Sam Varghese over at ITwire.com has sent a few cats amongst the pigeons with a post asking the question “Is Windows Vista really driving people to Linux?”

He makes the argument that since there’s very little proof in the way of figures to back up the claim, you can’t really say it is.

To try and get a grip on how Windows XP vs Windows Vista vs Linux plays out, I’ve been playing with three computers for the last three months - one desktop with Vista Ultimate 32-bit (the one I’m using to type this story), another with Windows XP Professional 32-bit (the one I do my software development on) and a third with Ubuntu 8.04 32-bit.

Over that time, I’ve used all three to do various tasks from image editing to word processing, video encoding, software development, digital TV streaming and operating system development.

Here’s how I rate those three months: