Vista had an undeserved bad rep IMO, it was an important 1.0 milestone for many new technologies and improvements especially in the security model. It effectively was a beta of Windows 7, with 7 being Microsoft's "Snow Leopard".

Windows 11 still ships with the installer from Vista.

Vista was especially good if you had high-memory-use workloads. Vista 64-bit was miles better than XP x64 Edition.