I have to agree. My work laptop came with Vista. I tried getting along with it, but I didn't like it as much as XP. When working on a project, everything worked fine on XP and Ubuntu but not on Vista, so I had to switch to Ubuntu.

It was easier (at least for me) to come to grips with it even though I've never been an avid Linux user.

By now I've started working on a new project and decided to give Vista another chance. Two days later... I'm back in Ubuntu.

I would agree with that also. As a beginner, I found Ubuntu easy to understand. However, I would now consider myself an advanced user, and having tried all the other major distros (Debian, Suse, Fedora, Arch, among others) I still don't think you can beat Ubuntu for every-day purposes.

I haven't seen any other distro that is as likely to work on most hardware (specifically, I'm thinking of laptop wireless devices - those have been huge nuisance to me), have as much software ready to go, as much documentation, and feel as "finished". With very little work, I've customized the hell out of my ubuntu installation and it uses very little disk space, runs extremely fast, is very stable.

I see Ubuntu as an ideal balance of usability and raw power. Out of curiosity, what would you say is the best follow-up after XP? I saw XP as the best Windows version, because it was more robust, popular and usable than any of the others.

The whole article is flawed - it's based on the false assumption there is such a thing as an advanced Windows user. :-P