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.

I love Windows, but then, I'm an IT support analyst so I find it dead simple to maintain. If my system looked like some of the client machines I've seen literally soaked in spyware, my outlook wouldn't be so rosy - the stuff never takes to my system though - hell, I don't even have close calls anymore... Also, if you pirate, the server version of any Windows makes a better desktop than the desktop ver - you'll just find a lot of pigheaded programs do an OS check and refuse to run. They can be tricked with wildly varying efficacy.

I've tried many Linux distros over many years, and essentially... hated them. Ubuntu has the most promise I found, but there was so little I could do in it that I was accustomed to, and it was so damn hard to fix when little things would happen like - it'd just forget it had a network card and never configure properly again. Very good initial hardware detection though. I swear it seems more closely related to BeOS than Linux!

Posting this from a Macbook I'm playing with for work so I can learn and support them... It's not bad at all and I don't feel I need to install WinXP just as a backup to "do real work" on it. Then again I'm not really sold that it's superior either. The OS has a bad habit of ignoring input and giving no feedback, then erupting in a flood of backed-up commands. It also has a bunch of things that simply can't be configured and work WRONG, but that's in another thread...