I had a Libretto 50ct (pentium 75mhz, 32 meg ram) running 95 and 98 perfectly, but on upgrading it to win 2k, not only was it extremely slow, but it also was limited to 16 colors (no drivers for video). There was no retro community in those days, so the recommendation to get a usb or Wi-Fi connection to the internet was to upgrade to win98 as I don’t remember win95 having any support for Wi-Fi or usb. Since win98 was already old at that point, a user such as myself might as well use win98se. I remember it being rock solid
Linux with the 2.4 kernel ram just as slow as windows 2k in the basic bash terminal mode and x windows was very slow. The terminal was also sadly very slow given the limited bus capacity for the hard drive which ran at 5200rpm. The Linux 2.2 kernel ran much faster, but everything was too old in the debian software archive to support usb over pcmcia.
Also listening to MP3’s and doing anything else caused a slow down in the gui and skipping in the mp3 except in windows and older Linux kernels
Though it might seem like a suck at the time Win 3.11 was good. MS Bob ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Bob ) ... IMO a massive reduction in productivity; it doesn't show up in the list of 'windows' versions, apparently because it was an addon (replacement for the shell). Windows 95 came out (shortly it seems) after that.