[phlakaton]

There are many features of BeOS I loved, but for some funny reason the one that just thoroughly won me over from day one was the three-second boot time on my crusty Mac. Might've been a bit of a cheat. You'd never know it. It was just glorious performance for the impatient.

Of course, that version of the OS didn't do a whole lot. By the time R5 rolled around, the boot time had grown quite a bit. It was still damn fast though.

[acdha]

The one which got me was the time I had music playing, a large C++ build going, and transferring video from a FireWire card with a tiny buffer simultaneously … and everything not only worked but the UI responsiveness didn’t change at all.

For reference, on that same PC I installed Win98 to play Baldur’s Gate. It bluescreened when I plugged in a Microsoft USB mouse. This was a representative experience.

[cosmic_cheese]

Some seem to remember 95/98(SE) fondly but what I remember is them being unstable messes even on good hardware, an effect which was multiplied on the crappy bargain bin machines sold at Staples and the like.

Mac OS of the same vintage wasn’t a paragon of stability exactly, but its stability seemed have more rhyme/reason - there were programs and activities that had a tendency to make your system more crashy while others had little to no impact. You could kinda plan around it, and rebooting after doing the instability-causing thing would clear things up. 95/98(SE)’s instability felt a lot more random which for me made it more day-ruining.

Windows didn’t feel appreciably more stable than the competition until they finally ditched that crappy 9x kernel with Windows 2000, but that release wasn’t intended for general users, which is a shame because it was just as stable as the post-SP1 XP was, maybe more. Consumers got cheated with Windows ME.

[bombcar]

Back then booting and rebooting was something you did so many times (or at least when you “wanted to use the computer”) - my first experience with Linux was colored by “how fast did it boot”?

[II2II]

I solved that problem by compiling my own kernel. The speedup was dramatic. Of course, that was back in the days when an interested hobbiest could compile a lean kernel without fear of breaking dozens of things.