Windows 98 SE was not only quite fast but also very stable. I preferred it greatly to Windows 2k. There were unfortunately nothing to be gained in Windows ME so that's why some people were still running it in 2007 such as at the link. Speed wise Windows 2k and Linux were comparable in speed and stability in 2003 on the 90's pentium machines, but Windows 98 SE was blazing fast.

I suppose it depended what you were doing. You couldn't beat Windows 98 for how light it was on RAM. Probably the fastest for DirectX games and so on vs. the competition. Fastest to boot and open up a word processor.

But I have the distinct recollection of it being excruciating for multitasking. Towards the end of Windows 98's life you might ask it to run a video player, a game, a chat client, a browser and a word processor all at once. Stability disappeared. So did responsiveness. Windows 2000 (or Linux) handled heavy load much better.

I ended up choosing Win 98 SE for my "retro" gaming computer. I use it to go back and play the games from my childhood that broke on NT based Windows releases.

When it came up was probably the first time in a decade or more that I'd heard the click/buzz of a floppy drive in person.

Yep Win98 SE was a local maxima for performance/stability. For the WinNT line, I used 3.51 for as long as I could, before giving in to Win2k and later for laptop support.

Wait, can you expand on that? Was NT4 less stable? I know you already had the 32bit app compatibility, but I don't think I've ever met anyone who preferred the Win3 UI to Win95.

I had no problems with the Win3 UI and was never into using themes, choosing background/window trim colour was fine. The Win2k one looked newer. The only real benefit was that there were some new admin views. I mean look at modern file/web browsers, they don't have much in the way of raised/sunken UI elements.

I was a developer so cared more about performance and stability. How my code editor windows looked didn't matter. Memory being taken up by a fatter UI implementation that slows things down counts against it.

Edit: and yes, win2k/NT4 was less stable. They moved the graphics subsystem into kernel space where as NT up to 3.5.1 had graphics as a separate service. And you can imagine that a lot of the bugs/edge cases in Windows is in the GUI and drivers.

On NT 3.51 you can install the NewShell update and the UI becomes more like Win95

Mac System 7 is probably no good - the modern web is largely unintelligable to the contemporary browsers. I had a Mac Plus for a while hooked up to a Gatorbox that had internet access, and the version of Netscape(?) on there couldn't even load the Google home page.

The Amiga guys are pretty fanatical, might be worth investigating that. Old Sun workstations are too feeble to run a modern web browser. Never had an SGI (always wanted one) but again has a devoted fan base.

I think if you need modern but want retro, configure a Linux with the Motif Window Manager and enjoy that CDE, post Unix wars goodness while still being able to run a bit of modern stuff.

I prefer the aesthetics of Sun Open Look or NeXTSTEP which doesn't get carried away with as many levels of visual depth. WindowMaker is a pretty good NeXT desktop experience.

Your best bet may be a Unix workstation. IRIX in particular still gets modern software ported to it sometimes: https://www.reddit.com/r/retrobattlestations/comments/cd5x78...

I still do a good portion of my creative writing in Microsoft Word 97.

I have a genuine disk copy of Office '97 around here somewhere...

dillo might run

or this fairly recent one https://retrosystemsrevival.blogspot.com/2018/05/k-meleon-74...