Windows 98 SE was probably the most stable ‘light’ version of Microsoft Windows ever made. I Microsoft got rid of the DOS underpinnings in Win 2k the systems started requiring much more ram just to run. When combined with VS6 and at least a gig of hd space, it was a very capable machine for development.
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
Every second version was useful (of the consumer-oriented Windows). Windows 95 was good(OK, it wasn't perfect, but a big step up from earlier version). Windows 98 sucked. Windows 98SE was good. Windows ME sucked. Windows XP was good. Vista sucked. Windows 7 good. 8 sucked. 10 good. 11 sucks.
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.
