Long time Windows user here, all the way back to Windows 2.0.

Windows 98 had some good things going for it, but it really was a crappy operating system. The interface was great, but It had a tendency to self destruct and could crash if you looked at it cross.

My all time favorite version is Windows XP. It was homogenous (one consistent control panel), compact, simple, and efficient. It was the first version of Windows with a good amount of reliability, rarely crashed and a lot of the problems with corruption over time such as "DLL hell" were resolved. The down side is it lacked native features, but there wasn't much you couldn't add with a third party program.

I think reliability is best it's ever been with Windows 10. In fact win10 is surprisingly robust. The down side is everything else. It's a lot more complex, it lacks consistency (settings for some stuff, control panel for other stuff), it's a lot more cluttered, and it comes with all kinds of forced bloatware. In other words, software you can't remove and would never install given the option.

I can actually solve some of that bloatware problem with win10 by using the LTSC version, which I've been running for some time now. Still I would go back to Windows XP in a second if it was never deprecated. But then how can make MS and its partners make money without a forced upgrade path.

I've not heard much positive about win11 so I'll stay on win10 until I'm forced (as usual) to upgrade.

Designed by none other than the legendary Susan Kare, apparently.

Also: no blinking aero stuff and invisible borders !

I usually try to remove all that fluff as much as possible but windoze makes it harder and harder (who in their right minds want to hide ALL windows just because you jiggled one of them a tingest bit is beyond me...)

This might be a bit off topic, but Windows 98, and to a lesser extent Windows XP and 7, always evoke a sense of nostalgic simplicity for me. The OS felt stable (as in, unchanging) and seemed to stay out of the way.

Since Windows 8, but especially with Windows 10 and 11, it's felt complicated, busy, and intrusive.

I'm a massive fan of skeuomorphic design, and Windows 98 was just so intuitive and practical. Things you could drag looked like you could move them, that bumpy texture thing was used in places it wasn't obvious already, and 3D made clickable things look like buttons.

I'm a software developer and power user, and Android surprised me by having a horizontally scrollable area with absolutely no indication other than the visible items didn't include something I was expecting to find.

I was barely alive in 1998, but I definitely think Win98 was the perfect sort of skeuomorphism, not super showy or maximalist like a lot of skeumorphic design is. It's like modern minimalism without the suck.