The only reason XP was decent was that it stuck around for so long so people got used to it, just like OS X 10.4 for Macs. XP SP2 fixed a lot of stuff, as did the yearly patches after that, but it was still a usability and security nightmare that tried to hide what it was doing from the user.

Personally, I feel like NT4 was pretty good, but didn’t have driver support. Windows 2000 onwards was intentionally breaking stuff to make NT more like Windows 95. And just this month, some buggy driver code ported from Windows 98 to Win2K was FINALLY removed from Windows 11.