I have actually lived through that era, and I can't remember there being negative sentiment about XP. I don't know about the dark corners of the internet, but the people in my circles were neutral about XP, hated Vista, loved 7, hated 8, hated 10 and hate 11
to this day, the only criticism of XP I saw is about the UI, which doesn't make sense to me - switching it was a matter of 3 clicks
Pretty much everyone i remember hated XP's "Fisher Price" look.
Also there was a ton of compatibility issues, at the time Microsoft saw Win98 as the biggest competitor to XP and it wasn't until SP2 that XP was seen as good.
Funny enough, a quick search for "windows xp fisher price" has this Ars Technica article about exactly that topic (people hating Windows XP when it first came out):
One of the first things I did was always revert to the Windows Classic theme, because it was very easy to do so. There were also plenty of other custom themes should you want something different.
Starting with Windows 8, they removed that option completely.
Windows 8 was genuinely the only one I felt was objectively a step backwards.
Even Vista had its goals in the right place (it was a broken mess, but it meant well).
Windows 8 had so many improvements to the core O/S (even Task Manager was a massive leap forward in 8!) that were just utterly undermined by that horrific metro UI. It must have been so frustrating to have worked there at that time then have some idiot force a touch screen interface on to it that didn’t make any sense.
Windows 10 resolved most of this, and Windows 11 fixed a lot of the fundamental issues with the security model that have plagued Windows for decades.
I must be the only person in the world who really loved that theme. It always cheered me up. The default wallpaper not so much, but I never let the default one anyway.
The coloured "rubber" gadgets were very nice. Those haters surely dislike Comic Sans too!
I, on the other hand, clearly remember a huge wave of disgust and resentment towards XP right after it came out. Slow and bloated, with hideous, gimmicky visuals, it had been an object of all kinds of ridicule and criticisms by "sophisticated" computer users.
I think people were happy with NT4, 2000, Windows 95, and possibly Windows 98 as it had a fair number of technical improvements over Vanilla 95 (OSR2 brought in support for >2G drives for example but it wasn't until 98 you could use it properly)
From memory XP was the first "phone home" windows version which required some form of online registration. I stopped using windows at home or admining it around then.
Yeah, but that shit was a big deal back then. We were used to having software work for us and not anyone else, so monetizing your eyeballs or attempting to profile you and enforce copyright through the internet was weird and creepy. People lost their shit when they found out Bonzi Buddy and Comet Cursor had spyware. Today's Bonzi Buddy/Comet Cursor is called... well, Windows 11, and no one seems to care.
They're slowly stuffing that shit into updates of Windows 10 too.
and no one seems to care.
I suspect that's largely because of learned helplessness and the bias that search engines and the like seem to have developed. Instead of piles of critical articles about all the worst parts, we get SEO'd sites parroting the same unbearably positive marketing copy about how much "better" Win11 is.
As did I. I was excited for everything until 8. I even liked Vista, since I was installing it on a real computer and not a 256MB shitbox. Still miss Vista's ability to dock My Computer as a desktop toolbar.
Incorrect. Nor you or anyone else liked Vista. There's a video of one of the lead engineers describing how they use the "fail fast" mantra. They sure did.
After some of the newer anti-telemetry tools like O&O ShutUp and WDP, I find Windows 10 to have similar parity with Windows 7 in terms of snappiness and simplicity. Yes, it takes work that one shouldn't have to do, but at least all the usual Windows features (like moving the taskbar) are present, patches are frequent, and there are no longer any major breaking changes with updates. So for now at least I'm happy on 10, and not looking forward to 11...
It had online activation and online updates. People freaked out. There was a Software called XP-AntiSpy. It was so popular that it was soled in stores on physical media!
