The Top 10 Worst Operating Systems of All Time

I hate Ubuntu

Vista was so bad, I used a Mac for 10 years

It should be a Top 9, with Windows Millennium (ME) being at 0. (Yes, that would only be 0-8, but it's that bad.)

I actually HATE windows 10. With its forced updates. So much so i quit using it and dual boot using linux mint. And use mint 99 99% of the time

Scratching my head how GeOS and Windows CE didn't make the list. Probably not enough people who actually used these. If you normalize the number of people who disliked it against the installed user base, these would probably float to the top.

I'll add android 12 to that lisr

Symbian should be high up on that list. awful OS to work on and develop for. 10K or so of lines that made the tiny micro kernel itself was good but the client server architecture on top was a hideous mess of over engineering and head scratching complexity. Building owt was done via a painful arcane Perl system and non standard C++, although they did try for some POSIX standardisation at the end (Symbian PIPS) but it was too little too late in the face of the vastly superior iOS and Android

I grew up with a computer that had ME on it, and I dont know if its just that I didnt know better or if I just got lucky, but I had pretty much 0 issues with it. I played all my games, did all my schoolwork etc for years on that thing, and when I ran into problems it was usually due to a lack of hardware as it was a pretty low end machine even when it was new

Windows Vista is 1 million times better than XP... And Windows 8.1 is 2 million times better than Windows 7. Nothing will change my mind.

Windows 3.11. I loved it at the time. On a 90mHz machine it would re-install in under two minutes.

TRS-DOS 2.2... but none of you remember it.

Windows 8 was good, except for the interface.

I think the problem people had with Vista was most people at the time did not have a computer capable of running it.

Vista wasn't bad, computers were. I enjoyed vista a lot back in the day. Ofc xp will always have a special place in my heart but vistawas stunning.

I was quite happy with Windows 8, of course it was a drastic change with some redundancy of old designed applications and new modern UI ones, but let's face it, it's still the case in Windows 10 ! Microsoft can't change everything in windows from one version to another, its user base is so huge and its technical and ergonomical history is so long that a complete UI redesign is almost impossible !

You know your OS is bad when TempleOS is not even on the list so it is worse than that.

The only thing I hated about Vista was my long-time, never failed Xerox P12 laser printer was no longer compatible. It had a flat paper path (so I could run card stock through it). I never once had a paper jam in it. I had bought 5 drums of toner on a clearance rack at Office Depot for pennies on the dollar - and had yet to open any of them. That beautiful printer and all toner became junk as soon as I upgraded from XP to Vista. I will never forgive Microsoft for that happening to me.

Worst i ever encountered WinME and vista.

Am I the only one who actually loves Windows Vista?

Windows 2000 Professional isn't included on those lists because it isn't a home OS, but a business OS.

WinME didn't BSOD on you? Lucky lucky

Windows 8 was great, it was 8.1 that was the shit show.

lol " cream of the crap", xp and windows 10 seem to be the best out of the windows line. Win 10 is far more stable than previous versions, still has networking bugs. The big problem is forced updates, and unwanted cloud accounts. The search menu crashes alot. I find the trick is to be very selective on what you install, for example using office 360 is bad! and so are most of the per-installed apps. The start menu is awful, Also the browsers are rather bloated, and run slow down after a while with memory leaks.

Vista created a wave of new Linux users.

My personal worst experiences were with Windows 3.11 and MS DOS 5
Both were incredibly unstable and typically crashed at least once a day, forcing you to make manual backups all the time to prevent your work from being lost.
None of the later MS operating systems had such a huge problem.

Nintendo teamed with SGI

Nothing wrong with IBM DOS, Vista always sucked not to mention how long it took them to release that pile of garbage. MS is famous for debugging software after they release it. I didn't think ME was all that bad. It introduced restore which was nice. Windows 8.X was a joke. Frankly I still cannot stand the Windows start menu.. it still sucks balls.

I have used ME and vista it worked fine for me back in de day. And vista did have some features I did realy like. I do know allot of poeple did not like vista but that's because there pc or laptop wasn't build for it

You forgot TempleOS...

I ran XP Sp2 for almost 12 years without any problems. Until I gave the computer to a friend running Ubuntu in 2012. An early Compaq Evo.

I almost want to install Windows vista on my PC to get that lovely side bar with the clock, weather and system usage.

Windows 8 is the most stupid OS ever, bar none.

I had win8 crash itself on two new machines... and took its serial number with it....

I'm not saying that Vista was my favourite OS of all time, but it certainly isn't the worst. That would be a toss-up between Windows ME and Windows 8. Windows 8 was actually pretty good under the hood but had a terrible UI, Windows ME had a reasonably decent UI but was terrible under the hood.

windows 8 was pretty bad

I'd always put Windows 8 in front of Vista. Had Vista on a Dell laptop and didn't mind it at all. Another reason for the hate of Windows 8, is that god awful interface would be put on their servers!

titled: Operating Systems.
discussing: User interfaces.
no sub for you today.

Vista was excellent, way better than 7 and 10... It was the most stable windows ever created after SP1 got released (SP2 made it even better). I never ever had a single crash on vista, same for my friends for which I made a clean install. They never saw such a stable OS in their entire life. At launch It just required more modern hardware to run compared to XP. But it had all the good fonctionnality of win 7, was more snappy, had better UI, was more stable, had better performances.... It's just that back in the days people had in general less than 1gb of ram, but vista required 1,5gb as a minimum to run properly. I remember playing war thunder on top of league of legends, with foobar and like 20 playlists opened with thousands music titles per playlist, and firefox with 40 tabs opened, I did not even realised I did not close league of legends and firefox while playing war thunder... all this with only 3gb of ram on a 32bit version of vista... Best windows ever created. It introduce the search bar in the starting menu which was a real revolution after the excellent windows XP. but people did not realise how good this OS was. I know I represent the minority but I think it's honest way of seeing thing. People had trouble with it because their pc had not enough ram or came along with bloatware that were really killing vista normal functionning. Once formated withtout the bloatware, this OS was a true beast and I kept it many years after win 7 was released before to switch. Simply because it had better perf and was also using twice less HDD space for every program you would install with it.

Lindows/Linspire wasn't that bad. The real attraction was Click'n'Run, their version of a package manager. When it worked, it made installing a new app remarkably quick & easy. Recall that back then (c. 1999-2000) most flavors of Linux required detailed knowledge of your distro, and the dependencies. Ask for help in the user groups, and the usual answer was RTFM. Lindows said Click'n'Run would take care of the gory details. Didn't work out that way. Worst of all, was they charged $60 for access to any "real" apps through CnR, and it was implied it was a one time fee. Later they changed it to subscription fee. The original language was fuzzy enough they got away with it. Eventually CnR was buggy enough that they went with a "easy to use Linux" model instead.

Windows 1.x wasn't that bad, either. Windows apps were nearly non-existent, and while you could run DOS apps, they had to be "well behaved," i.e. didn't write directly to screen memory.
Given that 8088 systems with 640K of ram were still common, and ram was hideously expensive, It's no surprise Windows didn't take off. You needed a 286 at minimum with 2 or 4 Mb of ram. The hardware wasn't there yet.

Finally a category where Microsoft can excel.

Vista was buggy, but I really liked the statics of it. The laptop I originally bought with it can't even run it anymore and that's after upgrading the RAM.

Windows Vista reminds me a lot of KDE 3 and 4 at that same period of time.

Vista had a very pleasant GUI

11. Temple OS

On number 1 should be Windows 10 ofcourse. Vista is superior in any way than that horrible trash.

1 question
where in europe or anywhere else can anyone get 100gig connection speeds for normal use?
you mention this speed at approx 16.40.
i can only get 1gbps in belgium
and uk in work and home it was usually 100mbps. even for government offices.

I always pronounced it as letters - "G, N, U". Was surprised to learn it's pronounced as "Ganoo".

Watching on Windows 2008 std server stripped to the bone, I hate the newer windows. I'd rather use 2003 but browser support is terrible and none will update anymore so a year or so ago I had to upgrade. I use W10 on my video editing rig, but I don't even use it on the internet I hate it so bad, I keep using my workstation for anything internet relate.

I knew the Microsoft manager who was responsible for releasing the home version of Vista. My connection had nothing to do with PCs but was for a volunteer group where both of us held board positions. The last time I saw him, he has since passed away from complications with diabetes. I was setting up my equipment to webcast a board meeting. He was the first person to enter the room after me. He looked at me and said "I don't want to talk about Vista". He knew Vista wasn't ready but had been forced into releasing it because it was so far behind schedule. Rest peacefully Tam.

I got a new computer that came with ME. At the time, I had a home network with about 8 computers. ME was running so slow I could only get about one keystroke every 10 or 15 seconds. It took me almost a full day to track down the problem. The new computer had full network indexing turned on by default and was trying to index everything on my network. Once I disconnected the network I was able to disable the the indexing feature and things started running a lot smother.