My main OS would be Winxp since it came with the rig, and i have to say something that comes along  with a package does last long and is better compared to those downloaded from net, i downloaded Winxp image from my Technet account, and that image i made it to oem and after a few weeks of heavy browsing and downloading it would not behave the same as the original copy that came with the rig.
That wouldn't give any reason to prefer more than Win7 but, i really like the eye candy and the whole aesthetic feel of Win7 when i simply leave it open, i don't know if its me, but i noticed the copy/paste feature is considerably faster in Win7, and tweaking command prompt wasn't to time consuming, and the major thing i liked was configuring the recording option and selecting main audio device, which was replaced by some sound card was also easy, all these small things have been improved.

I am an average joe, and i do not use my pc for any major things, but i tweak a lot and noticed a lot of the small things i had a little time consumed in Winxp has been reduced in Win7. But i will not leave Winxp that easily or any time sooner. I can't comment on kernel level or can't give any comments what an administrator found it useful to him/her.
I am on a dual boot, and it is rocking for now.

I'll also probably keep some VMs of XP around indefinitely.

Same here, for testing applications I've written.

Even Win 7 will be TWO OS's OLD if they live up to their promise to slam out another new one. Yes it's 8 years later and "competent", but why still go with a 2 year old OS? If I'm gonna upgrade I like to "bite the bullet, pick well, get stuff that lasts, then ride out the ripples of marketing".

  Yeah, I don't play into that "You've just got to upgrade to the newest OS or your not cool" crapola.  XP works just fine for me, and I'll be damned if I'm going to spend another 4 grand on another top-of-the-line computer just to be able to use it.  This 2.8 ghz machine flies with XP, and will be extremely faster on Linux.  I'll keep XP as an alternate boot with all external communications disabled for security.  Once I get Wine installed plus get all of the Linux software that I need, I'll be pretty much set up for the life of this computer.  And when it blows up, I'll just transfer everything onto a new computer without having to buy an OS that I already paid for.  Got to love that! 

Quote from: Tinman57 on January 27, 2013, 02:17 AM

Once I get Wine installed...

Wine works surprisingly well. But it's not a panacea. Don't expect everything to run under it. Or be stable if it does run. Because there's many times a winapp simply won't work with Wine no matter how much fiddling you do.

Fortunately, with the advent of inexpensive and very large hard drives, it's quite practical to allocate some space for XP and setup a dual boot system. Especially since most flavors of Linux are Windows 'aware' and can install themselves alongside it with no fuss or headaches.

  As with all emulators, I kind of figured there would be some things that just won't work.  I think I'm going to put in a larger hard drive for the dual boot system and use this hard drive for storage and backups.