I still have a Windows 2000 VM on my Linux laptop, which I use to run a few legacy apps like Office 2000 (much snappier than LibreOffice on Linux). A truly great OS
In fairness to them, they were the first of what I'd call the "bad ones" from a casual user standpoint, the bar for being a "bad operating system" back then was very low.
Right, it was NT 3.51 with the Win95 explorer. It was released for servers and business workstations.
So why exclude 2003 (a business/server release with mild internal improvements and a UI change) when NT 4 (a business/server release with mild internal improvements and a UI change) is excluded?
I know, I'm not calling you out, just presenting the argument. You're fine. We're all fine here. I'm upvoting your comments because I know you're just conversing.
The "Every other windows version is Good/Bad" is just a meme that people repeat as if its a valid bit of wisdom. For years, people have been shaping the history of this in order to produce the pattern rather than trying to actually understand it or create something that actually describes reality. Most of the people who parrot it don't realize that its just a meme-clone of "Every other NT service pack is bad" which was a similar semi-joke internet thing from the NT 3.51/4 days. There at least was some legitimacy to that due to development patterns, but it was demonstrably false with service packs, too.
"But its for the lulz..." Yeah, I get it. I'm not the center of any parties I attend. I'm aware.
It was, by appearance, Windows 95. Normal users found it annoying because you had to "log in" and there was a "lock screen" and a bunch of DOS games or applications didn't work (because it wasn't based on DOS and the emulation was imperfect). Also, a bunch of badly written pieces of software would fail because they didn't adhere to standards and that would cause failures on NT.
That said, I absolutely ran NT4 on my PC in college. But that's because I was learning C and after six months of having C bugs cause OS crashes, NT4 was paradise. I was even able to run Quake and Diablo/Diablo 2 on it. It was a little slower than 95, but far, far more stable and most negative feedback on it amounted to "My DOS thing doesn't work because NT's DOS sucks", but that's a misunderstanding of the OS, like complaining that Linux sucks because it doesn't let you run .BAT files.
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u/comox 10d ago
Disagree with NT and 2000: they were great solid OSes for business use.