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As a Mac person that also used Windows NT in my day to day work, I never liked Windows 95. From a purely subjective perspective the design wasnt to my taste.

As a Mac person that also used Windows NT in my day to day work, I never liked Windows 95. From a purely subjective perspective the design wasnt to my taste. But the worst thing was the Viruses! Windows 95 was a hellscape of security issues. It felt like I never encountered a Windows 95 box that actually worked like it was supposed to. And it seemed like everyone was always reinstalling Windows 95 to get it working again. In the late 90s I had an NT4 box that I never had to reboot. My Mac was getting rebooted multiple times a day.

ronsor 3y ago
> reinstalling Windows 95 to get it working again Even today, reinstalling Windows is often the only way to get it working again.
pengaru 3y ago
I worked as a lowly PC technician assembling machines from components for a little shop in a strip mall when Windows 95 was what everyone wanted. The OS was indeed a hot mess, but one thing was abundantly clear after assembling and installing it on hundreds of new machines: driver quality varied wildly across hardware vendors, and installing them was often the change transforming a perfectly stable fresh installation into a crash-prone unstable disaster. Linux may not have had much in the way of hardware support, but what hardware it did support tended to work pretty well. This was a huge difference vs. Win95, where all hardware ostensibly came with drivers for the OS, sort of a classic quality vs. quantity situation.
- kiwijamo 3y ago
  That would explain why my experience with Win95 was so good. I never really understood all the hate for it (especially given 98/98SE/ME/XP, which came after 95, all of which I never really liked due to the all the extra "user friendly" features I never really used). I must have been lucky to have had the 'right' hardware with the better drivers at the time. IIRC I stayed on Windows 95 right up until Firefox (or whatever it was called at the time) finally dropped support for Windows 95.
  - dale_glass 3y ago
    Netscape Navigator? Also, Firefox isn't a rebranded Navigator, it was a new, alternative, light browser made to get rid of all the bloat that made it into the main browser.
    - prmoustache 3y ago
      Firefox's earliest name was phoenix, and later firebird. I still miss the phoenix's yellow and red buttons.
      - dale_glass 3y ago
        Did it ever support Windows 95? I thought it was too new to bother.
- jorvi 3y ago
  Even in something as late as 2009, I installed Ubuntu, was told by Ubuntu to upgrade the packages, did so, and on next reboot saw some sort of arcane panic message and was dropped into a bare shell straight out of POST. Linux stability pre-2015 (?) is not something to be lauded.
  - pengaru 3y ago
    My comment is specifically about drivers. I've used Linux exclusively since the 90s after leaving OS/2 Warp and rarely encountered a driver-related instability issue with any actual supported by mainline hardware. The few which come to mind had to do with NIC drivers requiring disabling offload features, or link rate auto-negotiation failures. Your problem sounds like a non-specific distro update bug. Don't even get me started on my mother's current Win11 machine that breaks its USB printer on every.single.update.
  - anthk 3y ago
    Ubuntu was a turd build on Debian Testing. Debian was rock solid, and Slackware never crashed. If you wanted something Ubuntu like, you installed Debian and then you upgraded everything to Backports.
  - hulitu 3y ago
    > Even in something as late as 2009, I installed Ubuntu, was told by Ubuntu to upgrade the packages, did so, and on next reboot saw some sort of arcane panic message and was dropped into a bare shell Yet after 10 years people still think automatic updates are a good idea.
- justsomehnguy 3y ago
  > driver quality varied wildly across hardware vendors, and installing them was often the change transforming a perfectly stable fresh installation into a crash-prone unstable disaster YES. 99% of BSODs are driver or hardware issues related. It's not that many things in the OS itself what can break so bad what you need to panic. But of course it's always Gates himself who wrote shitty OS.
  - hulitu 3y ago
    > 99% of BSODs are driver or hardware issues related Of course, memory management is also done by a driver. /s
    - justsomehnguy 3y ago
      /s aside, can you remember when MM failed in the user-mode?

ronsor 3y ago

> reinstalling Windows 95 to get it working again Even today, reinstalling Windows is often the only way to get it working again.

pengaru 3y ago

I worked as a lowly PC technician assembling machines from components for a little shop in a strip mall when Windows 95 was what everyone wanted. The OS was indeed a hot mess, but one thing was abundantly clear after assembling and installing it on hundreds of new machines: driver quality varied wildly across hardware vendors, and installing them was often the change transforming a perfectly stable fresh installation into a crash-prone unstable disaster. Linux may not have had much in the way of hardware support, but what hardware it did support tended to work pretty well. This was a huge difference vs. Win95, where all hardware ostensibly came with drivers for the OS, sort of a classic quality vs. quantity situation.

kiwijamo 3y ago
That would explain why my experience with Win95 was so good. I never really understood all the hate for it (especially given 98/98SE/ME/XP, which came after 95, all of which I never really liked due to the all the extra "user friendly" features I never really used). I must have been lucky to have had the 'right' hardware with the better drivers at the time. IIRC I stayed on Windows 95 right up until Firefox (or whatever it was called at the time) finally dropped support for Windows 95.
- dale_glass 3y ago
  Netscape Navigator? Also, Firefox isn't a rebranded Navigator, it was a new, alternative, light browser made to get rid of all the bloat that made it into the main browser.
  - prmoustache 3y ago
    Firefox's earliest name was phoenix, and later firebird. I still miss the phoenix's yellow and red buttons.
    - dale_glass 3y ago
      Did it ever support Windows 95? I thought it was too new to bother.
jorvi 3y ago
Even in something as late as 2009, I installed Ubuntu, was told by Ubuntu to upgrade the packages, did so, and on next reboot saw some sort of arcane panic message and was dropped into a bare shell straight out of POST. Linux stability pre-2015 (?) is not something to be lauded.
- pengaru 3y ago
  My comment is specifically about drivers. I've used Linux exclusively since the 90s after leaving OS/2 Warp and rarely encountered a driver-related instability issue with any actual supported by mainline hardware. The few which come to mind had to do with NIC drivers requiring disabling offload features, or link rate auto-negotiation failures. Your problem sounds like a non-specific distro update bug. Don't even get me started on my mother's current Win11 machine that breaks its USB printer on every.single.update.
- anthk 3y ago
  Ubuntu was a turd build on Debian Testing. Debian was rock solid, and Slackware never crashed. If you wanted something Ubuntu like, you installed Debian and then you upgraded everything to Backports.
- hulitu 3y ago
  > Even in something as late as 2009, I installed Ubuntu, was told by Ubuntu to upgrade the packages, did so, and on next reboot saw some sort of arcane panic message and was dropped into a bare shell Yet after 10 years people still think automatic updates are a good idea.
justsomehnguy 3y ago
> driver quality varied wildly across hardware vendors, and installing them was often the change transforming a perfectly stable fresh installation into a crash-prone unstable disaster YES. 99% of BSODs are driver or hardware issues related. It's not that many things in the OS itself what can break so bad what you need to panic. But of course it's always Gates himself who wrote shitty OS.
- hulitu 3y ago
  > 99% of BSODs are driver or hardware issues related Of course, memory management is also done by a driver. /s
  - justsomehnguy 3y ago
    /s aside, can you remember when MM failed in the user-mode?