Hmm, this thread is not surprising. Nor is it's tone.
The problem we have is that Vista got a bad breath because of the jump in hardware, which then affects version 8 because 7 was better received, despite the fact that 7 and Vista SP2 were (essentially, bar a couple of new features) identical. If Longhorn had been released, well, we'd have seen something more gradual, and the OS would be a bit higher in standing.
I had a laptop with vista SP1 installed. It was a nice machine, 4GB RAM, with a 512 MB video card, perfect for my needs. Going back to XP was archaic for me. Things were disjointed, the interface wasn't particularly clean, it wasn't so good for the games that did run. I LIKED Vista, and I remember the furore over XP RTM. Find an RTM disc and compare it to XP SP2. It's like the jump from Vista RTM to 7 RTM. It's VASTLY different. It's also a practically identical timescale (about 3 years).
To those who ask, yes, I have tried the dev preview of 8, and, in fact, I'm learning to take advantage of the Metro style interfaces on the VS11 preview, and I like it. To me, the scrolling is no different to scrolling albums in iTunes, for instance. It's more productive, as well, cause all I need to launch an application is to type it once the start screen has loaded, which rid me of my need for Launchy, settings are nice, and the system reset feature is a godsend to play with.
In addition, if you don't like Metro, it can be disabled entirely, along with the explorer ribbon (it's a registry tweak, but a simple one, will probably be a boolean value in the Control Panel soon as people are asking for it - also note this may be a temporary measure, the ribbon reverts to the win7 version) and you can still access all of the back end features, so it feels like windows 7, but better. So, in my opinion, there's nothing to lose by upgrading when it arrives at beta sometime in January (CES).
Regards,
Tathrim
(dives back into Windows Dev Preview).
EDIT: and to those of you pumping Gentoo, Arch Linux is bad enough to set up if it goes wrong. Yes, the result is appealing and responsive, but the effort is just too much. Quit the trolling.
You will never go in to space.
FACT: Space does not exist.
Spheres that insist on going into space are inferior to ones that don't.
