NT kernels were always better than the DOS-based hot garbage of 95, 98, and ME.
Windows 2000 is my all-time favorite Windows OS. NT-based kernel, literally nothing extra, fast, stable. Used it til the day support was finally shuttered.
In my experience it was the opposite. 98SE was great, ME was worse.
NT might be more stable but it was also much slower. DOS applications on 9x actually ran in a VM with hardware passthrough, whereas NT emulated much of the hardware via NTVDM. Interacting with something as simple as the EDIT text editor in a window on 2K/XP is noticeably slower than on 9x.
> In my experience it was the opposite. 98SE was great, ME was worse.
I think you're mixing up Windows 2000 and ME? ME was a rushed update of 98 because Microsoft felt "they should release something" for the Millennium. It was a dumpster fire. Windows 2000 was the continuation of Windows NT, and became the basis for XP and everything that followed.
As for performance, by the time Windows 2000 came out (Pentium 3 era machines) it didn't seem to matter that much any more, and it really was a lot more stable.
WinWorld has been freely distributing copies of Windows 2000 for years now without issue.[0] Someone even tried reporting them to Microsoft and nothing happened,[1] even though WinWorld says they honor takedown requests.[2] It seems Microsoft really doesn't care as long as you stick to stuff older than XP.
Windows 2000 is my all-time favorite Windows OS. NT-based kernel, literally nothing extra, fast, stable. Used it til the day support was finally shuttered.