[abiloe]

> They went from 95 and XP, some of the best operating systems from a user's perspective

I mean that's some rose-tinted shit if I ever heard it, 95 especially. 98 OSR2 improved quite a bit on the situation, but I don't recall having a great time with 95. It was still a glorified DOS extender in many ways, often slow to start up and shutdown, PC hardware and drivers were a mess and system stability therefore poor. This was right at the beginning of the concept of "PnP" in the PC world (plug and play) and it was a cruel joke most of time.

Windows 2000 being from the NT line was peak Windows in many ways. I resisted XP but it was ok for most people admittedly.

[r00fus]

As someone who grew up with Apple computers, yes the overall fit/integration was not as good as Apple's but it did have some semblance of preemptive multitasking (which System7/8 did not have).

The "UI that runs on DOS" was a feature not a bug for legacy game/software support.

[lamontcg]

> I mean that's some rose-tinted shit if I ever heard it,

I was trying to figure out how to express myself, but I think you got it.

98SE was still pretty bad because pre-NTFS filesystems would decay over time (of course so would ext2, but linux generally crashed a lot less).

[insane_dreamer]

XP, yes. 95, not so much.