Vista was a deployment issue. At its release, the bulk of affordable consumer laptops had 1-2GB RAM, underpowered IGPs, and barely-beyond-32-bit dual core proce

Vista was a deployment issue. At its release, the bulk of affordable consumer laptops had 1-2GB RAM, underpowered IGPs, and barely-beyond-32-bit dual core processors-- real "made for XP" systems. Vista required hardware acceleration for its desktop compositing, a minimum of 2GB RAM, and amd64 to avoid PAE. It ran very well on on systems with quadcore CPUs, discrete GPUs, and 4+GB RAM. The Linux DE Revolution hadn't started and I was still gnashing my teeth over the GNOME 3 transition when Vista came out, so I gave it a try. I still say it had better compatibility for foreign and older software than any of the later Windows.