Do you love going to the dentist to get a filling — if it means you don’t have to get root canal? In this case, XP is the filling you learn to live with because you don’t want all the deeper pain associated with Vista migrations. But that doesn’t mean you love XP.

You may or may not have heard of it, but the PWN to OWN Competition is an annual competition where hackers get together to try to hack into 3 different machines: a Mac, a Linux box, and a Vista box. So far, the results have been both surprising and unsurprising as well.

Technically, Vista is pure misery. It eats system resources like an elephant does peanuts, Windows applications break and its so-called improved security is a joke. I know it. You know it. Even Microsoft's most devoted yes-men know it--although they won't admit it--and perhaps Microsoft knows it as well.

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."

Migration to the Windows Vista operating system apparently isn't generating much enthusiasm among IT personnel in the enterprise. A survey conducted in November of last year by market research firm King Research supports that notion. The study found that "90 percent of participants have concerns about the migration to Windows Vista."

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.

Microsoft creates FUD as it reports that Windows Vista has logged fewer vulnerabilities in its first year than XP, Red Hat, Ubuntu, and Apple Mac OS X did in their first years.

Demand for Linux systems is such that some retailers are selling out. Last year, for instance, Wal-Mart for a time couldn't fulfill orders for Everex's $199 gPC.