> XP was a pretty damn good OS that came out of a time when there wasn't a lot of options.
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).
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.