I've been trying Microsoft Vista for the last couple months, on the post-thief-bought EasyNote BG45-P-006. Contrary to what you probably keep hearing from colleagues, Vista works relatively good for me. Am I sold for some screen blings? Definitely not. Would I give up my GNOME desktop? Definitely not. Here is the pro:

• Good support for my hardware.
• Fair enough power management.
• Reliable suspend and resume.
• Very, very good fonts and font rendering. I mean, close-to-Apple-good, but not there yet.
• Quick user switching.

And here is what you'll love most, the con list:

• Slow startup. It takes like ages to get a usable desktop.
• Immature support for wireless networks. Actually, wired networks are not so good at all. I keep myself doing ipconfig /release and ipconfig /renew all the time.
• Too many questions. Security doesn't mean ask user about everything.
• Enormous, gigantic memory usage. Boy, a decent default desktop uses just about 1 GB memory. I've got 2, so this beast uses about half of it for itself.
• It's messing around with my hard drive all the time. Disk light keeps blinking every couple seconds even if I have nothing running. This prevents disk from entering standby to save more power.
• I like the new Start menu layout but searching the menu is just too slow.
• There's no use for Sidebar on my desktop.

For your pleasure, here's what my usual work session looks like:

• Eclipse
• Firefox
• Thunderbird
• PuTTY, and Pageant.
• Cygwin
• Vim
• OpenOffice.org
• Last.fm Client
• Xming
• Pidgin
• Skype
• Google Talk

Most of what you see in the list is open source, or free software. I also have an Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex installation on the same device but I pushed myself to bear with Vista stupidities for a while. I think I'll go back as soon as they fix Compiz's multi-head support. For my single-headed desktop needs at work, I just use Ubuntu.