2000 was peak-Windows for me; the stability of NT 4, but with the addition of USB-support.

But you're being a needlessly argumentative, by any real definition all versions of Windows have been "real operating systems".

I still fire up my trusty old Win2k VM from time to time. Fast, stable, simple, intuitive. Along with Delphi 7 it's incredible how productive we used to be some 15 years ago. Documentation was sooo good back then.

XP was a gnawing (but likely necessary) step back from Windows 2000 in many ways, mostly on the UI side of things, at least in its early days

Brushing all the checkboxes and menus it could under the rug in favor of those stupid "Wizards" gives me a headache even just reminiscing about it

"Internet Connection Wizard"

"Help Wizard"

"Accessibility Wizard"

Agreed. 2000 and 2003 were peak-Windows for me. I used my trusty 2003 version from MSDN AA for years, skipping XP entirely, and then jumping straight to Vista with hardware change.

Windows 7 was a-ok too, but my best memories are still with 2000/2003.

Versions 1 up to 3 weren't really real operating systems.

What does this mean? It's much more of a "real OS" than DOS at least, no? And it's certainly a platform that can be used to get computer things done, in a much more resource-efficient manner than modern systems.

you know he meant NT kernel is proper isolated design unlike win95

what, I like remote people to visit me freely..

Or remote people to BSOD you freely as well via some OOB data to the NetBIOS TCP port.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinNuke

Sure - if you mean by “real OS” a server OS.

There was Windows NT Workstation, which was the best option for running CAD software on PC for some time.