Not an answer to the OP, but my most hated was Windows NT4, Service Pack 6!

Maybe I should reconsider that, actually, because the POS that NT 4 SP6 was, is what made me go out and get my first Mac. Occasional glitches, mostly my own fault/ignorance, but I have thoroughly enjoyed my nearly 8 years with Macs. My Macs do everything I ask of them and rarely let me down. There is definitely something to be said for an OS that is tailor-made to the physical machine it has to run on.

All the NT family of operating systems are infinitely better that any DOS. I started (and stopped) using DOS with 2.1 on an Acorn Computer in 1984. Thank goodness I had an Apollo Workstation for my engineering work and that was bundled with Interleaf Publisher. The system was a kind of Unix+ OS, was the world's first networked workstation and the world's first window manager. We wrote our applications in Pascal.

In 1989, the company wanted our Apollo code ported to DOS 4. I recall my first demo by the DOS lovers and said "OK, guys. I know you're playing a game with me. This is the same stuff that was on the Acorn 5 years ago. Where is the OS?"

They weren't kidding. The system appeared to me to have no software at all! Single user, a limit of 640k for a program. 25x80 character display. Sneaker net (floppy disk networking). How did such a mess become successful?

Reminds me of a Joke I made way back in the day, and I am sure this is completely unoriginal but I remember calling the dosshell dos-hell. I know, so funny right? Right? :D


Then again I didn't have a computer in my home until Windows 95 era. My parents were slow adopters to technology, so all I had to use was what was at school and friends. So lots of Windows 3.11 machines, lots of Apple IIe computers. We had a few computers in our library that ran Windows 98, and the very back bone was NT based. I only know this because I once sort of abused my some privileges given to me and installed Doom on one of the network drives. Which is pretty much how I taught myself how to use DOS, and I did so with out Internet or google, just good old plain trial and error, and there was a lot of error.

I'd have to say my favorite OS in concept is Linux, but in practice it is probably OS X. I love the flexibility of Linux and how I can do whatever I want with zero restraints, but I think it doesn't quite have the polished feel of OS X.

I'm pretty platform agnostic. I think the OS is merely a tool, and one chooses the best tool for the job at hand.
Although my main computer is a Mac Pro, I run Win7x64 on it pretty much exclusively (I do a ton of .NET and SQL Server development).
When I set up a server and it needs to be 100% secure with 99.999% uptime, I use FreeBSD. If I need to set up a server for someone that needs to be able to remote into it real easily, but 100% reliability is not a must-have, then I'll use Win2008R2.
If I need a workstation for test and development work that is completely customizable, I tend towards a Linux distro.
If I did more Mac or iPhone development work, I would no doubt be using OS X constantly.
In the past, I've used Solaris (even SunOS for a bit), Irix, HP/UX, AIX (on an old Mac ANS 500/132 I bought for $50), QNX, OS/2, etc. They all had their quirks, and all had things they did well at.

I love obscure operating systems. I used to troll ebay for ancient non-IBM computers, just to get one with some bizarre OS on it.

i have both Mac OS X 10.6 based MacBook Pro 13 inches and Windows 7 Professional based Sony VAIO and both are good at their own end. I love both and therefore its a tie between these two operating systems.

OS is the best operating system!