• Windows Vista Starter Edition
• Windows Vista Home Basic Edition
• Windows Vista Home Premium Edition
• Windows Vista Professional Edition
• Windows Vista Small Business Edition
• Windows Vista Enterprise Edition
• Windows Vista Ultimate Edition

There’s two answers to this question, one for the geeks and one for everyone else.

If you’re not a geek

Buy an Apple computer with OS X. Seriously. You’d have to buy a new computer for Vista anyways (this applies to you even if you bought a computer this week). The Intel-based macs are excellent machines, OS X is easy, reliable, and can do everything you want do with your computer. You can even set them up to run XP alongside OS X for that one last program you can’t get your files out of.

If you don’t want OS X because you’re a gamer, you don’t want Vista either. Just get a mac and a Wii.

If you’re a geek

You want Ubuntu Linux. It’s darn easy, it’s great on laptops, and you can make it sit up and do tricks. I don’t need to elaborate on this one: you know Linux is the hands-down best OS for geeks, and Ubuntu is a great distribution.

Either way…

I’m not going to be supporting Windows Vista for my friends and family. I’ve limped along with a little XP knowledge, but I’ve never used it for anything but testing and a few games so I’ve never really learned my way around it. I’ll put up with Vista professionally, but I won’t be able to help you solve the problems you’ll have with it.

And you will have problems. It’s built to have problems: the anti-piracy protections will have it lowering image and sound quality, turning off features, and disabling itself altogether if it decides you’re doing anything hinky, whether or not you are. Editing your home movies may trigger it to think you’re editing Hollywood’s movies, and it’ll lock down on you. You don’t want a product that’s defective by design anywhere near your important files.

* Yes, I’ve used Cygwin. It’s good, but awkward.

The ? indicates that support is added by a random freeware utility rather than built into the OS, so who knows how well it’ll work. Yeah, XP and OS X both suck for filesystem support.

The general plan looks like OS X and XP will have ~10G partitions with their native HFS+ and NTFS. Linux will get a ~10G ext3 root partition and the rest of the disk space will go to a large ext3 partition for /home. I’ll spend my time in Linux, booting to XP and OS X mostly just to test, so their ext3 support needs to not suck or I’ll have to create a FAT 32 scratch partition just to pass files around (and scratch any hope of using my svn repos).

Just to add another wrinkle, I plan on using TrueCrypt to encrypt all my private data so I’m not 100% screwed if I lose my laptop, just like 15% screwed. TrueCrypt runs on Linux and XP and can encrypt entire filesystem partitions or virtual disks (which exist as files on existing partitions). So while I’d like to have a big ext3-formatted TrueCrypt-protected /home partition, that’d leave out OS X.

Anyone have a better plan? Anyone else with a triple-boot setup care to share lessons learned?