Vista? No, please!! I sometimes have to use it on my Dad-in-law's old laptop, ever since my even older XP laptop gave up
My new box had Win 8 installed (even though I did not want it), and I had to use it until I got Fedora working. Those 2 months were so bad, that I decided to format the whole disk, instead of leaving Win 8 for a dual boot.
If only Win XP was still supported, I'd give a lot to have it! It had the best of both worlds: Not as old-fashioned as the previous versions, but still simple. More control, less resource hogging.
Oh well, but no sense in remembering the good ol' times. We must get used to being served automatic updates "because they're better for us"