Windows 7 was basically Vista with a few service packs, and Vista wasn't really that bad. Once the rough edges were off and it was renamed "Windows 7" it was liked well enough.

Vista->7 was certainly a smaller change than XP->Vista but more than service pack level. For instance, one big one is that DWM in Vista keeps a copy of each window (at least old GDI windows, maybe not DirectX ones) in both CPU and GPU memory, which both consumes unnecessary space and generally slows rendering down. In Windows 7, they're only on the GPU.

It's a classic example of something changing significantly under the hood but not being very visually obvious.

Seems like a cherry pick. Was the difference between 98 and 98SE larger than between XP and XP SP and SP2 which are not included?

I always jokingly called windows 7 vista service pack 3. Vista added in windows defender, really ramped up how aggressive superfetch was, and search indexing. Turn those 3 things off and vista worked decently as it was too much for most CPUs/HD of the time. They fixed most of that in sp2 of vista. But win7 is when everyone really got most of the fixes. One dude I know managed to 'fix' Windows ME. He figured out it was the plug and play system aggressively scanning the inf files. He narrowed them down to just the ones that were needed for his hardware and it worked pretty good for him.

You needed an upgrade CD ordered from Microsoft to update, so I count those.

if 98SE was a service pack it would be the largest feature increase in a service pack of any Windows service pack, iirc it brought native USB printer+storage support and firewire support to the OS.

Though I was a kid at the time (barely 10 years old), I just remember 98 and 98SE disks floating about and people not upgrading their windows 95 machines until SE came out.

The wisdom used to be to wait a couple of service packs before installing a new version of windows. It seems that is still true. Windows 2000 was quite usable a few service packs in. Windows XP took a few as well to become usable.

ME was the last version of the Dos based windows versions. Versions 1 and 2 most people barely remember. Version 3.0, 3.1 and 3.11 were pretty close together and the first versions that were more widely used. Then windows 95 was obviously the big one in that series but quite buggy as well initially thus necessitating service packs. 98 and 98SE were relatively minor upgrades to that and thus quite alright. ME was an attempt to bridge the gap to the much delayed XP and as such quite pointless since it was buggy and would have also included a lot of misguided stuff around internet explorer that has since been long forgotten and that obviously was omitted for XP. Somehow MS got into their heads that the browser was the OS, which in MS land meant stuff like active desktop, which as I recall was horribly slow even if you could get to run it at all (no in my case). And when you did there was a "and now what ... " moment as well.

XP was the successor to Windows NT 3.1, 3.5, 3.51, 4.0, and 2000 Each of which were pretty OK. To complicate things further they started doing separate releases for servers as well from 3.1. I use NT 3.1 for development work at some point. Pretty nice machine as I remember. Never gave me much trouble.

XP was where they cut loose from DOS mostly and by then nobody, including MS, had appetite for yet more releases. So, they doubled down with service packs and fixed bugs only for quite a few years. Nevertheless, in terms of stability XP was a huge upgrade from the dos based varieties in terms of stability which is why people remember it fondly. But especially before service pack 2, many people were sticking with windows 2000 in companies. I had a nice windows 2000 desktop for quite some time at work.

By the time they released Vista, it was so horrible that many opted to not upgrade since there was no big need. Especially enterprises said thanks but no thanks and kept on defaulting to XP right until MS pulled the plug on that many years later. They had the same issue with windows 7 and 8. Which is why they made windows 10 a longer term thing and made an effort to get companies upgrading. I predict that this will be an issue with windows 11 as well. Most enterprises like uniform environments and they don't want to have to support multiple versions of windows. So, windows 10 is going to be here for a while.

If you count 98SE, you should also count 8.1 and then it doesnt work anymore as well :)

Touche,

however I'm not sure if 8.1 really bucks the trend, Wikipedia says reception was negative/mixed.

about 8.1 - I suppose it was mostly inertia. To this day - it's better than 10's pushed ads, telemetry, xbox(!?), and misguided control panel.

It's effectively 10 minus DirectX12

95 was pretty terrible, before osr2 - but I guess few have experienced that.

You also missed Windows 3.11, which I recall was good (not sure where Windows For Workgroups fits in...)