Luckily they learned from it and redesigned the kernel from scratch -- hold on, my producer's telling me that no, it's still the NT kernel under there. Outstanding.

When I actually started doing hobby projects, I remembered that feeling with Windows 9x where you learn to avoid "wrong" actions which have a potential of hanging your PC. You don't even think about it. Just get used that you don't move the cursor after clicking there, you don't click here again after a first double click, and other such.

While things like editing config files were ... more normal for the average person even, you'd have a paper manual generally. For everything, kitchen appliances and anything technical you could buy too. You wouldn't expect everything to just work without reading it. Freezes and crashes were worse.

Windows won because most people didn't know of anything else.

Fair enough, but Linux was quite difficult for a normal user to install back in the 90's. And you could literally destroy your monitor if you didn't know what you were doing. I was responding to the notion that using FOSS was somehow easier to get into in the 90s than Microsoft products.

I'm not sure that the alternatives were any better, everything was terrible back then.