I wouldn’t say Vista is absolute garbage, but it doesn’t knock me out. For 6 months now I’ve been running both XP and Vista on my two year old HP with 2GB of ram. Dumped all the slick, RAM-eating eye candy from Vista and it runs about as well as XP. But I just don’t experience any major advantages to using it when compared to XP, which is simple, light and reliable as hell. 90% of the time, I just boot into XP and get on with things. I won’t even bother with the next Windows release. Maybe when I get the time, I’ll play around with Linux and see if it’s worth easing into that, and away from Windows before XP becomes obsolete.
That was pretty much my predicament, only it was exactly three years ago and the two Windows were Win2k and XP. I installed Ubuntu Linux 5.10 and pretty much stopped finding reasons to keep the Windows installation around.
Now I'm happily using 8.04 and looking forward to my upgrade to 8.10 that came out today. My sixtyish mother will be staying at 8.04 as that is an LTS (Long Term Release) that has support for three years.