The 7 Worst Operating Systems Ever 

I remember that era when windows 8 came out, and everyone was like, Nah and used windows 7 for 3 more years

"Windows ME sucks!" "Have you ever even used it?" "Of course not! Why would I use an OS that sucks?"

I had an after school job at a small shop fixing computers back in the early 2000s. With almost every Windows ME PC that came in, standard procedure was to salvage what we could in terms of personal data from the hard drive, then installing Windows 98.

The flaws you point out for the "Incompatible Timesharing System" applied to every single operating system back in the '60's. Things like hierarchical file systems, long file names, basic security etc didn't begin to exist until the '70's, and weren't universal for a long time after that.

windows thiojoe edition nothing works but thiojoe has a fake tutorial for everything

1:15 Windows XP = Xtremely Popular

Back in the day we used WinMe to test the hardware when we installed batches of PC's because installation was the quickest. We had to test every USB port. About 30% of the systems crashed when plugging/unplugging an USB mouse. It was THAT bad.

Remote Desktoping into Windows 8 internationally was one of the most painful experiences I've had. The RDP (in basic onrelease 8), forced you into the mobile touchscreen interface with just mouse emulated as touch. So no cursor, you had to basically guess where to click to force it back to desktop mode. On a good connection this wasn't too bad, but over a laggy connection to a client using hotel or airport wifi on the other side of the world who wanted something fixing or configuring asap before their meeting... extremely frustrating

WindowsME: "Mistake Edition" *Windows98SE: "Windows SIKE Edition"*

ChromeOS should have been on the list. -Chromebook user

MSDOS 3.3 changed my life. In 1984 that's all you had for IBM personal computers. I taught myself assembler using the Debug command in MSDOS. From that I got a hold of a copy of MASM and furthered my assembler learning using the Macro Assembler. I'm sure I could have done the same using the Apple ][e Monitor program. Incidentally a couple of years later when I was in high school my math teacher let me use his Apple ][e he had in the classroom. I used the Monitor program to teach myself 6502 assembler :P. It just so happened my parents bought a PC. If they had bought an Apple or C64 I'm sure I would have found similar tools there. Oh, and 4.0 did suck.

My mother bought a Gateway PC back in 2000. She asked me to come over and set it up for her. I got everything out of their boxes, hooked up the PC and pressed the power button. I booted to the desktop and immediately blue screened. I knew from then on it was going to suck.

I never had any issues with ME, but I was a kid back then. Just wanted to play rollercoaster!

I remember an internet cafe in our town which had Windows ME on every PC. Any time you visit you could see at least one PC with a BSOD, usually 2-3 at the same time. This should say it all.

I recall working at Best Buy in 1999 (at the Computer Dept.) and seeing the fiasco unfold due to the confusion by consumers walking in wanting to upgrade their OS. To 99.9% of them, the intuitive choice was to grab the box that read Windows 2000. They just had no idea it was meant as un upgrade to Windows NT. Having said that, there is one area worth giving credit to ME: The OS was FINALLY compatible with many webcams, which started coming out after Win 98 and were a pain in the arse. Newer printers and scanners were also a lot easier to install and many of them had the drivers already in the OS which finally brought the so called Plug-and-Play to reality. So for teenagers, and college students wanting to actually use these newer gadgets, ME was a far better choice than 98.

Back in the day, I had Lindows on a bootable CD ROM. I found it very useful in recovering deleted files on an MS Windows partition.

I never actually used Vista. Jumped from XP to 7, those were the best ones.

Fun fact: Window Vista was usually commonly known as Window sVista (meaning windows mistake/overlook) here in Italy because of how bad and initially highly distributed it was

I had an ME box that lasted for years! It was buggy at first, but after a couple service packs, it worked great. I used it for a long, long time and only replaced it when it got so old that the software I needed to use wouldn't run on it.

I never referred to ME as "Mistake Edition". It was "Major Error" in my house.

“Windows XP became xtremely popular “

11:02 Windows 8.1 also has the Charms bar. My problem with it is not that the charms were unintuitive or that I didn't know how to access those things, but that they would sometimes come up unbidden and get in the way when all I wanted to do was access something on the right hand side, like a vertical scrollbar.

Ever since I migrated from Windows to using Linux for most tasks, it has all been happiness ! I do have a windows machine for playing games , because of well the DirectX and virtually all games are written to run on it. Not much gaming on Linux. But for general browsing, email, programming, and most tasks (other than games ) , linux reigns supreme in my mind.

0:20 7. Windows ME (2000) 2:08 6. MS-DOS 4.0 (1986) 3:48 5. Incompatible TimeSharing System (1960s) 5:54 4. JavaOS (1996) 7:52 3. Windows Vista (2006) 10:03 2. Windows 8 (2012) 12:49 1. Lindows (2001)

My father calls windows vista "windows svista". "Svista" (also σβήσ' τα) is a greek word that means delete them lol

Great video! I would have expected OS/2 Warp in the list though 😄

Lindows creators got 20 million dollars from Microsoft for changing the name of their product? That's probably more money than they ever dreamed of making by selling their stuff.

Also SpyOS must be included. Excuse me, ChromeOS

Look I remember parents getting a new PC with ME and when they finally decided to upgrade, they got one with Vista. Good times.

Windows Vista was not that bad, ran it on company laptop for some time and it just worked, though windows 7 did run noticeable snappier on the same hardware. Biggest problem was that the driver model changed between XP an Vista and that caused the majority of the problems, by the time 7 came out most of those where sorted.. Must say that Windows XP and 7 remain my favorite Microsoft OS's, Windows 10 has some flaws and the biggest one is the fragile start-menu and the settings mess.

8:20 I had that very computer case. I don't know if the components are the same, but I remember doing the same kind of stuff seen here, with various upgrades. Nostalgic stuff.

Windows Xp Never dies,That cool start-up sound Gives me shivers.Good old days.

"Microsoft sues them, loses, pays them $20M". The American Dream.

As a long time Mac user, Mac OS 8.5 and 8.6 where very buggy and crashed frequently. The classic os was on it last legs , so many extension patches and helper apps slowed anything down. It could not do multitasking and no protected memory. So many stuck watch icons pointers. Bit map interface

2 things: 1) Windows Vista did all the dirty work for Win7 - because Vista did a complete overhaul below the surface. When Vista was launched, nobody was ready (DRIVERS!) - but when 7 came out, everyone was - 7 got all the credit. (note: i didn't use Vista) 2) I used 7 from the very beginning and was excited to use 8 from the very beginning: 8 felt so much more fluent. My workflow did not change: Whether I use 7/8/8.1/10/11 or a popular Linux distro: press Windows(super)key -> calc -> enter -> my calc pops up? :)

The only thing people don't like Win 8 is because they don't like the new Start menu interface, but otherwise they're fine.

Honestly, Windows 8.1 was like Vista SP2, it made the operating system viable.

I had the chance to have a demo of JavaOS and the Hot Java browser on Sun France headquarters. Compared to our regular PC, it was laggy and moreover it crashed superbly and repepetitively. The system price was very "Sunny", laughable to say the least...

Hi! Windows ME was called "MüllEimer" in germany, which means garbage bucket.

I saw the thumbnail for this video and my heart almost stopped because I thought I saw windows XP in the trash can.

Windows 8 was so bad that one night when I was 11, I literally installed windows 10 on my family's PC without permission because I hated it so much. I got grounded for it cuz my parents aren't good with computers and they were angry that everything changed but I think it was worth it to get rid of windows 8.

I saw Lindows and thought of what I’m currently running on some ancient PCs in the house…Q4OS. It’s a Linux distribution that reminds me heavily of Windows XP and also has the graphic prompts of installing applications but actually works extremely well!

ME was a tiny step forward in terms of functionality over 98 but much more unstable and crash prone. I used it a little at a friend's PC and witnessed it a few times. He hated it and only used it because the PC came installed with it. I, like most people, bypassed it straight to XP. This one, yes, was a huge improvement in every way next to 98. It was so good it made older PCs feel like new again.

I like how you went back in time to cover older Operating Systems. One of the my theme papers in college was about ENIAC, BINAC and UNIVAC. I am surprised I never came across any references to that system you mentioned in the 1960's.

I didn’t even know there were 7 operating systems

Look windows vista was a disaster but it will forever be a place in my heart And it was the most prettiest version of windows

Another different impression about win8. My wife's family had been running a convenient store and had bought a Lenovo PC with Celeron CPU and 2GB memory. The Win8 system worked smoothly. But when I downgraded the OS to Win7, every time after logging-in, the system would freeze and take quite some time to respond to your operations of clicking the mouse or hitting the keyboards. So that less resource consumptions compared with win7, might be a merit for win8.

Vista was too ahead of its time, and never got a chance to be popular. I do still use it for fun myself on a triple-booted laptop of mine where I have XP, Vista, and 7. Windows 8 was also not horrible though. Once I got used to it, it felt great, and it ran so fast. I have an old Pentium 4 Dell OptiPlex GX620 desktop, and it's so fast. It's so old too.

are humans considered operating systems tho, thats the real question..

My first custom pc ran windows 8.1, I actually really liked it, my hardware was far from quick, yet the UI on 8.1 actually felt snappy compared to 10

Valdocs was an OS written in Forth. Not many people, including me, had interaction with it. Rising Star Industries introduced it in 1983. Initial enthusiasts were motivated by the slogan "You can do anything 10 times faster in Forth." Forth believers admitted Valdocs had sluggish performance, but laid the blame on the designers not the language. So much for faith-based design.

Honestly, I miss my Windows 8 laptop, but it was touchscreen and honestly really easy to use with a touchscreen all I ever had to do was swipe a finger up the screen to get to start. It honestly just felt nice with the touch controls.

I actually liked Vista. On semi decent hardware it ran fairly well, and it brought a huge number of quality-of-life improvements that we still use today. Drivers and compatibility are what really killed the OS. At the time I was working in a retail computer store (not big box, but similar), the number of devices that didn't have Vista drivers out of the box was simply shocking. Its almost like they didn't care (HP was notorious for this, 2 years after launch and they still weren't providing driver discs), combined with larger overall driver package sizes for Vista over XP, and still 56K modems being commonplace lead to it being a pain in the backside.

I used Windows Vista from 2007 up until 2016 when I could get a better PC, and I still absolutely love Vista

Back in the day, I ordered an IBM ThinkPad that was supposed to come with WinME pre-installed. However, I chose an option to have Windows 98 installed instead. Interestingly, history repeated itself just a month ago. I ordered a new high-end laptop, but chose to have Windows 10 pre-installed instead of Window 11. The more things change….

11:56 Windows Technical Preview added the Start Menu back as well as Metro apps in a Window

7:17 that thing looks like a tissue box

Everyone knows the best operating system: Microshaft Winblows 98

I used Windows ME. I think the restore function, windows media player and movie maker were really great. It certainly was better than Windows 95/98 and to some extent windows 2000 which was oriented towards professionals

Anyone who used Windows ME in a VM and not installed to hardware doesn't know why it was truly hated.

Always really easy to look back on what was on offer in the past. I remember when an OS could sit in 16k of RAM. The hardware limitations of the day dictated what was capable of being implemented, something commonly forgotten today.

ITS got the "Incompatible" label as a spoof of the older operating system CTSS (Compatible Time Sharing System).

I do have windows vista on one of my old laptops, running nicely... Though to be fair, i had to restore it to factory settings 3 times during first year of use before i was able to finally configure it so that it wouldn't break again...

A lot of the screenshots you shared of JavaOS were actually IBM's OS/2 Warp v.4. IBM went all-in on Java as a desperate attempt to fill in the application gap in OS/2, but the two operating systems are completely different.

"I don't use the Windows key anyway" Win E, Win R, Win X, Win 1, Win2, Win D, Win period, Win and type to search. How can someone live without these shortcuts?😂

I actually switched from Vista to OSX, I never really had too much problems with it but after testing out Windows 7 via Bootcamp it was clear why so many people disliked Vista.

One thing I wanted to mention that a lot of people tend to not know, overlook, or forget about, is that Windows 3x, 9x, and ME, were in fact fancy shells on top of MS-DOS with increasing complexity and capabilities, including the use of Protected Mode. Whereas the Windows NT series was entirely self-contained with a non-DOS kernel. Windows 2000 was NT-based, and WinXP was the point at which the consumer and professional OSes were merged onto the NT code base. Of course, the question becomes, "why is this important?" Depends on how pedantic you want to be about distinguishing an operating system from its interface. Win95 started to diverge from DOS in terms of file system limitations, which is a low-level OS feature, and Win98 more or less finalized things like long filenames in the FAT16/32 file system. But the Windows UI, support for drivers and PnP, etc., were sort of hybrid functionality given that the kernel was a huge extension of DOS Real Mode. But to the average user, the UI and applications and features are the OS, so the fact that it's running on DOS is mostly irrelevant. This daily dose of pedantry is brought to you by me.

With Vista the problem came from the fact that it would brick lower-end computers - even newer ones. It didn't play well with the budget laptop I was using for college work, which even came with it pre-installed on the machine - so there was no getting out of it at that point. 8 *ran* decently enough, however that tablet style start menu was absolutely unusable for me. All the icons were too big and too spaced out for me to really "read" it properly; it might have been better on a laptop, but the sheer size of the text and buttons on a desktop screen just made it look like a bad piece of pop art and completely unfit for use. A lot of the time I just had to use the search function. Or just dig through the file explorer. Yep, digging through files was *easier* than trying to navigate windows by andy warhol

The PDP series of computers were not "mainframes." They were mini computers designed for small companies that couldn't afford IBM 360's or CDC 3600's. They were also used as "switches" connecting dozens, or hundreds, of dumb terminals to the mainframe for early networking. This is how the Lawrence Livermore Lab's "Octopus" network was organized (with a CDC 7600 as the mainframe).

DOS 4.0 took up more (base) memory than DOS 3.3 - We had to re write our DBASE 3 app into Clipper to get it to run. Later Vista has the same issue, it was built for 4 MB, but most people only had 512MB, 1MB if you were lucky. Nothing to do with having any more or less bugs, as you can see running them now with sufficient hardware.

I was happy with every operating system I ever used because I did whatever was necessary to make it run OK. The first thing I always did was to remove everything I didn't need. That always makes the system faster and more stable.

I remember when I first installed Windows 8 and started it up I was like “WTF happened to the start menu ????” Pathetic MS

Java slow? It was called Java so you can go to Starbucks and get a bit of coffee while it tries to do anything!

I used to have Ubuntu on my first laptop as a second operating system and I love it most of the software where free and compatible with most files created on windows. I lost the operating system because of the copy got damaged and I was a rookie.

The list of worst OS's would be every version of the mac os ever released.

The main reason why the UAC prompt came up so much in Windows Vista was because programs for XP and earlier assumed your had administrators privilege's and tried to edit files that were outside of the programs own directory or the users data folder. This would automatically trigger UAC. Windows 10 will trigger it as well if a program tries to do this. As third party software was updated, the issue slowly went away. The main issue wasn't an operating system issue but third party software companies not following what Microsoft told them to do back in 1995 when Windows NT came out.

This video is basically digging into the cream of the crap.

As for Windows 8, I personally enjoy the start screen and its flexibility to the start menu. The live tiles were so amazing! I still run it on a laptop today. However, nobody complains about the macOS launchpad that's been there since the beginning that doesn't even get live anything or widgets!

Wow, agree agree. Vista was disappointing on release & I was an immediate adopter (always a terrible idea - MS used us, meaning initial adopters, as beta testers, but they always do. Wait until first major update before buying into new MS OSs). It became good, just as you say, but OS 7 & Win XP were gold in their day. Dos 4 - not a patch on Dos 3.3. It was stable enough to run Win 3.1 on top of when that came out. Lindows made a splash on release - I think we were all heartily sick of MS at that point & their vaporware tactics and all the blue screens of death. Win ME, I tried to use that for a while before going to Win XP on home computers, but I put my company onto Win2000. I had used Win NT4 extensively & knew it was a more stable platform than 95, 98, or ME. I didn’t use computers until 1977, so too young for ITS! Anyway, a very well researched video and amazingly accurate considering you weren’t there for the 70s-90s OSs and the horribly slow super expensive computers we had to contend with back then. Gratz!

Best part of Vista was Aero and the Start menu.

2:03 That's a wierd mediaplayer =D

If I recall correctly, MS-DOS 4 introduced a more graphic surface and QBASIC. It also allowed to use better configuration and extended memory. And was used for the first Windows apps without a true Windows environment.

My first OS came out just before the first Windows and had the first GUI I had ever seen. It was called GeoWorks. It was simple to install from DOS and pre-loaded with useful apps for writing, graphics, data base, etc. Windows was much more complicated to install and use at the time.

I actually liked Vista over W7. I built my own system and turned off UAC , so I had none of the slowdown issues most people experienced. Only worked on ME once, and it was an utter pain to fix. I could see why that one was so hated.

I remember Windows 8. As a kid, the first computer I interacted with ran on Windows 7, and I eventually figured it out. Later, we got new computers that ran windows 8. I was very confused. The start screen was weird, and I tried to avoid it whenever possible, as well as the full screen apps.

i love how i thought my old pc was a Windows 10 computer until its hard drive failed. We had to reset the system and it turned out to be a Windows 8 computer, which i think is okay. However, i didnt use it much because the computer eventually broke the day after thanks to the hard drive failing, it was a all-in-one PC

I used ME for a few years without an issue. XP however, would keep downloading new updates and drivers till the HDD was full and needed continual maintenance to prevent this.

Windows vista has one of the best looking desktop ,start menu, taskbar

An operating system I loved was called DMFIII (Data Management Facility). It had a built-in file management facility, so you could create a database application. Another unusual facility, was that from a terminal you could bypass the OS and create a machine code programme and do whatever you want. OK, security not great, but you could get into the bowels of the system and learn how it worked.

The mail program of vista was the best Microsoft released until now. So good, they scrapped it not to be a threat to Outlook. Same with write before it was renamed wordpad. If it was capable of making tables… you wouldn’t need Word. Still it can read a document that contains a table and was exported from word into the write/wordpad format.

I still miss the charms bar from 8.1. moving the cursor all the way right revealed a bigger size time on the left side. It was very convenient to check the time, as a low vision user a bigger time display ment a lot. There is no way in windows 11 to bring up a bigger time display that to in any location

We knew the "ME" part in Windows Me as "Many Errors".

I must be the oddest person ever, I loved Windows 8 and 8.1

First OS I used was PC-DOS 1.1. I loved DOS - esp DOS 5.0 - 'cos it had 'xcopy', a really useful utility I've not found outside the command prompt. I had a soft spot for IBM's OS/2 ..... but then moved onto Windows NT, which was really solid. Still have one machine running Windows 7

It's funny listening to millenials explain DOS, and getting confused. He said "there was nothing pre-installed." Well, it was a Disk Based Operating System, so you had to install *all* the programs yourself. And it did come with programs: it had BASIC, an Assembler, and an Text Editor. And some utilities, like CHKDSK and XCOPY, etc.

I've had a computer ran Windows me and it wasn't that bad

Had Window 8 and 8.1, remember downloading a Classic Shell program that gave it the windows 7 look returning the windows in the corner. I remember reading an article that Classic Shell was boasting millions and millions of downloads since so many users hated the windows 8 and 8.1 look, made the jump to windows 10 as soon as I could

MS DOS 3.3 had also mouse support with the right drivers back then. It’s not starting by 4.0. I used a mouse at my Schneider Euro PC with MS DOS 3.3.

I remember using Windows ME when I was teaching at Dankook University in 2001.

Red Star OS should have at least gotten an honorable mention.