A friend of mine just treated himself to a shiny new laptop. It's a top of the range model, and came with Vista. He's very impressed with Vista's features and content, and extremely unimpressed with the speed of his new machine. We also can't get it to connect to the other machine on his local network. It seems Vista goes out of its way to make that difficult.
The blow came when we did a quick comparison: my old 1100MHz IBM ThinkPad (4 years old if it's a day) running XP is faster doing any serious application than his whizzbang running Vista. That proved what we'd suspected.
Oh - and with Vista, came MS Works preinstalled! I thought Works had been consigned to the dustbin of history.
Now he's debating whether to buy MS Office 2007 (pesky expensive), or install Linux instead. He's not quite confident enough in his geek-skills for the Linux-only step.
That (especially a fruitless afternoon spent trying to get his new toy to work on his network) has convinced me that Vista won't be coming in this direction.
Isn't Slackware 12 good! Knoppix 5.2 is downloading as I type this...