The Vista experience is broken. It's long past time to fix it.

I have been using Vista for well over a year now (since Beta 1). Of course Vista is slow, its bloated (over 10x the size of XP), aero kills system performance (even though this should be done on the video card), networking is pathetically slow, etc etc. We all know Vista sucks.

But recently my blood has been set to a rolling boil by the fact that most of my games just don’t work in Vista. At all. Its so bad that out of spite I have decided to make a list of games that work better in Linux under Wine than in Vista. These are games that were originally written to run in Windows XP, are broken in Vista, but magically work in Linux.

I knew it. Vista simply wasn’t ready for prime time. Some internal documents that emerged from a class-action lawsuit over Vista Capable illustrated that hardware vendor, Dell, pushed back on Microsoft to fix issues with Vista before launching. Microsoft knew fully well of Dell’s feedback as early as Aug 2005.

In a blow to Microsoft Corp., a federal judge granted class-action status to a lawsuit late Friday alleging that Microsoft unjustly enriched itself by promoting PCs as "Windows Vista Capable" even when they could only run a bare-bones version of the operating system, called "Vista Home Basic."

I have many colleagues and friends who have been through messy divorces. In each case, these poor guys have gone from having the good life, to having issues, to losing half of their assets (or more). I just filed my divorce papers for Microsoft's Vista. In my case, my relationship with Vista never went through the good life period.

It's the problem of legacy and Microsoft's ridiculous integration strategy. Windows is a fat client for a thin world. There's no future place for the desktop client. Computing is shifting from the desktop to the device and server. Windows, particularly Vista, has too much middle-age girth to dance with the lithely crowd.

iPod Linux lock-out broken. Just a day after it was reported that Apple’s latest iPod had a checksum that prevented it from working with anything other than iTunes, the offending piece of code has been broken. Blog ipodminusitunes was among the first to report this.

Yes, that's right. A loyal Windows user of more than 15-years is throwing in the towel on Vista. You can read his story for why he finds Vista so annoying, but I'll sum it up for you: Vista sucks.

While I definitely think some elements of Vista are definite improvements, 10 months of experience has shown me there are some things that just annoy me to my very core. Here are the three things that most make me wish I had the strength to move over to Linux — full time.