already created hassles at work because all work needs to be done twice. On my own 3D engine I’m just sticking with DX9.
Security: Are you sure you want to do this? [Yes] Are you REALLY sure? [Yes] Absolutely sure? Your average user is just going to click yes 3 times in a row. It’s not like he’s going to click yes twice twice and then reconsider running “XXX girls now!”
DRM: Read this article
The only positive thing that I can think of over XP is I like how you can have multiple windows occupy the same slot in the task bar.
On the other hand, Ubuntu on my old computer, a 2 GHZ Athlon with 1 GB of memory, runs quite well. There are some delays due to the 5,400 RPM harddrive but I ran some of the games on it and they were fine. Ubuntu was easier to install and I think the interface is cleaner. I especially like that it automatically downloaded updated drivers and security packages for various programs. I also like that it’s open source – not that I want to contribute so much as that I can feel confident it doesn’t have malware or backdoors.
Once Ubuntu gets or I find a decent IDE, on par with Visual Studio, and Open GL is optimized to be as fast as DirectX I wouldn’t mind doing cross platform with all my games to it.