No one liked Win 98, and it was comprehensively EOL'd by Win XP - which always ran fine on iX machines.
Now, many people still prefer Win 7 to the creeping user-hostile horror that is Win 10 - if only because it's possible to use Win 7 with relative confidence that an update won't suddenly kill your machine, or your webcam, or your Kindle, or whatever else MS manages to screw up in the next year or two.
That's not a trivial difference. MS+Intel are attempting to force users towards an OS that is inherently broken, and - given the level of competence on display in the Windows division at the moment - is unlikely to ever work reliably.
As I recall Win 98 and 98SE were hugely popular. People may not have loved them, but I don't think it was generally disputed that they were a huge improvement over Win 95. In fact, hardly anyone liked Win ME, and many clung to 98 until XP arrived, much like people clung to XP and avoided Vista until Win 7 arrived.
"No one liked Win 98, and it was comprehensively EOL'd by Win XP"
That's not true at all. Windows XP was based on NT, so had a very different technical base than 98. It had a completely different driver model, and could not run real-mode DOS apps. There was tons of hardware and software that it couldn't run. There were lots of people running 98 for a very long time to run legacy apps and hardware after XP came out. There probably still are.
The big difference is that those machines aren't on the internet, so no software maintenance is required.
This is just completely wrong on every level. Plenty of people liked Windows 98. There was the general "I don't want to upgrade" crowd, but more specifically, there were the gamers who wanted to keep playing the games they had already paid for. Windows XP wasn't great for that.
That gamer inertia was powerful enough that Windows 98 got DirectX 9 in December 2002, well after the release of Windows XP, and Microsoft released their last DirectX on 98 in December 2006.
If memory serves, Win 98SE fixed many vanilla 98 problems before the love. Same with XP pre service packs; #1 fixed many stability issues, #2 fixed many back-compatibility issues(or vice-versa). Same comparison can be made about the Vista & 7(aka Vista SP7) releases. What also came with each new release was bloat, poorly implemented features(some initially, others perpetually) and phone-home functionality: XP=4, Vista=32, 7SP1>40. Win NT was the last OS MS created, it's been feature rich-er iterations ever since.
Revisionist bullshit. Every new version of a Microsoft OS had been met with derision and complaints that "the previous version was the best" up until another version is released. People thought XP was going to be the ME release of Win 2000 with it first came out.
Your forgetting many versions sucked before the first or second service pack. MS tends to release things ~2 years before they are ready. Sometimes they still suck after those service packs.
Case in point at release win 98 was rather iffy, 98se was solid. XP was much better after SP1, win 7 was ok to start with but defiantly got better.
No one liked Win 98, and it was comprehensively EOL'd by Win XP - which always ran fine on iX machines.
Now, many people still prefer Win 7 to the creeping user-hostile horror that is Win 10 - if only because it's possible to use Win 7 with relative confidence that an update won't suddenly kill your machine, or your webcam, or your Kindle, or whatever else MS manages to screw up in the next year or two.
That's not a trivial difference. MS+Intel are attempting to force users towards an OS that is inherently broken, and - given the level of competence on display in the Windows division at the moment - is unlikely to ever work reliably.