Windows 7: six month review

It has now been 6 months that i have forced myself to use Windows as my primary OS and my general impression with it is fairly good. This was a project to just re-familiarize myself with the windows OS so that I wouldn't completely loose touch with its ins and outs, and also to pull myself back from the "whichever system i don't use SUCKS" mentality that is so prevalent in the tech world (trying to stay out of the droid/iphone flamewars too...).

Pros:

• Windows 7 is actually stable for the most part, I haven't had a single system freeze or bsod.
• Management of system resources seems much improved, can't argue with the speed and multitasking efficiency.
• The days of required periodic reboots are gone, I've only had to reboot once to solve a problem (sound had stopped working, who knows? just reboot...)
• Security seems to finally be taken seriously by Microsoft, the system's networking is much more locked down and almost everything runs with limited permissions.
• Thanks to open development, most software that you need now has a free equivalent, which was one of the major draws to linux.
  

Cons:

• For some reason when i unplug my laptop, the video driver crashes... in the Linux world i would be able to fix that in the config, or work with an open development team on the problem. In windows i just have to wait for Microsoft to fix it, if it ever gets fixed at all
• The windows shell is still not intuitive to use, powershell is a bit better than CMD but still missing a lot of the functionality that BASH has.
• Compatibility Mode is NOT a feature! it's a patch that is a pain in the ass.. having to tell a program to run under legacy dlls and system parameters to get it to work at all is just a bad way to manage applications.
• Windows Firewall still seems to have limited functionality and a poor user interface... can we just have a cli like iptables for it please?
• And as always, the cost... software that costs hundreds of dollars should be superior in every way to similarly purposed software that is free. I do not see the value in windows 7 that justifies its cost.
  

I didn't include anything about games.. because i'm not a gamer. However, I've seen some awesome videos of people running Crysis on their Gentoo rigs..

I can see Windows 7 being a decent system for most people, Most of my complaints lean towards the geeky side and most people wouldn't really care about them an most people are willing to pay the money for the OS that is familiar to them. I think Win7 has pulled Microsoft's ass out of the fire after that horrible darkages they brought on known as "vista".

Haven't decided what system to run now, time to browse distrowatch or something...