since you’re coming from the linux world, there’s a chance you’ll already have seen more thorough graphic desktops (beryl) and such, but there might still be a surprise or two. Vista has some transparency by default, and likes animation.
Another thing that was truly nice about Vista is that you could go in and mess around with sound devices really easily. I have a sound card and a USB headset, so in XP to switch I have to go to audio properties and change the default device manually, in vista it has a list of sound devices and you just select one and hit “make default” and bam, there it is.
one thing tho I’ll forewarn you about, in case you somehow missed any mentions of it, windows vista will insist on being the only bootloader if you’re trying to multiboot off of one hard disk, and there’s no option to undo that. Plus, last I checked (though it was months ago) GRUB couldn’t chainload the vista bootloader from another disk.
The big thing I’ve noticed for picking between windows XP and windows vista is drivers. Recent computers will likely have hardware that has no drivers for XP, and older hardware by just about anyone but Nvidia and ATI will be iffy in vista. And the ATI TV Wonder Pro pci card had no Vista32 or Vista64 drivers and ATI didn’t plan on any. This was pre-AMD times tho.
I’ve tried triple booting (vista64, xp, and linux) and dual booting (only vista64 and XP) off a single hdd and I have persistently broken something that has royally screwed my computer over, just different things each time that I installed Vista. This may be me trying to tweak too much of it, but it has not failed yet. I’ve gotten a copy of Vista32 and I’m trying that out at the moment, but so far I’ve only booted to it to install it and the basic programs (firefox and xchat) that I use, and haven’t booted to it since, so I haven’t yet tampered with it to the breaking point.
And in case you never saw the mac vs. pc tv commercials, the vista permission thing is a pain.
In general, I’ve gotten fairly familiar with Vista, but at least in my experience, once I started digging around and doing things beyond what a basic user would (msoffice, AIM, internet) then it got annoying very quick, and eventually unusable. To its credit, for basic users it’s very nice and stable.
Of course, all this is pre-service pack 1. I might try that out this weekend after I back everything up… (I finally went on ahead and got a backup hdd so that theoretically i can just hit the restore button if something goes wrong)
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And one last thing, for the record, I am a much greater fan of OpenGL than I am of D3D.