I’ve heard it’s actually quite good; it was only the initial interface was disliked by laptop users, and they are fixing that in 8.1 for free.
I remember buying Win2k but waiting over a year to install it. When I did, it turned out my video card was incompatible. However, it also turned out that it was on update version 2 which corrected that. I installed it and the update and used it for over a decade in that computer.
When building my own computers, I never buy the newest operating system. When buying a computer off the shelf, that stuff has been handled.
I just recall that it wasn’t well received on its roll out. I got burned with Vista and hope to avoid a similar situation.