Vista was fine, apart from the performance. I had a fairly beefy machine for the time so I hardly noticed, but on lower spec machines it was an absolute dog.
Kinda felt like an unoptimised prerelease version of Windows 7
I didn’t use windows from 1999 through 2008, when I bought a laptop which of course came with Vista. I used it a bit and thought, well, for a wintendo, this isn’t horrible.