Design failures

For example, all X11 clients crash when the server goes down.

When was the last time your browser crashed because a server was down? Or your irc client? Or whatever else there is except for X11 programs? Yeah, that's right.

Why they wouldn't just wait for the server to come up again and reconnect is beyond me. I mean it's a client-server system, so what's the point of not making use of it? Sure, you can connect from some remote machine and play around for a bit, but it's fucking useless when all your programs crash once you disconnect!!!

What the fuck were they thinking?

>>68
Why bother with marketing names at all? Just call it after kernel versions:

NT3   - NTOS 3.x
NT4   - NTOS 4.x
2k    - NTOS 5.0
XP    - NTOS 5.1
2k3   - NTOS 5.2
Vista - NTOS 6.0
WS2k8 - NTOS 6.0
2k8r2 - NTOS 6.1
Win7  - NTOS 6.1

The Server vs Desktop differences tend to be in software included, licensing options/settings, and some minor kernel tweaking to accomodate more common usage scenarios, but in most cases, they're just builds targetted/tweaked with different goals in mind.

9x kernel line is ignored as while they have some shared code, and implements a more limited version of winapi, it has completly different internals, and is a completly different kernel than than NT. (Versions there are 1.0,2.0,3.0,3.1,4.0,... (9x line)).