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.
I’ve recently been messing around with XP on an old laptop of mine, it’s a lot nicer than I remember it being and I’m honestly shocked at how fast it is on a single core laptop with only 512mb of RAM! Need to grab a stack of DVD-RWs sometime (for the first time in over a decade) to see how terribly Vista and ReactOS run on it - the bloody thing really doesn’t wanna boot from USB unfortunately.