Totally my experience as well, Windows 2000 really was the only Windows version I actually liked, it had very few faults for its time. Windows 7 probably comes second.

What I remember from XP is that it took until SP2 before all the problems were worked out, and SP3 actually introduced more annoyances in the name of security. I also think the default theme and general visual style of the XP is downright terrible and completely unworthy of a large professional company like Microsoft. The very first thing I always did was to switch back to the classic UI for everything (theme, start menu, all control panels, etc).

I don't care for any of the 'modern' Windows versions. They work, behind the scenes the technology has improved, but I they still annoy me in many ways, and the UI is IMO the worst it has ever been in the history of Windows. It looks cleaner but behind the veneer its just a giant heap of historical accidents piled on over the years, with no consistent direction of vision to be found. I get no joy using it, but I guess if you are used to working in Windows the OS is perfectly fine for what it does.

Agreed about the UI. Even at a distance of twenty years, Windows 2000 looks more pleasant and professional. The Windows XP UI managed to be somehow childish in its aesthetic and stressful in its complexity.

Of course every Windows OS eventually gets stable and fast on current hardware, at which point everyone starts praying that they'll get to use it forever and they'll never have to deal with a new major release again.

Yup. When saying "XP was great", people mean "XP SP2 and on" - for me, the move from W2k to WXP was "the same thing, now with Fischer-Price aesthetic!"

I say this as somebody who really enjoyed W2K, but the complaints about WinXP's default theme are very difficult to understand when:

- 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.

Hey man, let people complain about what color the bike shed was painted.

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.

> 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).

The look was superficial, sure: For someone moving from Win2K to XP, this was not the main frustration, but a easily recognizable sign for the myriad other issues (note: original XP, XPsp2 was the release that should have been).

(We did some printing. In the range of 1M pages/workstation. It...worked...on XP. Eventually.)

> Fischer-Price aesthetic

That is the perfect description. It’s one of the ugliest UIs I’ve ever experienced.

XP also shipped with the 2000 skin and it was trivially easy to switch over.

It was easy to switch but there is a lot to be said for sane defaults. With each new iteration of Windows I'd find more and more insane defaults (for me at least). It started with file extensions being hidden by default. Then system files too. By the time XP was released I was finding that I had to spend an hour just configuring the system how I liked...and that was before I installed any software.

Users will sometimes reach a point where they say "If I'm having to spend this much time configuring new installs to function how I like, then I might as well install something else that already ships with the defaults I like". And this is why many power users started drifting away from Windows in the decade of 2000 to 2010.

Windows Server having file extensions turned off by default still drives me crazy. I get it for the desktop versions, but it would be fantastic if server editions had it on, or it saved and picked up the toggle from your AD account/profile.

I agree generally about the importance of sane defaults, but the theme was just soooo damn easy to switch, and a lot of non-techy people I know did so.

I actually don’t really associate Windows XP with its theme in my memory, because I so rarely saw it in use.

Yep. Even switched it over when you went to the lower resources usage settings.

I have to stick up for XP because i have so many fond memories from my young adulthood of using it. I never had a problem with it's default theme but it also shipped with a few other themes that were better. like olive and then later the zune theme which was arguably the best one.

People said that (as well as Skittles OS) since it launched.

Many games did not work so well on 2K, and XP brought some substantial improvements specifically in that department.

I hear that said a lot about Windows 2000 but my experience was that it was only really true of legacy DOS games that didn't work right. Anything written for OpenGL or DirectX worked fine. In some cases even better (for example Quake 3 ran so much smoother on my BP6 board running Windows 2000).

I remember several of my Win9x games didn't work fine, but not which ones. I think Carmageddon 2 was one?

There were plenty of games for 9x that assumed its lax memory and permissions model, especially for stuff like DRM.

W2k had a w98 compatibily mode which could be enabled from the command prompt.

My migration from 2000 to XP meant blue screens. Most likely caused by drivers. But that left me with a lasting impression that 2000 was way more stable than XP.

It was largely the same kernel. Issue was largely because drivers for retail hardware weren’t written well enough.

It wasn't. It was just as stable as 2000 as long as you weren't a tweaker and stuck with stock. Almost every single OS becomes unstable with shitty drivers and/or cheap hardware that wasn't designed for it.

Don't forget that a lot of people compare XP not to Windows 2000 but Windows ME which was probably the worst Windows version ever :)

A few clicks and XP SP3 looks exactly like 2k, with a few useful features thrown in.

A decent number of not-ancient floss software supports it as well. Not so with 2k. Add thousands of security patches and firewall, and the choice is clear.

> A few clicks and XP SP3 looks exactly like 2k, with a few useful features thrown in.

There wasn't much added to Windows XP over 2000 in the original release of XP (service pack 3 was released 6 years (!!!) after XP was originally launched. So it's not really fair comparing XP SP3 to Win 2k). I remember this era in computing vividly and it took a few service packs before XP really came into it's own. However you still paid the price running XP because it demanded double the hardware requirements to run when compared with Windows 2000. So sure, you could disable themes in XP but for many people sticking with Windows 2000 was more appealing because you had more preferable defaults out of the box plus less bloat / hardware overhead too.

I thought the issues with games on Win2k was that it didn't have an uptodate DirectX version. I recall various hacks to try to get around this after XP showed up but Win2k was always the odd one out for games if memory serves.

Funny that, because Win2k was a glossy, less stable version of WinNT 4 that we had to move to, to get USB support. Had USB been backported to NT4, I never would have moved.

Did you run any specific hardware or something? W2k was rock solid for me from RC2 and onwards. The only thing that really didn't run stable was the drivers for Via's crappy chipset, and they released improved drivers fairly quickly.

No same hardware I ran NT on, although most of my machines were dual processor which was rather rare at the time.

Ah, that could be it then. I've never experienced W2K as anything but rock solid, but then I never had anything faster than a K6-2 back then. :D

This is also what I remember, but then I also remember that the specs of my first and last XP machines were miles apart. The first had 256MB or RAM...

Agree, Windows XP was sluggish when it was released. Same applies to Win2K though when it first came out compared to WinNT 4.0. 2K was the first Windows to include a shadow effect under the mouse cursor. Oh the extra compute cycles it had to do to render that...

I do agree but don't forget that the difference between NT4 and 2000 was night a day. 2000 wasn't just a reskin of NT4, there were lots of compatibility and usability improvements too. The problem was most people simply couldn't run NT4 outside of an office environment because very few games would run on it, driver support was relatively limited, etc. Windows 2000 was the real bridge between NT office machines and home machines, not XP. Granted consumers wouldn't have seen it that way because most stores didn't sell 2000 on home machines (instead opting for the dumpster fire that was ME) but technology wise XP (original release -- pre-service packs) wasn't a huge advancement from 2000 where as 2000 from NT4 was.