As someone who was stuck on vista as a teen towards the end of its life is wasn’t a bad OS, but it did deserve the hate early on for being a buggy OS that was poorly optimised for the average hardware of the time. But then I moved to 7 and fell in love with it( or at least I thought it was great).

Then I upgraded to 10 and hated it. I switched to Mac for a couple of years and started liking unix but missed the hardware of PCs and didn’t like the 10.15+ direction of MacOS.

So I switched to Linux( which I had messed with on an old laptop on and off as a teen, but at the time liked all my proprietary crap I was used too) and have never looked back.

I was one of the few people who bought the original Surface and I actually loved Windows 8 on that thing. I even used Internet Explorer because the touch interface was fantastic. It all got taken away though.

I got a laptop with Vista when it was new and though I’m wasn’t really a Windows fan, I never really had a problem with it. I suppose I had never used XP though.

Vista was more stable and usable for me than xp ever was.

Vista became pretty good after tons of upgrades.