XP is certainly not the proper OS to be running today, it's been passed by especially in a security sense.
But when it was released, it was the first really truly stable and consumer focused operating system MS had released. The NT series prior had been stable (to a point), and was good for business uses, but try gaming or doing much that a home desktop user wanted to do and it really fell down there. XP picked up the mantle of being the successor to both Windows 98 and Windows 2000, and it really did a great job of it.
Was it perfect? Of course not. But it did a job and did it better than anything else in its time for its specific uses.
XP is certainly not the proper OS to be running today, it's been passed by especially in a security sense.
But when it was released, it was the first really truly stable and consumer focused operating system MS had released. The NT series prior had been stable (to a point), and was good for business uses, but try gaming or doing much that a home desktop user wanted to do and it really fell down there. XP picked up the mantle of being the successor to both Windows 98 and Windows 2000, and it really did a great job of it.
Was it perfect? Of course not. But it did a job and did it better than anything else in its time for its specific uses.