So, moral of the story is "It failed to work on Vista and Linux, but since I was willing to tinker around in Linux until it worked Vista sucks."
Linux is open source, so you
can tinker around with it. There are whole forums of smart people who understand how Linux works, and have figured out most problems you might have with it. And if they haven't found that problem already, you can post it there, and someone will probably know how to at least attempt to fix it. If the drivers for something don't work in Windows, you're usually just screwed, IMX.
Also, in my experience so far, Ubuntu seems to support most hardware as well or better than Vista does. The bluetooth stub worked as soon as I plugged it in in Ubuntu (it was the headphones that gave me problems). Even after I installed the drivers from a cd in Vista, it kept wanting to reinstall them over and over for some reason, every time I inserted the thing.
I've always disliked alot of things about Windows, and have wanted to jump ship for quite some time, but there really weren't any viable, easy-to-use alternatives up until recently, unless you were willing to shell out the extra bucks for a Mac. Ubuntu seems like the first Linux OS that can actually replace Windows for the common user.