Vista users "upgrading" to XP
Lifehacker is featuring a video by Windows user Chris Pirillo on his experience after 6 months using Vista. It's quite in-depth (over 50 mins) and he reaches the conclusion that at the moment, it is just not worth the hassle.
Lifehacker then asked its readers about their experiences with Vista. The result is a mixed bag and we have to be careful as everyone likes a forum to bitch about stuff, but the response certainly backs up the old tech adage of 'don't buy v1 of anything'. Those who've had good Vista experiences are overwhelmingly people who either bought it pre-installed on a new machine or who did a fresh install. Upgrading from XP appears to be a recipe for disaster.
Reading down the comments, the thing that struck me was how often Linux and particularly Ubuntu gets mentioned. This might be a reflection of the make-up of Lifehacker's readership but it certainly appears to show that Linux is finally going mainstream.
I've written about Ubuntu here before and have now persuaded our IT guys to let me have a laptop with it installed. The laptop in question is an ageing HP that has been thoroughly 'road tested' by one of our account services team. But the OS itself and applications fly along quite happily.
Being a shallow Mac user at heart, I'm easily swayed by eye-candy. This has been where I've been disappointed with other OSes in the past, they just look a bit too steam driven. The native Ubuntu look and feel still suffers from this a bit but I'm now looking at the different themes that are available – and some are awfully pretty. And for the whizzy, spinny stuff, there's Beryl as shown below:
Microsoft will certainly iron out the problems with Vista. They can't afford not to. But in the meantime you have to wonder how many additional Macs and Linux machines will be sold.
experience, technology 
Reader Comments (3)
I tried all three OS's, X, vista and ubuntu... and what i found out is that all three have their advantages and disadvantages. Ubuntu so far is on the bottom because even though it's free and can run on older (very old) machines, it still suffers from limited compatibility and ease of use. I'm talking about mainstream now. I was quite fine with ubuntu, but when i persuaded my friends family to start using it on their home pc, i ended up spending a day every week at their house trying to fix problems and teach them on how to use it. OS X is by far the simplest os to use, but it can only be used on macs and that's a big problem since they're way more expensive than PC's. In conclusion, even if vista suffers from a few bugs, I would still recommend it over the other two for the "average" person.
windows vista forum
[...] lately it seems to be one thing after another. First there were the stories of people “upgrading” Vista to XP. The the whole Vista-ready debacle and the resulting class-action lawsuit. And now we have panic [...]