[pauljara]

NT 4.0 was solid and felt fast! The UI was so snappy. You could just leave it running and never reboot -- it almost became a geek humble brag to do so. For those too young to remember, one of Windows 98's marketed features was the ability to use ACPI to turn off your computer without you having to press a physical power button! It was just expected the device would need to be turned off.

Windows 2000 was great too, which PC enthusiasts at the time realized was essentially "NT 5.0 but can play games because it has (official) DirectX". It's amazing how there's so little nostalgia for these two OSes. I watch some retro PC YouTubers and most haven't ever covered them. There's so much nostalgia for Windows XP. But among enthusiasts, the first impressions were that it ran slower than Windows 2000 and looked like a Fisher Price toy. I think a lot of PC enthusiasts hung onto these two OSes, as you point out, until they eventually relented and used Windows XP around the time of Service Pack 2's release.

I ran LiteStep (http://litestep.net) on NT 4.0 at one point in my teens, completely unaware that Apple would eventually make a NeXT-style operating system something I'd use as a daily driver.

[jaclaz]

NT 4.0 was not for the masses, it was costly (the OS license) and needed higher specs than the almost contemporary Windows 95 (which was largely sold with license included with the new PC). As well, Windows 2000 was a "professional" OS. Both were way ahead in stability when compared to the Win9x/Me counterparts, but in terms of number of users, they were a fraction of the 9x ones, so it is not surprising that you can find much more nostalgic people about the latter.

XP somehow "unified" the professional and home market, bringing the (unneeded) Fisher Price look that the professionals hated and the (unneeded) complexities of authorizations/NTFS that the home users were not prepared for.

I can testify for the stability of NT 4.0, I have run a machine for some 15 years, roughly from 2001 to 2016, running NT 4.00, on 24/7, and only reboots were once a year or so for cleaning or occasionally for replacing the (failed) PSU or hard disk (not as a server, as a desktop running a specific DOS based accounting software). I remember initially I had a few BSOD's because for some reasons there was a counter of some kind in the mouse driver that caused them, but once that was fixed, if I recall correctly by a change in the Registry, it was really rock solid.

[ilrwbwrkhv]

Windows 2000 is my favorite OS of all time. It was fast, stable, snappy and the UI was remarkable with so much thought put in everything.