Just about 2 years after Vista's initial availability, I finally installed it on my primary desktop at home.
Actually, the machine has been in a pretty sad state of running 32-bit XP on a machine with 6 Gb of RAM for several months now. Vista x64 is the only useful 64-bit version of Windows, so here we are.
So far, things seem to be OK. I managed to use the opportunity to change my boot drive to a newly acquired WD Velociraptor, which seems to be doing quite alright. 5.9 on the vista disk performance index, whatever that means.
I'm kinda tired of the Vista hating. Yes, it sucks on old machines, but on a decently new machine, it's just fine (and most of my current desktop is 2 years old). It's the only Windows OS that lets you use >3GB of RAM, and there are tons of kernel improvements that can really benefit power users. Try using Windows Search on an XP machine with a giant cached outlook mailbox. It totally sucks. Only the vista scheduler and low-priority I/O support make it bearable.
I got this thing up and running in an hour. I still can't say the same about Linux. Mac OSX sure, but I don't want to pay 3k for a MacPro, so that comparison is irrelevant for me.