Skeuomorphic design was a mistake.
At least Vista wasn't as bad as Apple back then. Look how silly iOS's books app was. Or OSX's podcasts app.
Heck, iCal's stupid leather stitching was literally based on a texture in Steve Job's Gulfstream jet.
At least Vista didn't look like a fisher price toy like XP did. The only people I see defending XP's looks and its pseudo-3d clipart are just nostalgic. The Luna theme was rightfully derided when it came out.
I just want what they had going in Windows 9x, flat boxes with right angles and no gradients. As much as Win8's UX was unusable (if I didn't already know all the keyboard shortcuts, I would've gone mad), it was a huge step in the right direction visually. If only they just toned down the neon colors, I would've been so happy.
But no... Now Windows 10 is starting to dig up the mistakes of the past. Foggy glass that looks like someone took a shower? Distracting outline gradients wherever I hover my mouse? Eugh.
Regardless, the issues with Vista came almost entirely down to vendors not supplying drivers. Most of the under-the-hood overhauls Vista took were sorely needed. WinFX/.NET, WPF/DWM, and the new media APIs were ripping off crusty old band-aids that were keeping their OS stuck in the 90s. Poorly written applications kept unreasonably expecting the user to have administrative privileges, making UAC a necessity. Between that and address space layout randomization, Vista was a lot more secure than XP.
Also, the integrated search in the start menu. Once you get used to that, it's difficult to ever go back.
But because of how long longhorn took (heh), XP became the end-all be-all of Windows, supported by everything and used by all. For some reason, a lot of vendors took this to mean that supplying their drivers for the new OS wasn't a priority, despite MS giving them ample time to update their code. So you had crap like Nvidia's drivers causing 30% of all Vista crashes.
The chaos at launch was fixed after third parties got their butts in gear, but by then word of mouth spread and MS took a lot of bad press. Honestly, Win7 was just a rebranded Vista service pack that came out after the bundled drivers became stable. Everyone fell in love with the changes Vista made after it wasn't named Vista.
I do wish WinFS became a reality though. A relational database for a regular file system is fascinating to me.
Agreed. Everything looks like sheets of paper layered over each other now.
I jumped on the bandwagon for Vista right away, and it took months to get a stable install going. I waited nearly a year before installing Windows 7 when it came out. But when I did, I made sure to back up all the backgrounds from Vista, because they were so pretty and simple.
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