ME was all the features that eventually went into XP but still based on the Windows 98 kernel instead of NT.

What made XP great was how reliable it was compared to previous Windows versions.

I had the one PC in that era that WinME was smooth sailing on. It was a Packard Bell with a 200mhz Pentium 1 (96 mb of ram at the time, i think). For whatever reason, and combination of hardware, ME had no issues running. I had less blue screens on it, and overall found it to be enjoyable and much more stable than 98 and 95c was on that machine.

I've heard the pattern phrased:

95 Good, 98 Bad, 98 SE Good, ME Bad, XP Good, Vista Bad, 7 Good, 8 Bad, 10 Good.

Counting 98 SE as a separate release does seem to me like cherry-picking in order to make the pattern work. Then again, you could also say the cycle started with Windows 98 (putting the whole of that release into the good pile), and you'd still have a remarkably consistent pattern across seven releases. Honestly makes you wonder if there's some deeper cause related to Microsoft's corporate structure or something.

If you're breaking out 98 into two releases, then you should probably break out XP into pre-service-packs and post. IME it wasn't until SP3 that XP really felt solid, depending on what hardware you were running.

Pre-SP3 XP was slow out of the box, buggy, and insecure.

And then there's 11 which doesn't really feel like a new version at all to me.

I use 10 at work and 11 at home and after changing the taskbar settings to put the start button back on the left I don't even notice switching.

For all the rightful hate 11 gets for ads and tracking crap, once you turn it off it feels... fine. I even don't mind the UI look and really like the new window management, but I don't use windows for anything serious anymore, only gaming so maybe there are other issues.

You can't turn off the tracking crap, this is really the biggest problem IMO.

Same here by the way, I don't use it for anything but gaming and work for the tracking reason.

>And then there's 11 which doesn't really feel like a new version at all to me.

That's because it isn't, Windows 10 and 11 both identify internally as NT10.0.

For some context: Windows Vista, 7, 8, and 8.1 identified as NT6.0, 6.1, 6.2, and 6.3 respectively; Windows 2000 and XP identified as NT5.0 and 5.1 respectively.

It wasn't supposed to be an extensive list, plenty of versions are missing, like NT 4 and well, every single version before 95 :)

There’s also Windows 2000, which I think was the worst of all.

Oh wow, I feel exactly the opposite.

Windows 2000 was no-nonsense, but all good stuff. The good bones that Windows XP got came straight from Win2k.

The only real problem it had was a narrower hardware compatibility profile, but it still wasn’t that bad.

I would personally argue that Windows 2000 wasn't bad, it was just painful in the beginning. It was the transition point from the 9x kernel/setup to the NT kernel/setup and some manufacturers navigated that change better than others in the beginning.

it was brilliant - fast and very stable.

It was a server and workstation OS not really suited for consumer desktop.

i used it as my daily driver on a sony laptop - worked like a charm.

It was the first stable Windows OS that could run all the latest games and desktop applications without constantly crashing or needing a periodic reinstall. It was their best desktop OS at the time. XP was just 2000 with an ugly default theme and added bloat.

Some things about Win95 are lost to nostalgia, as well. Like broken drivers, esp. in concert with up-to-date office, which came with issues of its own, broken export formats. (It took more than a year for serious support for Postscript printers, etc.) Win95 became only somewhat functional with Windows 95B. (This one, however, started the IR integration.)

And broken USB support. Even with OSR3 it didn't quite work with many devices.