XP was a pretty damn good OS that came out of a time when there wasn't a lot of options.
It was pretty stable. You could change network settings without restarting. It was built on the NT core instead of whatever 95/98/ME hot mess was.
The main issue was it's exposure to viruses. Which was address in 8+ (windows actually started acting more like linux with regards to user/admin).
Windows7 IMHO had the best ui out of the box. 10 grew on me. Let's just not talk about 8.
That's more true of Windows 2000 though. By the time XP was released Apple had released a few iterations of OS X and it was looking pretty decent. Not to mention desktop Linux becoming stable. Neither of which were true in 2000.
In fact with Windows 2000, I used to dual boot Win 95, Linux Slackware and BeOS 5 but I always came back to Windows 2k for day to day work. Then when Windows XP was released I gave it a try and got so fed up with it that rather than installing Win2k again I just switched to Linux full time instead (sadly BeOS had ceased development by that point).
(We did some printing. In the range of 1M pages/workstation. It...worked...on XP. Eventually.)
- The classic theme was just a few clicks away
- Of all the problems with XP, I would not even list the "easily changed default theme" in the top.... 100 or so. I would not expect to see such sentiment on HN, of all places.