Windows 9x had driver and stability issues but you could always kill an application if it stopped responding.
Linux today is similar to OS/2 - the OS keeps working but UI is unresponsive so if you have another computer you can ssh in but if you don't you may have to reboot.
I know that sometimes you can switch to terminal using keyboard and try to kill the application from there but that is not as easy as CTRL+ALT+DEL + Task Manager and killing the application.
Of course, there are times you don't have the keyboard attcahed (tablets) and then frozen UI is equivalent to the crashed OS.
And just to add - these days MS has made Windows much less resilient as misbehaving applications can freeze the UI to the point where CTRL+ALT+DEL and Task Manager do not respond any more so I guess OS/2 has won in the end - two of three most used Desktop OSes emulate the bad UI behavior.
At the win95 time plenty of BSODs came from microsoft bugs, from userspace accidentally weitingbovervkernel data, or even from running out of resources.
You have to remember the barrier between kernel and userspace was very porous, applications had their own address space but e.g. DLLs were projected at identical addresses and shared some resources. Kernel memory was mapped in userspace, if I'm remembering it right. Basically, apps had their own cubicle, not their own apartment.
Win95 was still a special flower OS due to its backwards compatibility compromises, where you could even kill the kernel with task manager, not really a good idea.
Eventually NT 4.0 became a better option, if you could get all the required software and weren't doing DOS games.
