Vista got a lot of hate when it came out but honestly, I liked it then and I continue to not think of it as problematic. It introduced `gksudo` to everyone and people complained about it but I was an Ubuntu user prior to using Vista so it felt natural to me. Overall, it was an operating system that worked well, as did Windows 7 afterwards with signed drivers and so on. In fact, those Windows versions got the reloadab…
Imo vistas biggest problem was they underspecced the minimum system requirements. Most peoples experience with vista was on sub 1gb of ram machines with a single core, no gpu and 32 bits. Vista was an os for modern architectures first. Windows 7 had the luxury of those features being the default at launch.
And the later ones which did have full DX 9 support really weren't that much better. I recall drivers being an absolute mess for a lot of external peripherals too, many that weren't even dated took ages to get something usable for vista if at all.