Windows XP's level of 'plug and play' for devices/drivers ushered in the modern OS feel from a usability standpoint, but from a 'get-shit-done' GUI and responsiveness standpoint Win 2000 (and up to Windows Server 2003 by extension) was all I ever wanted/needed.
These may be rose tinted glasses though, and I'd be interested to hear counterpoints.
I otherwise agree that the older Win 2k era UI was pretty much an ideal UI. The whole "frutiger aero" look did not age well.
If I hit Winkey and type a string, it should not be the case that I get different results from doing that 6 times in a row because it depends whether some background task which changes the results finishes first.
I've got another PC with the same setup running Windows 10 but they both show up in search results just fine.
Windows 11 is also a lot faster than 7 was on equivalent systems. Windows 7 would take minutes to boot.
THEY SAID THE THING!
I feel during XP times it was basic string matching, and sometimes I miss that. At one point on linux they also started matching on description text, but then application maintainers started to add keywords to their description text for their app to rank higher, which again made it worse to find whatever you are looking for.
Too bad it's been completely broken by Windows 10. It can't even find the names of software I have pinned to the start menu. One of the things I miss most from 7.
And I also completely agree with your point that everything else since then has felt like a poorly placed theme on top of something else.
As an aside - as someone who used ME back in the day, I feel like I honestly had more problems with Vista. ME was a downgrade from 98SE for sure, but I don't remember it being the same level of performance and reliability degradation that I saw going from XP to Vista pre-SP2.
I did later run Windows 98 on my kids' machine for games, but I never tried, or wanted to try Windows ME.
Windows 2000 has the best look and feel for the GUI, but I do recall that I usually saw my first Explorer crash within an hour of a fresh install. Windows 7 was peak Windows because you could still get the "Classic" Windows 2000 theme, but with all the under-the-hood improvements. I've gotten used to the Windows 10/11 UI, but I've never liked it and just wish I could go back to the way it looked when Microsoft cared about usability, as opposed to trying to make everything look like a phone.
Win7 wasnt that bad, you still could set classic GUI. If they only kept it like this and plow money to improve kernel...
I think the best benefit of Windows 2000 was that the GUI was extremely coherent. Even in Windows 11 for some sub menu and options you sometimes have a Windows 2000 UI popping up out of nowhere.
That was the thing I missed most in Windows 10. With the previous versions of Windows (I think up to 7?) you could still switch back to classic theme.
I guess I like the design language but I wouldn't be prepared to give back the usability of modern UIs.
I believe that it has always supported multiple desktops since the introduction of the NT kernel. There just wasn't any UI provided in the OS for switching. I used a Microsoft PowerToy to switch between desktops, I think all the way back to NT 4.0.
Sure, yes, me too. And there were 3rd party add-ons like 9Desks:
https://www.hexagora.com/en_dw_9desks.asp
But the thing is that they were significantly crippled, because the OS didn't know about them. So there was no way to move a window from one vdesktop to another.
And for me, that is perhaps the principle use case. I start some app, realise it will take ages, so I move it aside to a vdesktop so it can keep working but doesn't get in my way.
Without that functionality then you need to plan ahead, and you simply cannot always do that. My go-to example made me about £150. A non-techie consultancy client of mine ran Office XP. He wanted the service pack. MS offered it on CD, as it was back when broadband internet was very new.
So when he got it, I went there and installed it for him.
Step 1: it's a CD. It's only about 25% full. Microsoft, in its infinite idiocy, makes step 1 of the installer to copy the compressed files to hard disk, and then decompress them.
IT IS ON A CD. Why ship them compressed at all? Because some idiot of a manager stuck the download version on a CD and didn't think to ship the decompressed files when on a medium with the space.
Second, once decompressed, it starts to install. A progress bar gets to the end... and then resets to the start again.
SEVEN TIMES.
You know the real reason progress bars disappeared, replaced by throbbers? Because of poorly-implemented crap like this: programmers found they were too much like hard work.
I sat there and watched the damned thing work for an hour and 45 minutes, and I charged my client for it, because that was my job and my living.
You do not always know if running a tool is going to take 2 minutes or 2 hours. You can't always pre-plan and think "this will take ages so I will start it on a secondary vdesktop where it will be out of the way, and I will flip screens and check occasionally."
You don't know. You can't know. And so you need the ability to move something out of the way.
Secondly, because these things were hacks, some programs insist on only running on the "real" primary display. Some will open there even if you're on a vdesktop when you run them. Sometimes you run it 2 or 3 times because you have no sign this is happening -- the OS can't flip you back because this is outside of OS control.
Yes it was there. Yes it worked in a minimal sense. No, it often was not much use at all.
Both desktops tried to create someting shiny without being too close to Mac OS X.
TBH KDE has better themes like the Slick icon set and plain but contrasted widget and menu themes, kinda like the semi-flat theme from Office 2003 (was it the .Net theme?) or something like that, which was modern but not baroque and overloaded like Keramik or XP's silver theme with too many gradients.
That style would modernized would be several times than the unusable flat themes from today. Kinda like Zukitre for GTK2/3/4 under GNU/Linux and BSD desktops (ad QT5/6 being set to match the GTK3/4 themes under the settings).
Indeed, the term "Frutiger Aero" was not really used among geeks in this time; I had to look up Wikipedia to get its precise meaning:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frutiger_Aero
On the other hand, basically everybody who had an opinion about Windows's design used the official terms
- Windows XP: Luna; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_XP_visual_styles
- Windows Vista, 7: (Windows) Aero: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Aero and Liquid Glass (though the latter is an Apple term): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_Glass
- Windows 8, 8.1: Metro; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro_(design_language)
I agree.
But it's all relative, and I did actually like how Win7 looked. Then "flat design" came along and not only did things get visually boring, nowadays, it's frequently very hard to tell fields from buttons from other controls, where you're supposed or allowed to click and where it's just decoration, etc.
It was a mercy on KDE Plasma: KDE has always been at best plain and homely, but at worst, retina-searingly fugly, IMHO. Flat design at least tamed that.
But on everything else, it's worse than what went before.
Win10 LTSC is now my version of choice. I rarely use Windows -- I mainly use macOS and Linux and am exploring BSD -- but when I need to, it's Win10. Win11 is worse than WinME and Vista put together.
If this can make Win10 look like Win7, I'm interested.
I do have the same feeling that Windows 2000 was in many regards the best UI (tied with 7 maybe), but after switching to Linux I'm wondering if this is maybe more rose-colored glasses than I thought.
KDE or XFCE seem to mimic the Windows 2000 design in many ways, but they are still far away from feeling as snappy or as well-thought out than Windows 2000 did. They also paradoxically feel more "gray" than I remember Windows, even though the "grayness" of Windows from that era is sort of famous.
So I'd like to know if this is really just nostalgia/muscle memory or if there are really specific things that KDE does worse than Windows did.
XFCE comes a bit closer to the old UX and cohesiveness, but is still a bit off. In saying that, Chicago95[1] for XFCE does a really great job of bringing that classic Win9X look to XFCE, so it's worth giving a shot. There's also a fork of it called MENT2K[2], which recreates the Win2K experience, also worth checking out.
The DEs I've seen being closest to recreating that classic experience have unfortunately been outside of Linux: ReactOS being the most obvious choice, and the other one being SerenityOS. Although not viable for daily driving yet, still fun to play around with in a VM.
Will definitely check out those themes and have a look at ReactOS (what I wanted to anyway but was procrastinating)
I haven't used XFCE, but you can attribute the lack of snappiness in KDE compared to early Windows to compositing and having more animations. There's not much you can do about compositing, it's kind of necessary on high resolution computers, but Wayland latency has been getting better and if you use a recent distro like Fedora it feels about the same as Windows 7 with compositing enabled. For animations, you can speed them up or disable them entirely using the "global animation speed" slider in the settings. For the grayness, you can re-enable colored window titlebars in the settings by going to "Colors & themes" -> "Colors" and then selecting "Breeze Classic". I don't know why they have them disabled by default.
For "Peak Windows GUI", MW10 and MW11 both score high in my opinion, but the changes in Start Menu behaviour in MW11 and the horrible "Show more options" sub-menu in the MW11 right-click context menu are confusing. So I'll give MW10 the advantage for consistency and less insult to the principle of Least Surprise.
For Peak GUI, I would say there's a tie. An Android device with Desktop Mode is just hard to beat for multi-context usability. Early OS X looked great and had mature GUI ideas. And my daily Linux box with the Sway tiling window manager is the right combination of mouse gestures and keyboard power.
Fastest and lowest latency UI I have ever seen.
I actually like the Win7 version of Aero, but the real unlock of these features is the third party themes it enables. There were some really nice 7 themes that hold up even now.
I miss the days when windows was a platform you could extend and customize.
I also recall this 3D shell where your desktop was basically like an first-person shooter, where there would be a literal desk with files that you could click on, a media wall that would display your photos and so on. I forgot what it was called, but it was one of the coolest things ever. In reality it wasn't very practical, but it was still cool. I miss those days of crazy mods and customisation. Everything so locked up and dumbed down these days, in the name of "security".
Was it Task Gallery from Microsoft Research?
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/the-tas...
We used to have highly optimized C code. Now the freakin' start menu is a progressive web app that runs react components because even Microsoft hates developing in WinUI. Madness.
I'm so disappointed that all those years later, the Windows UI is literally less configurable than Windows 2.1, which is the earliest version I used. Yeah, I don't miss 16-color mode, but I definitely miss that you had so much flexibility to tweak the UI. Now you're just stuck with some art-school dropout's idea of "flat UI" (seeing as how Microsoft has thrown out most of the great HCI work they, IBM, and others did in the 1980s, in favor of lame aesthetics that are entirely orthogonal to usability) and there's almost nothing meaningful you can change about it.
Interestingly, I hear a lot of people talk about LTSC, but few talking about their positive experiences. Is this the "I'm moving to Canada," of operating systems?
I'd be more interested if it brought back the performance of Win7. That OS was released into a world that still had HDD boot drives and had to pay attention to the details. I still run a Win7 machine that boots in under ten seconds.
Sadly no extension can bring either of those back and we are unlikely to see anything along those lines from MS ever again.
(Can I post the link, to the open source repo? Is it against the rules? I mean MS owns github and has no problem hosting it)
If you are a student or work at a supported educational institution: I think Windows 11 Education is to my knowledge basically identical to Windows 11 Enterprise (at least for Windows 10, this was the case). In these versions, you can use LTSC updates if you want.
Only way is usually to buy devices that have such a license included.
The repo is only 8 months old, which could be seen as good or bad.
If you think, "I should try this", Any reason why? I'm really curious to know
The 2d design of modern interfaces is terrible. Everything looks like a "Label". Scrollbars are terrible. Light gray on dark gray. And, worst of all, they need 3d acceleration to draw a bloody 2d label.
And, worst of all, they need 3d acceleration to draw a bloody 2d label
I hope it comes back
Every design refresh since then has been half finished and pushed out the door with too many bits of the old left.
I definitely prefer XP over 7. No automatic updates."
Win10/11’s problem isn’t auto updates, it’s the severely reduced user agency in the matter (and the quality of said updates, but that’s another story).
At home, while I have a Mac Mini 4, a MacBook Air, and several Linux boxes, I still use an old PC on Win7 as my primary machine. Is it insecure? Probably. But today "insecure" feels more like a feature than a limitation. No forced updates of anything => everything that works, keeps working indefinitely.
Why do modern OSes need so much power and RAM anyway? I used to produce documents on an Amstrad PPC640. 640 stood for 640k of RAM (no hard disk). It was fine.
I understand the above makes me sound like an old fart (or fool), and we have moved on from DOS. But what does Windows 11 do that Windows 7 couldn't?
In some ways it's a bit like having to customize a Mac to feel comfy (AutoRaise, Rectangle, DiscreteScroll, ...), except in Apple's case it's because they believe that they know better what my computing experience should be like, and in Microsoft's, it's some enshittification and pushing me towards features that I don't really want or need.
At the same time, games work (even the shitty rootkit anti-cheat), lovely software is all there like Notepad++, MobaXTerm, SourceTree (though GitKraken is really good if you want to pay for it), SteelSeries Sonar (the only experience of managing audio devices that wasn't unnecessarily messy or complex, tbh even VoiceMeeter has weird UI/UX), oh and FreeFileSync and ofc all of my dev tools and other software. It's just passable in most categories.
I still believe that something like Linux Mint would give me the best desktop computing experience, cause it almost never is actively hostile to me as a user - all of the instances of it sucking and being broken are either growing pains, ecosystem fragmentation, insufficient development effort (given that there isn't a multi-billion dollar org behind it, or at least not really the DEs or most userland software, or that the drivers don't always get as much love from vendors), or circumstances outside of their control (e.g. the anti-cheat situation with games), rather than a conscious choice on the part of the developers.
for windows 8 on linux, there's this: https://github.com/er-bharat/Win8DE
I cannot remember what it is called
but makes it look almost like XP and the UI is very fast and crisp
it's under
System Properties -> Advanced -> Visual Effects -> Use visual styles on windows and buttons