While  I am thinking about myself as OS agnostic person, I do have some preferences or opinions about what is an ideal OS form me. I switched my personal computer to Linux a few years ago, but my workstation OS was usually chosen by my employer IT department. To be honest I did not try Vista, I was happy with XP and this was true even after a lot of my colleagues moved to Vista (and back  to XP again). For software developer there are more essential things than Aero or new security model. Developer needs to write code, compile and debug. I have to say that best development experience on Microsoft platform was with combination of Visual Studio 2008 and Windows XP.