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.

You know, the only reason I bought vista was because I thought "hmm, I want to play games.  XP would fulfill all my needs in that area, but I also want it to look good.  hmm, xp looks like shit to vista, linux looks even better, but dosn't play the games I want to play." hence, vista.  and, provided you get the 32 bit version, everything works fine.  its the 64 bit version that sucks