Dual-booting a really cut-down optimised version of XP, and Ubuntu 8. Works for me, think it's pretty unlikely I'll switch to Windows 9.

Anyone tried Ubuntu 9 yet? 

no problems so far.
boots really fast. Very cool indicator applet. New nvidia driver with opengl 3.0 8)

What I don't like is that they removed some partitioning features from the installer. Had to create the partition with gparted. Still using ext3 though. 

8.04
8.10
9.04 -> April 2009

not 8. 9. 

the bi-annual naming convention. Was running 8.10 before, and obviously its April now. Might be worth the reinstall from what I've seen. Tempted to try kubuntu 9.04, never ran KDE before but it always looks sexy as hell. 

Boosh. 

That Amiga OS that Aardappel was working on and then wasn't, and we never heard about again. THAT'S THE SHIT. 

9.04 is fine for me. Suffering a bit from the "intel graphics are slow" problem.

Also FF3 seems to have a fetish for eating all the RAM in the machine, but that was going on with Intrepid too. 

the new kernel doesn't work on my Dell Latitude c400. Nor does a custom compiled one.

i run it fine with the 7.04 kernel though. the 8.10 one doesn't resume from standby...

Not that i noticed any difference besides new less annoying pop up bubbles... just that there's now more of them . 

Repeating what you hear on fuckwit anti-MS websites and posting experiences of running Vista on "brand" PCs loaded up the wazoo with useless bloatware won't make it true.

Vista is fine, on machines with 1GB ram, its as fast as XP, on machines with more, its faster. 

I like it. Its great! Runs like a dream, boots fast, everything works, even got an old demo of Carmageddon 2 to work on it fine, Quake, everything. USB peripherals load faster (noticably).

Asus N10j NETBOOK running Vista Business - on an Atom processor:

Runs fine, no complaints there. OCed the Atom from 1.6Ghz to 2.01Ghz and despite what it says on the GamesRadar website Fallout3 runs fine.

4Gb and 2Gb RAM respectively. 

Seems like most of the complaints about it hinge on the fact that people are scared of change.

I've got a new setup arriving with Vista.

I'm one of the windows lazy. 

Vista is alright but damn is it slow doing some basic things. My work machine takes no less than 10 minutes to get from from power up to "ready to work" state. And most of that time is spent after I log into Vista. 

Well Vista runs on my machine like a dream just a few seconds boot time, Linux too and I guess XP would also run well.
But thats not really the point, it does not mean that I have to like it. 

Jago: You are a braver man than I...

Vista is fine, on machines with 1GB ram

I would still not want to try with anything lower than 2GB. Good thing this computer I have now has 4GB...

ijed: I switched about a month ago. Some things will piss you off in how they've changed from XP. UAC has high "marmite factor", but I would definitely try with it on first before turning it off. 

It's alot faster than my old machine in any case. Downside is it's capable of playing games after 1997. 

Very quick, but don't know if thats the machine or OS. 

http://www.abload.de/image.php?img=pubuntu0vk1.png 

Meh, pretty good. Very similar to Vista in a lot of ways, but generally seems more polished and less annoying. Doesn't seem like a huge leap right now, but maybe it isn't supposed to be. I like some of the new desktop backgrounds, for what that's worth :)

Still can't stand the Aero theme though, it's just way too busy and it takes up way too much space. Unfortunately, as with Vista, they haven't taken much care with windows classic mode, looks a bit buggy and crap.

I'm curious, what do people here go for, the full pazazz of the modern OS themes, or something clean and simple?

Currently I'm using a custom theme which is very close to windows classic, with the Vista font, and Icons from the tango project ( http://tango.freedesktop.org/Tango_Desktop_Project ). Very happy with this at the moment, about as clean and inoffensive as it gets. 

As a Mac nerd, I feel the OS should deliver nice aesthetics without slowing to a crawl or causing crashes. 

I am a big fan of OS X.

As soon as they finish letting the HackBook people write drivers for everything that's not standard apple hardware I'll switch to the universal release (it'll happen, trust). 

I agree except replace "nice aesthetics" with "clean, non-offensive, functional aesthetics" and I think OSX and XP's "windows classic" skin both provide this. OSX is probably a little more "nice" but in both cases, you can get used to the visual appearance and it doesn't get in your way with attempts to be flashy. 

Functionality is first consideration.

One thing I have a semi-irrational dislike of is when buttons have a circular image but sqaure contact area - why fucking bother?

Form should always follow function. <rant> 

Yes, and form following function is exactly what OSX does IMO. It does many nice looking effects but none of them get in the way of using the OS. The OS responds as if those effects weren't there. 

window wobbling streching fucktarding does so follow function. As do coloured balls. Oh, and reflections. Didn't some mac app practically DEFINE those? Ah, and slideshows that use all the mac mambo jambo 3d rotating cube effects, i love how the Mac designers hit the form follows function concept spot on with those. :P 

None of those things interfere with the function they are supporting. I'm not sure what the "mac mambo jambo 3D rotating cube effects" are but the rest of them are innocuous.

By "window wobbling streching fucktarding" I assuming you mean the genie effect when you minimize and restore windows. Non issue.

By "coloured balls" you either mean the buttons on the top left of the window or the busy cursor. Non issue.

"Reflections" is pretty clear as to the meaning but ... how is that a problem and how does it interfere with the function? The dock has reflections on it. It looks good and doesn't get in the way at all.

Is this just irrational Mac hating or do you have an actual issue here?