It was a known rule that every second version of Windows was good. 95 was good, 98SE was good, XP was good, 7 was good, but sadly they never released Windows 9, so we’re still waiting for the good version to come after 8.
They were still good windowses for their time, especially when you compare them to DOS and Mac OS 9 which would have been the alternatives.
For a fair comparison with professional OSes with full memory protection like UNIX you’d have to look at Windows NT, but there the preimise is true as well (as far as I can tell by googling, I only ever used 2000 Pro): 3.1 was bad, 3.5(1) good, 4.0 bad, 2000 good, 2003 meh.
It was a known rule that every second version of Windows was good. 95 was good, 98SE was good, XP was good, 7 was good, but sadly they never released Windows 9, so we’re still waiting for the good version to come after 8.
Prior XP they were really bad at memory management and isolation.
They were still good windowses for their time, especially when you compare them to DOS and Mac OS 9 which would have been the alternatives. For a fair comparison with professional OSes with full memory protection like UNIX you’d have to look at Windows NT, but there the preimise is true as well (as far as I can tell by googling, I only ever used 2000 Pro): 3.1 was bad, 3.5(1) good, 4.0 bad, 2000 good, 2003 meh.
There was also OS/2. But yes, for the time they were running decently on “cheap” hardware.
I liked Vista and 8.1.
Vista was fucking terrible on launch, it got better towards the end it it’s life, much like 8.1 was to 8, but it was still a mess when 7 came out.
No problem, we don’t kinkshame here.