Windows 98 was so bad when it came to drivers, lol.

It had the plug and play standard but that only worked half of the time, and if you messed up by doing something like connecting the peripherals before installing the driver you could BSOD while trying to install the drivers and have to rescue the whole OS. Happened to me enough for me to remember it.

And my sister demonstrated how you could delete the recycle bin if you were bad enough at computers, which was fun.

I've also had nearly as many kernel panics on OSX or hangs on Linux as I have had BSODs on Windows (when graphed as a ratio of use over time).

All OSes have flaws and issues, there would never be a perfect operating system with our current understanding of computers, and that's ok.

That being said, my critique does not include OSes that spy on you (for what will be considered a several trillion dollar crime syndicate when this era is written down in history), which is its own entire rant.

Windows Vista got saner permissions support and made the OS survive certain kinds of driver crashes, but on launch a lot of existing software and drivers weren't updated to support those changes so it got a bad reputation. Nobody gave Windows proper credit for these advancements until Windows 7 which had a cleaner launch since most software and drivers were already updated for Vista's changes.

Win98 was terrible. I used to reinstall it every month or so, as routine maintenance.

Win2k was so much better it's not even comparable.

XP had a bit of a rough start, but by sp3 it was a lot better than 2k.

I skipped the other windows-es until 10. It has been solid.