Microsoft was targeting 16-bit Intel CPUs which required a coprocessor for floating point support. That's a huge constraint on what you can practically do, compared to the Mac's 68k.
Hardware is probably the biggest reason Windows was garbage until Windows 95, where they jumped ahead of Mac OS with preemptive multitasking etc.
You can do very sophisticated work entirely with fixed point (such as the first Playstation), and I suspect we're going to see more noise from the ML people about using it for silicon space efficiency reasons.
Though their original target wasn't a Mac clone, it borrowed Mac UI elements. Lee Jay Lorenzen left Xerox and joined DR because he couldn't sell Xerox on the idea of getting Xerox Star functionality onto commodity 8080/8086 class machines.
Another early one was VisiOn, from the VisiCalc folks, which had a very nice (for the time) minimalistic look and feel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visi_On
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.
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.
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.
Linux stability pre-2015 (?) is not something to be lauded.
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.
Yet after 10 years people still think automatic updates are a good idea.
If you wanted something Ubuntu like, you installed Debian and then you upgraded everything to Backports.
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.
Of course, memory management is also done by a driver. /s
Even today, reinstalling Windows is often the only way to get it working again.
Makes me wonder what went wrong for them.
It didn't came preinstalled on the PC ? "For free" ? /s
maybe autocad?
Built using MS C also APL, Fortran and other languages