Of course, anything was good when compared with vista. Win 3 and Win 95 are not directly comparable, as they were running on severely underpowered hardware (an

Of course, anything was good when compared with vista. Win 3 and Win 95 are not directly comparable, as they were running on severely underpowered hardware (and they could not pursue the sort of simplification that made OSs on other low-end, "home computer" machines of the day more workable overall); Vista does not have that excuse given the growth in system requirements wrt. its predecessor. (Even Microsoft had to give up not only on Vista but on Windows 7 itself for "low-end platforms" - they ultimately promoted a "Starter" version of the latter that was specifically built to never even try to launch more than three apps at the same time! I won't bother to attempt even the most cursory comparison with what a proper, FLOSS alternative can still achieve on the same hardware, even today...that would be tedious and ultimately beside the point.)