Vista vs. Linux - Which is REALLY better?

I'm sick of this "just get more ram!" bullshit. My 286 did almost as much functionality-wise as my current multi-ghz machine. Yeah, really. Sure, there was no multi-tasking, but I did the mostly the same things as I do today.
Hello, fuckers, just because you can eat ram doesn't mean you should. It costs money and also reduces the number of programs you can run.
I can see it now: in another ten years programs will have minimum footprint of 1GB, but they'll just do more of the same.

Linux is faster but you
can get applications such as XGL
and beryl which adds more functionallity
to the Desktop Environment than vista's areo
and eats up less ram, but ubuntu's minimum
requirements is 256 MB of ram, would your old
computer be good enough to keep up with
development. stop viewing this page if the answer
is yes because your old computer couldn't do this
running procedural languages (unless you would
like to browse this site in lynx/links)