Month in Vista vs Month in Ubuntu Linux

When I started at the new job in August, they gave me a pretty powerful laptop and since the company I work for is 100% windows, I decided to give Vista a shot. I've been using it exclusively for about 1.5 months, from the beginning of August to the mid-September, every day, 40 hours a week. I also installed Ubuntu at that time but didn't use it as there were a lot things to do in the beginning and I couldn't spend anytime playing with linux in the 100% windows environment.

I work as system administrator for a small brokerage firm and my primary task is making sure that all of the IT stuff is working, plus supporting the company's website. So in a typical workday I usually:

• Play around with servers. I have 4 windows 2000 servers supporting AD, file sharing, backups etc. The person before me didn't have a clue or just didn't care much so a lot of things are not properly setup.
• Occasionally help users by connecting to their computers with Remote Desktop and fixing things.
• Price out and buy needed stuff - new computers, accessories etc
• Have been developing the new website and fixing the old one.
  
• And generally make sure things are working and will keep working in the case of emergency.

At first Vista seems pretty nice - all pretty and colorful. And overall boot time is faster than XP. But as soon as you start doing work, all the eye candy becomes more of an annoyance. It just doesn't seem to serve any purpose. For example in OSX and Compiz, when you want to switch between apps it actually shows all of them at the same time which is useful. And in Vista they are stacked on top of each other so you can only see the top program and fractions of the ones on the bottom. Looks kind of cool, but is not very useful.
Another big annoyance is the new contol panel - I suppose it could be easy for someone who has never used windows before, but for me it was just annoying to look for the things in the most random places. For example, we use static IPs at work(which I don't like, but that's how it was setup) and it takes a very long time to get to the window where you can enter it. Even in XP it was much much easier.
Also a lot of programs don't work well with it. It is especially sad with microsoft's own applications. It would be stupid to blame Vista for not supporting windows 95 era tool for configuring the Avaya Merlin phone system. I can also understand how some proprietary financial tools don't work in it. But there's no excuse for outlook 2007 not working with exchange 2003 server over the HTTPS. I went through countless forum posings and KB articles and nothing fixed it. Plus after some windows update a very annoying bug popped up: I have a second monitor connected to my laptop and it is to the left from me. And everytime I log off or even just lock my screen, Vista keeps resetting it to the right. Very annoying.
Overall Vista doesn't seem to be any better than XP - I haven't noticed a single thing that it does better. Plus there's a whole bunch of areas where it just sucks.
So enough about Vista, now lets talk about Linux.
As soon as things slowed down a little bit I started booting to Ubuntu more and more often. The install wasn't completely painless as the widescreen resolutions didn't work right away which was solved by installing ATI's closed fglrx driver. I've originally installed Feisty and then upgraded to Gutsy. The upgrade process was easy and painless. And the GUI tools are really great - if you dont't want to, there's no need to use shell at all.
The Evolution mail connected to the exchange seamlessly(even though it doesn't use MAPI) and works very well. Rdesktop allows me to connect to any windows server without any problem.
But what is most surprising - everything works much much faster than in Vista.
And Gnome is very well thought out too. I've never used explorer like file managers - I always preferred things like Total Commander or Krusader, but Nautilus is really great. It's both friendly and powerful. There's no way to seamlessly connect to ssh in Windows - extra tools have to be used, while in gnome it feels all transparent.
So in general - Windows Vista sucks compared to both XP and Ubuntu.