It has been ages, and I did probably not touch Vista anymore after that (I used Mac at home after years of Windows&Linux, while at work it was mostly WinNT, Lin

It has been ages, and I did probably not touch Vista anymore after that (I used Mac at home after years of Windows&Linux, while at work it was mostly WinNT, Linux, Solaris...) so I cannot recall what specifically felt odd (apart from the UAC that at least for the first hour or so were cropping up with alarming frequency - the person I was helping lives far away from my hometown, so the idea of leaving her with mistery pop-ups wasn't really encouraging). In any case, the UI was only a minor concern: I was confident that everyone can learn and adjust after a few hours of work with it. But what I could not help to notice was that I still remembered clearly what happened when I started my first Macbook (three years before the Vista episode): the UI felt very different than what I was accustomed to... but it felt also much better. Intuitive, empowering. When something unexpected happened it was, most often than not, a nice surprise like "wow, the global search can find strings even in a just-closed Word for Mac documents!" (compare and contrast with stuff like Magellan on Windows) or how the progress bar on file copies worked (compare and contrast with https://xkcd.com/612/ https://xkcd.com/612/ ).