Who loves Windows 7?

Windows 7 is a good OS for most people but I find it doesn't meet most of my needs. The OS has improved to the point where most of the issues are based on third party Windows software generally being subpar to OSX apps:

-Very hard to find free software that isn't spyware infested -Bad GUIs in most apps -- lots of inconsistency on basic things like open/save dialogs -Most of the apps are very bulky. Even a simple app has a ton of toolbar icons, tons of menu entries, lots of wasted screen space, etc -Most Windows apps still include really low res ugly icons. Windows 7 looks nice but then you've got some 16x16 8 color icons or whatever in your Dock that look awful. -Lack of built in tools (good CLI, SSH, X11 clients) -Doesn't interoperate very well with my other non-Windows systems (no NFS, AFP) -Doesn't include a good backup system built in -No easy way to update applications (like apt or sparkle on OSX) -Still way too many popups, system tray icons, warnings, wizards, etc. -Not worth ~$100 to me. DRM makes it a bit too hard to pirate so I'll stick with XP in my VM -The system wide search feature doesn't work inside of many common file types making it far less useful to me. -Installing / Uninstalling apps is a bulky process with half a dozen clicks required in each direction.

They fixed a lot of the right things, yes. And they left a lot of things untouched, which is inexcusable for a company with their resources (sure it's a fresh coat of paint; but dig down just a little, and you can still find horrible, awkward interfaces that were untouched since 1995).

My friend bought 7 Pro for his extremely fast PC built in the last couple of years. But within hours he decided to remove it (back to XP) and wait until he buys a new PC. I'm sure the hardware businesses love that, but what kind of value is that for a multi-hundred-dollar OS?

I don't "love" Windows 7, but i definitely think that its the best Windows version to come out so far(which isn't saying much).

A lot of the improvements that they have made(which they deem usability improvements) have been things that annoyed ever since Windows 95 came out(such as window group in the taskbar).

I switched my systems to Linux variants a long time ago and it was painful to see the desktop systems there trying to mimic the same wrong behavior. I use Win7 at one of my jobs and think it is somewhat bearable for a developer.

I run a bunch of Windows VMs under VMWare.

Windows XP minimal install requires around 1.5 GB disk space..

Windows 7 minimal install requires around 16 GB disk space..

I don't think I'll be upgrading anytime soon..

It is working quite well in VirtualBox OSE under Ubuntu. I am able to access ActiveX and Exchange 2007 easily, and it seems to be performing faster than the XP Pro session I previously ran.