The problem with your question is that whether Tito was good or bad does not really fall in the purview of historians. What I mean is that when historians write a history of Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia, they don't set out to prove that Hitler or Stalin were bad -- although that might invariably happen from presenting the facts -- but instead ask other questions, aimed at gaining a better understanding of the past like what did motivate historical actors to behave a certain, what structural factors can we identify that shaped this kind of history, what can we learn about the nature of a regime by comparing it with other regimes, how and why did one regime tackle a similar question in a different way than another etc. etc.

With regard to Tito I'll first tag /u/Fucho since they are our resident expert on Yugoslavia. I'll also tackle a couple of things that I can speak on.

So Tito: One thing that can be said about Tito and his movement is that they were probably one of the most -- if not the most -- successful resistance movement in WWII. Military, they indeed had an important impact, one for demoralizing the German troops in the country from 1941 on and for drawing away resources from the Eastern Front. In 1941 Tito's Partisans erected arguably the first liberated territories in Europe in the form of the short-lived Užice Republic. Furthermore, by focusing in their political direction on the a narrative of national liberation rather than socialist revolution and by being open to members from all Yugoslavian republics, they managed to swell their ranks in an incredible fashion concerning their troop numbers, going from 80.000 in late 1941 to 800.000 in April of 1945. The only resistance group with comparable numbers was the Polish Home Army with 400.000 troops in 1944.

Also, during the war of national liberation, Tito's Partisans were very good at winning over the population because wherever they went they made an effort to establish some kind of political order that included the local population and provided them with legal and other infrastructure so that they could have a say and participation in their fate. (The Greek Partisans did the same).

On the other hand, the Partisans also made decisions during the war of national liberation and the civil war within that war, that can be evaluated critically. It is important to mention that a crucial difference between the Partisans and the Četnici is that the Četnici did not have an exactly homogeneous ideological direction. Generally Serbs, often former officers of the army of the previous Yugoslavia, beyond a very broad national ideology they were not able to formulate a coherent political ideology and strategy. That is why we e.g. talk about the Mihailovic Chetniks, to denote that there were indeed other groups. The second crucial difference is that while the Partisans were by ideology and by by policy not bound to a specific place, which allowed them greater freedom of movement, while Chetnik groups were often limited to a certain area since they had their supporters and family members in a certain village/a certain local area.

This is important because it let to a set of different political decisions. In 1941 the Chentiks and Partisans collaborated heavily in the so-called Serbian uprising. They managed to drive the German troops from pretty much the whole country with the exception of the urban centers. The Germans decided to answer this with massive violence against the civilian population, shooting 100 people for every dead German soldier. The Partisans while seeing this with horror also decided to not let that impede their resistance since the more brutal the Germans were, the more support they would receive. The Chetniks on the other hand because of their deep local roots could not respond the same way because that would have meant getting their whole support system killed. That was on of the first and major issues that caused the schism between Chetniks and Partisans in the war. Now, of course this is a somewhat impossible situation, which the Germans were responsible for, but here is something that can be examined critically from the context. How justified was it to take the massive deaths the Germans would inflict on civilians into account in a quest for national liberation. A question that can be answered from a military and historical standpoint but is in my opinion incredibly hard to evaluate from a moral standpoint.

Similarly, when we look at the immediate post-war era, we come across such things like the Bleiburg repatriations, where Tito's Partisans shot hundreds of Ustaši, Četnici, and members of the Slovene Home Guards who had surrenders and in some cases also their families while they sent several hundreds more to labor camps. In the subsequent months and years, there were also a considerable number of political trials, which often resulted in the deaths of actual and alleged collaborators. In this question, the Tito Partisans acted of course under the impression of a brutal civil war and with the knowledge of the atrocities committed for example at Jasenovac as well as in an effort to stabilize the new Tito regime and its agenda of socialist revolution. In this respect they faced the same question as any other post-war society -- how to stabilize politically and socially after war -- with the added weight of having gone through what was essentially a civil war. In a number of instances Tito and the Partisans decided to tackle this problem with massive violence. This is historically explainable and possible to evaluate but, again, from a moral standpoint, it is different because shooting POWs and their families in retribution is a rather abhorrent act on a moral level.

This only covers the war and the time immediately after the war but the same problem extends to the whole regime. While Tito's Yugoslavia managed to improve the standard of living of its populace in an impressive way, it also did not allow for political self determination of that populace and suppressed political dissent often violently. While it somehow managed the issue of national self determination via a socialist Yugoslavism, some of its policy resulted in violent nationalism being able to break out in the way it did in the 80s and 90s. From a historical stand point we can evaluate and examine this but from a moral stand point this becomes more difficult because you have to tackle for example the question if the improvement in standard of life is worth the suppression of dissent and civil liberties. And making that call can land you in hot water pretty fast.

Of course, historians are people and therefore it is impossible to eliminate moral convictions from the process of historical inquiry entirely but the question if Tito was good or bad on a moral level is one that historians have a hard time tackling because it is in essence not a historical question but one that is contingent on so much more than historical evidence, sources, and their interpretation.

Coming from the historical field and background I come from, I would conclude that of course Tito is not the same as Hitler and Stalin simply because his policy didn't result in millions of deaths, war, and genocide. And similarly, personally, I'd much prefer living in socialist Yugoslavia than in socialist Romania e.g. but that doesn't negate the repressive policies of the Tito regime and the experience of of its victims.

Sources:

• Roberts, Walter R. (1973). Tito, Mihailović and the Allies 1941–1945. Rutgers University Press.

• Tomasevich, Jozo (1975). War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941–1945: The Chetniks 1. San Francisco: Stanford University Press.

• Tomasevich, Jozo (2001). War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941–1945: Occupation and Collaboration 2. San Francisco: Stanford University Press.

• Misha Glenny: The Balkans: Nationalism, War and the Great Powers, 1804–1999.

• Mark Mazower: The Balkans: From the End of Byzantium to the Present Day (Phoenix, 2002).

• Ben H. Shepherd: Terror in the Balkans. German Armies and Partisan Warfare (Harvard 2012).

• Holm Sundhaussen: Geschichte Jugoslawiens 1918–1980. Stuttgart 1982.

• Holm Sundhaussen: Jugoslawien und seine Nachfolgestaaten 1943–2011. Eine ungewöhnliche Geschichte des Gewöhnlichen. Böhlau, Wien 2012.

• Milovan Djilas' memoires about the Partisan war.

• Borković, Milan. Kontrarevolucija u Srbiji – Kvislinška uprava 1941–1944.

• Timofejev, Alexej J (2011). Rusija i Drugi svetski rat u Jugoslaviji.

they always say that Yugoslavia was the best thing to happen here

I really have to ask, is it because it kept the ethnic conflict from getting out of control? From college courses, just to see if they match with your knowledge, I read that the Chetniks were known to collaborate with the Nazis as long as it meant advancing their pro-serb interests. If I recall this made the western allies give more aid to Tito's partisans. Does this match up with your knowledge so far? Just trying to see if the same historical facts are taught.

As mentioned above, your question is vague and doesn't point the conversation in a particularly useful direction. Historians don't ascribe labels such as "good" or "bad" to historical figures, as this generally serves little purpose. That being said, I'll try my hand at illuminating the topic beyond WW2 and immediate postwar period, as others have done.

Yugoslavia was an incredibly complex country with a great many internal problems. It was also in many ways an astoundingly successful country, all things considered. Relative to Soviet-occupied Eastern Europe it was a remarkably tolerant place with broad support for the communist government and above all Tito. In contrast to Hungary in 1956 or Czechoslovakia in 1968, there was never once in Yugoslavia the need for a large-scale violent intervention to maintain order. The events of the Croatian Spring in 1972 were minute relative to the aforementioned events behind the Iron Curtain, and were more politically violent than anything else. The Communist Party never had to impose its rule by force, which arguably makes it a unique case in Europe, despite periodic criticism.

All that being said, Tito's rule went through several stages, all affected by external threats and contextualized by internal strengths and weaknesses. The Yugoslav obsession with defense was born not only of the horrors of WW2, but also the very real prospect of a Soviet invasion after Tito's falling out with the Soviet Union in 1948. This would continue into the early 1950s, arguably until relations regained some semblance of normality after Stalin’s death in 1953. The political terrors and purges within the Party during this initial period certainly produced no love for Tito, and neither did the brutal methods of his Chief of Intelligence, Aleksandar Ranković. My grandmother’s brother spent 7 years on Goli Otok for making an anti-communist comment in his workplace.

With the rise of living standards in the 1960s and political liberalization in 1964, Yugoslavs achieved some form of freedom and lifestyle comparable to Westerners in their day-to-day lives. Political criticism began to be allowed, so long as one wasn’t too incendiary or undermined the Party itself on an organized level. A normal Yugoslav could for example publically criticize Tito in a bar or write a buffoonish piece in a publication with no real threat by the time the 1970s rolled around. The events of the Croatian Spring notwithstanding, where reform-minded intellectuals, students, and politicians in Croatia and Serbia rose up and were crushed, have been quite erroneously re-framed as an anti-Croatian event in modern discourse. This really isn’t the case, as the participants were aiming at a reform of the system, not the destruction of the country on some nationalistic grounds, but I digress.

The late 1970s brought an economic downturn and political crisis at a time when Tito’s system had attempted but ultimately failed to bottle nationalist sentiments with the grotesquely complex 1974 constitution. The delicate political arrangements which Tito had crafted to keep the various anti-Yugoslav undercurrents in check proved to be the country’s undoing, as the multi-layered power sharing agreements between the federal republics and territories essentially paralyzed vital decision-making processes. This all occurred as the Yugoslav economy began its unfortunate downturn in the 1980s, and the consequent drop in the standard of living.

Was Tito “good”? If we’re going to judge him by the standard of being able to hold together highly disparate people and places, economies and political structures, then yes, he was. Did he have wide popular support? He certainly did during WW2, and this continued in the 1950s and 1960s despite political repression and even the (albeit small) violent suppression of the Croatian Spring in 1972. Was he a “good” international statesman? He certainly was, as he developed Yugoslavia into a far more important place in the world than its economic and political realities would have justified. Was he “bad” because he effectively suppressed nationalist sentiments, deliberately pursued a policy of keeping the horrors of WW2 undigested in educational and political discourse, and thus kept the “settlement” of debts outstanding while keeping opinions on the events polarized? Yes, most definitely yes.

I hope that helps, and I’d be happy to answer more specific questions.