Elenarie: You can also run Server Core or Embedded without anything user-related included, but that doesn't make it a good choice either.
If it's not a good choice, then why have the choice there to begin with?
Elenarie: There is so much optimisation, drivers, 20+ years of compatibility layers, security layers, self-maintenance processes, frameworks, 32-bit compatibility layers, attacks mitigation dead ends, and many other things that were simply not present during 95's time.
This is a silly comparison. And it is a billion years in terms of technology, not actual real-life years.
And Unix/Linux got it right early on back in the 80's and 90's. Great boost in confidence there...
Seriously though, 95/98 had some issues, but with internet/networking not really being widely accessible there were a few major problems with the OS.
1) No access controls. This includes no file locking.
All files were treated equally, and only a few flags hinted at a file's importance which you could override at any time. Unlike in a multi-user environment and Unix based systems where files and resources were monitored, windows... didn't...
2) The GUI
A GUI by itself isn't a horrible thing, but there was no effort put into the commandline, so people got used to using graphical programs and never having a clue on how to chain or pipe commands together to get more complex results. Seriously, commandline and piping is an old concept, and one of the best. Instead of a chain of commands to say, check spelling in your documents for errors, instead you'd only consider using something like say... M$ Office.
3) DLL's
DLL's in theory is a good thing, however it's when you started installing other software and replacing DLL's from different packages that the system became unstable. Worse there was no way to truly monitor or really install to local directories because everything wanted to be pushed into the system directory.
Things would have been much better if everything was statically linked and included in the EXE files. Yeah some programs would have been a little bigger, but the whole thing would have been more stable... Curiously they would have ran like DOS programs in that regard... heh...
As one of the first 32bit OS's (
or layered on top of DOS) they had to start somewhere. Protected Mode was a new thing, and properly programmed it's a wonderful thing.
So i guess the real question is... Can we strip out all the extra crap and get a very tightly packed powerful kernel for Windows that doesn't require a gig to run? Are we allowed to customize the OS to our needs? I'm pretty sure i know the answer to that, and it's going to be a big fat no.