Worst Operating System Family

[Wolverine607]

Now I do not mean a specific individual operating system like Windows ME or Windows Vista.

I mean an actual OS family. Like Windows NT based or 9X based or Linux based etc..

What was the worst in terms of ability assuming there were equivalent drivers and support equally for all.

Its hard to say because some operating systems that were not widely used had great potential, but never any market so not much value. Some were widely used and not that good, but good enough but inferior to what else was out there manly Windows 9X and Classic MAC OS back in the day.

What do you think?

 

[Ketchup]

"Classic Mac" felt old to me when it was new. I never was a mac person, but I had to use them in some classes, and it always seemed like they had a way of doing things that was odd just to be different. Microsoft, even back in the 90's, had a way of doing things that just made more sense.

 

[lxskllr]

WinNT due to the restrictions and ever increasing spyware. Remove that nonsense, it's a competent system.

 

[Red Squirrel]

I loved windows 2000, but since 8 and 10 are part of "windows NT" family, I had to go with that. 8 is freaking terrible due to it's horrendous UI, and 10 is basically a trojan, and it's UI is still not that great either. Too much white, too blocky, too big, etc. Try using it on anything smaller res than HD, and dialogs are actually too big to fit the screen so you can't click ok. Stupid design really. UI designers often forget that laptops are a thing. Most Laptops have crappy resolution.

Windows 9x was kinda bad too mostly due to being unstable, but when it did run, it was more usable than windows 8/10.

 

[KillerBee]

Chrome OS is the only bad one I've ever used
(used all the rest except for BeOS )

 

[RLGL]

You need to break up the 95, 98,ME group. 98SE was the best and ME was the worst in the grouping

 

[C1]

The thing about software & OSes is that times change & so with it do the needs.

The phenomenal thing now is that one can have access to pretty much all the OSes on a single platform.

And believe it or not, there are times (albeit rare) that I have to use DOS, WinME or Linux, XP or Win7.

 

[Wolverine607]

You need to break up the 95, 98,ME group. 98SE was the best and ME was the worst in the grouping

The poll was about full OS family regardless of which individual OS was liked or not liked in that group. And Windows 95/98/ME are all part of he same OS family just as Windows 10 and Windows 7 are part of the Windows NT family.

You could also make the same argument of breaking up the Windows NT family. Windows 10 is not good because of SPYWARE and loss of control and Windows 8/8.1 because of the start to SPYWARE and terrible UI. Windows 7 is awesome and Vista was alright and XP/2000 were awesome. Windows 9X and Classic MAC OS in general were pretty bad IMHO with lousy memory management and multitasking abilities as well as being very unstable. Windows 98SE was the best of 9X family and not that bad itself but not great either, but far and away worse compared any of the good Windows NT operating systems and the good of Linux based OSes and such.

 

[Ranulf]

Mac classic just because of OS9. Underpowered machines and it crashed worse than 98 ever did. The main fix was to push the reset button and reboot. Slick tv ads though, selling it as a multitasking super computer with a snazzy looking case. Buy one for more money than a two year old win98 box that would beat it silly.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Absolutely worst, or merely worst relative to its contemporaries?

But there's enough overlap and stuff that you can argue almost any of them.