Your chain breaks between Me and XP, because you omitted Win2K. And that's a huge change - It was the point at which they switched to the NT kernel from the pr

Your chain breaks between Me and XP, because you omitted Win2K. And that's a huge change - It was the point at which they switched to the NT kernel from the previous DOS-based ones. While MS hasn't always done a great job on all of the OS functionality surrounding the kernel (though it's quite good now), the internals of the NT kernel are and always have always been excellent, and IMO, are considerably superior to Linux' kernel internals. One reason for this, interestingly, is that NT had less of a past to deal with - it was a clean-sheet design by one of the most experienced OS kernel designers on the planet (David Cutler, from DEC) - Linux was still trying to be "Unix-like" and maintain (more or less) POSIX compatibility (though to be fair, POSIX didn't show up until about the time Linux grew out of its hobbyist toy phase...)