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
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):
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/04/memor...
Starting with Windows 8, they removed that option completely.
The coloured "rubber" gadgets were very nice. Those haters surely dislike Comic Sans too!
It went from a Toys R Us to a slick Lamborghini dealership.
Or how about some of that Olive Green action? Get you the muted natural look, you know what’s up.
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.
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.
