In those days, the basis of comparison for Linux was established Unixes, first and foremost Solaris. As a free hobby version it was already very desirable, and it was in the process of acquiring the performance and reliability that ultimately made it displace all the existing Unixes. So in that respect it was definitely great.

Where Windows won out at the time is that no end of essential proprietary software ran only on it (or perhaps also on Mac OS) and Linux was locked out. For example, if you wanted to use Garmin mapping software to download from your GPS, or use most printers, scanners, webcams. And of course a lot of web sites only worked on IE6 which looked poised to take over the way Chrome has now.

How times have changed. Most gadgets "just work" in Linux now too, the desktop environment is great (and here I refer to Mate, not the ongoing experiment that is Gnome 3), and the whole thing mostly just serves as a device driver for a web browser anyway.

In my personal opinion, too, the high point of Windows was Windows 7 since it first came with all the common device drivers so stuff would "just work" without the driver hunt dance. Windows 10 works pretty well - I have it on my work machine. But my mom was recently given a Windows 10 machine, and I set it to be as scrimpy with data as I could ("metered connection" and the last aggressive updates). Where, with her limited habits, she used to use around 500MB of data per month (email and very light browsing) she now comes in at 2.5-3GB, forcing a higher tier of mobile data (she's on an LTE gateway - lives in the countryside). Not great. Here Linux wins again in an old school way - it took some serious tweaking under the hood to get it to not consume data constantly i.e. not only not auto update, but not even download the updates and not even constantly download the index of available updates. Opinions vary on the wisdom of this, but it is of course behind a NAT firewall with all unnecessary services turned off. And using zero bytes per month that weren't asked for.

Back to the Windows XP topic. Her Windows XP machine is in the process of giving up the ghost after all these years and while I had her half converted to Linux/Mate, the Windows 10 machine is just more convenient, mostly because it is faster than my leftover laptops.

In the early days linux was great as a hobby if you liked tweaking things and learning (and also as a server) but Windows XP really was the best desktop at the time.

It might be a fun day to fire up Windows XP in a VM and see how well it can do with a modern browser and 4K screen.

Yes, and that was my assessment at the time. XP wasn't bad, but it got so bloated with, I think, SP2. I got frustrated that things would go wrong with it, and I could never find a definitive explanation online to fix it. There were usually webpages with 10 random things you could try in an attempt to resolve it, and weirdly I discovered that same community was still present for Win10. For years using XP I felt I never personally advanced in my ability to use a computer, whereas I feel my time on Linux has been a journey. But you're right, things may not have panned out of I'd either gone for OSX early on or Linux might have been not quite ready for me at that time.

Blaster. Sasser.

In parallel: Knoppix, KDE3.