I recently decided to upgrade to Fedora Core 8, and since I have been doing a lot of Windows development, I decided to back up my personal data, wipe the slate clean, repartition the disk and add my old version of Tablet XP back onto my laptop (the OS it shipped with).  It was an interesting experience, and it shows just how far Linux on the desktop has come. 

Windows Experience:

• I used the Toshiba restore disks that I created when I originally got the machine.  The restore went fine, but of course there's no option like "preserve existing partitions" so I made sure to do the Windows installer first or I would have had to redo the Linux install.  At least it offered me the option of restoring to a partition instead of just assuming the whole disk and making me fiddle with the partitions afer the fact..
• After getting it installed, I had to uninstall a dozen or so of the bloatware products that ship with it by default to make it usable.  My system tray took up practically half of the taskbar!
• It gave me some warning about one of the DVD drivers needing to be disabled and that there should be no problem regardless of which one I left enabled.  Mind you, this is on a factory-fresh restore. Why would you ship a version of your system with a conflict built into it?
• Of course, despite their assurances, I have somehow hosed the DVD drive, or so it seems.  When I insert the Visual Studio install DVD, and I get a random, unkillable process that sucks up 50% of my CPU, hangs explorer.exe, and will not let me logout, reboot, or shutdown.  Other than that, it's fine.

 Linux Experience

• Install works like a charm.  It recognizes my windows partition and checks if I want to add that to the grub configuration.
• All hardware seems to be working.  It certainly doesn't have any trouble opening the Visual Studio DVD.
• As a bonus, I get the lovely Compiz experience.  It doesn't get much better than desktops on a cube.

All in all, my Linux installation was faster, user-friendlier, and had a better outcome.  Maybe I'll check again if Visual Studio will run under WINE...