At my work, they had a lot of problems with Vista. Not sure if it was the hardware we were running it on or IT didn’t know how to deal with the quirks or something else. Vista wound up being alright but it took a few months for it be OK.
I chose XP for my new home computer during the conversion. Then I got Win 7 for a later new computer. I like Win 7 and I’m hearing that 8 sucks but I’ve never used it.
Win 8 is like Vista, released for technology (touch screen) that is not widely used yet. XP was great, Win 7 is very good, even Vista was a good OS overall after the hardware caught up with the software.