[ahartmetz]

I was youngish at the time and thought Windows XP looked like clown vomit.

There is a German saying "Grün und blau schmückt die Sau" ~"green and blue grace the pig" - and XP was green and blue and shiny like hard candy.

[ConceptJunkie]

Yeah, it was butt-ugly. The default Windows UI didn't actually look better until Windows 7, but I used the "Classic" look as long as it was supported. I skipped Windows 8/8.1 entirely, and while Windows 10 was reasonable in terms of how it worked, it was also butt-ugly, but now you couldn't do much of anything to customize it.

[thesdev]

Windows XP was the first OS I ever used and still I switched to the classic UI because it looked just better in my opinion.