One underappreciated thing about Windows 8 is that even if the start menu was ugly and blocked the entire screen, you could press the windows key, immediately start typing, and then press enter to somewhat deterministically pick the top app. This made it feel quite fast.
Now on more recent windows editions, I find that I often need to wait for the menu to visually appear before it will accept any keyboard input, and the ranking shifts over time and includes web stuff, making this workflow basically useless.
I also really miss the aero look of windows 7... Eye-candy, sure, but I thought it was pretty, clean and modern looking. I am sad they moved away from it.
> One underappreciated thing about Windows 8 is that even if the start menu was ugly and blocked the entire screen, you could press the windows key, immediately start typing, and then press enter to somewhat deterministically pick the top app. This made it feel quite fast.
Decent operating systems support this, and have for decades. macOS has the spotlight search (cmd-space), and most Linux DEs have some form of it too (eg XFCE's appfinder).
OSX's command-space spotlight search has been degrading functionally (at least on my machines) for literally years now. It peaked around ~2012, when it would reliably search the full text of all documents on my local hard drive quickly, and not do anything dumb like "search the internet by sending whatever I typed up into the search field to the cloud."
Nowadays it fails to reliably search the full text of documents on my local hard drive, tries to search the internet despite my best efforts to prevent this, and often even fails to find a file ~/Documents/foo.txt when I explicitly search for the string foo.txt. This is uniformly true on several work Macbooks and a couple personal macbooks too.
A truly astounding regression in functionality!
Most Linux DE's it's even the same use of the Super/Win hotkey by itself. I do wish Linux distros would add an emoji picker with the Suler+. hotkey (matching Windows')... When it's there, I always forget the hotkey, same on mac for that matter.
KDE has Super+.
Bind it yourself?
Also I'm pretty sure default Gnome and KDE include emojis in their "start" menu search, which is its own kind of annoying.
Giving Windows 11 the highest rating and XP one of the worst ratings clearly demonstrates that this author is not a serious person.
I don't think it's meant to be taken seriously, at all. It's a pretty unserious surface level critique of past GUIs based on 2025 standards. It's a bit like ranking the Coolest Looking Batman's - there's not really an honest metric outside of ones personal favorite.
Is everyone who disagrees with you an unserious person, or just on this particular topic?
The disagreement isn't what makes him not serious; the hubris to declare Windows 11 the most usable OS does.
No one who has any real experience with *nix, legacy ios, legacy Windows, and modern Windows/ios UI/UX would rate win11 top without serious qualifiers
Just because you disagree , doesn’t mean that your opinion holds any weight over theirs.
Especially because you’ve provided no rebuttal of substance, and resorted to name calling.
Windows 11 usability is garbage compared to Windows 10. Windows 10 already had multiple desktops, docking(which does need app to augment), sandboxing, and the start menu worked. Further win 10 does not gimp the OS if not activated, doesn't require an online account, and has an identical update mechanism to win11.
There is nothing superior or even functionally 'new' in Windows 11 besides compute burning eye candy and embedded backdoored encryption
If Windows 7 had multi core enhancement, driver downloading, and updated libraries it would still be a superior OS from a weight of resources perspective.
GP has a point tho. The article ranks vista over XP, and that's just ludicrous. Even Microsoft has admitted that vista was hot garbage.
It's even become a slang expression: a app can have a "Vista moment", meaning they released a version that was completely unusable and a stark regression from previous versions.
Meanwhile XP is widely regarded to have been the best windows version ever. The only version that even compares in terms of popularity is 7.
I get the feeling the author of the post hasn't actually used any of the older versions of windows, and was ranking solely based on some screenshots they found online. There's no other reasonable explanation for rating vista higher than XP.
This article wasn’t ranking the quality of the OS overall, just the UI
Win2k was one of my favorite OSes of all time... I know there were a lot of security holes in the way some things were done, but it all just mostly fit well together in a relatively consistent way. The last version of windows with nearly this level of consistency. LiteStep on Win2K was amazingly good.
XP really looked like a Fisher Price toy... I liked the Media Center theme (as well as derivatives) so much more as part of that release.
Windows 7 was probably the best start menu of Windows' history, and Win10/11's taskbar enhancements (not the centering default) are pretty great as well. I'm hoping this gets better/similar in COSMIC.
8 for Windows 11? An OS that includes ads in the Start menu, made with React. I'm not even mentioning right-click, which has basically two views: you open it and see some uselessly chosen tools, and you still need to open the old version (with the old design, breaking design consistency) to access actually useful things. Viva Windows XP!
It's not made in React, only the "recommended" section is made with React Native which compiles to native XAML. No web technologies involved. And yes I will debunk this every time I see it :) .
You can use winutil to replace the new start menu with the old one. I think the option is in "advanced tweaks".
With that move to React or whatever web based monstrosity it is, it lost a lot of the existing user experience crafted over the years.
Not only OS pre-installed apps are much slower, but it broke shortcuts and common sense behaviors.
It’s not web but react native.
Whatever product manager team decided to jump into React Native with both feet for the Windows experience needs to be ejected from the industry permanently. Think of how many thousands of human hours per day are now spent waiting on React Native jank, all in order to save the Windows developers from having to program in Windows using Microsoft products.
MS could/should have just made other XAML/MAUI options a better experience in general over the React Native thing... It might be different if they actually embrace web as a whole and at least gave a consistent UX, more like say WebOS or ChromeOS, but that's not what they're doing here.
What MS really needs to do is create a really long checklist of all the UI defained configurations and options, along with a connected list of all the relevant API interfaces they connect to... then come up with a consistent, complete and competent component library to do a ground up re-implementation of all the things in a consistent way.
This would, of course mean stabilizing the released version of windows to mostly bug fixes for a couple years while frantically generating and dog-fooding the new UX... starting with a re-revamped task manager, and launcher/file-picker. Just a bare desktop and a hotkey that opens task manager as the first and only UI elements then working out from there.
But this article is only grading the styling of the OS GUI elements, not the functionality (or lack thereof) of the OS itself.
Fair point, but the article praises Windows 11 for "cohesion" while the right-click menu literally has two different visual styles, and many system apps still use old UI. Even judging purely on aesthetics, that's inconsistent.
On the surface, Explorer looks more modern on Windows 11. But when you use it, you can "feel" it's still based on old Win32 APIs with just a layer of paint on top.
IMO, in a good way. It has a nice feel compared to the new laggy context menus and selections
Windows 11 is far from the best at that though.
It doesn’t even look good.
I know taste is subjective, but a better comparison is the contemporaries of the time or at least taking a step back to consider the entire aesthetic.
If so, ironically, I think Vista should win.
They actually do mention bloatware in Windows 11, so it is a bit confused.
When you hit print screen, it takes a screenshot, waits a blatantly visible number of frames while you type more letters or stuff keeps moving on screen, and then eventually rewinds time by overlaying the now outdated screenshot for you to select a target area
Pressing escape can sometimes cancel out of this overlay (in case you bumped print screen by accident). But sometimes it doesn’t, because the full screen overlay in front of everything has managed to lose keyboard focus, and you need to click on it before it can respond to keyboard input.
Godawful trash OS and I hate that I’m stuck working on it.
On my very rasonably spec'd laptop it often takes 20 seconds for the snipping tool selection to pop up. Video recording is very nice though, definitely my favorite feature.
New Notepad had a broken typematic that took them 2 years to fix, but they added Copilot at the same patch. Resizing its window still rapidly still flickers and can max the CPU.
If you're using labels in the taskbar the buttons aren't fixed width, they resize to fit the window title - except that until recently they didnt, so if you cd from C:\ to a longer path you got the label "C...". That one is fixed, but not the one where I switch desktops with Ctrl+Alt+arrows and the entries have no icons.
If you have a folder with lots of audio files, sometimes explorer.exe will hang for 30 seconds while it dutifully extracts artist metadata (no way to disable). Possibly an old issue, but I've never hit it before.
Search is even worse than before, I have "alacrity.exe" both in PATH and as a shortcut on desktop, but when I type "alacr" I get a web suggestion until I fully type it out. "Visual..." toggles between VSCode and fat visual studio on every keypress.
I can't express my opinion on the Task Manager changes without using language inapropriate for this forum.
Those are my issues off the top of my head, if I record every single broken thing I see for a week this list would be way longer.
That's just the stuff that doesn't work, there's a similarly long list of things that work but are evil.
Wow, I hadn't realised it could do video as well. I installed a separate app for that purpose the other day.
Just tested on my very anaemic 5 year old laptop, it loaded in about 2/3 seconds.
I'm glad it's not just me struggling with the screenshot functionality. I've encountered the bugs you're describing, and recently, I've been encountering an incredibly frustrating one where hitting print screen just...doesn't do anything. The only way I've found to temporarily fix it is to manually open the Snipping Tool (via the Start menu) - then the print screen key starts working again for some indeterminate period of time.
Win+Shift+S. It launches the snipping tool. Its been a feature for over a decade.
Especially since it can open with selecting the area to screenshot and not have to manually crop it in Paint or be sending a 4K image to someone.
This is the most atrocious rating article I've stumbled upon in a while!
IMHO the right-click menu these days seems to get better, at least I can find "Open with Code" or "Open in Terminal", etc. Except that I need the old menu to create a desktop shortcut occasionally.
In my Windows 11 right-click menu, I can choose "Show More Options" at the bottom and then Send To > Desktop (create shortcut).
I want to opt out though. I use 7 zip all the time and I don't want this menu that can't have 7 zip...
Just use NanaZip
Does the end user care that the system is made with React? What is the tangible negative impact?
My start menu doesn’t have ads, it really isn’t hard to manage that sort of thing.
OneDrive is fully uninstalled, Copilot is fully uninstalled, I find my system to be quite clean.
And if you don’t like the start menu, there are ways to replace the start menu entirely with something else. Good luck replacing entire major elements of the macOS UI.
In contrast, Apple puts advertisements at the same urgency level as critical system updates in the settings. There’s no setting to disable them and they sometimes come back with a new version release, you just have to know the magic actions to get them dismissed.
Haters dog on Windows 11 for various things but it really is the best version of the OS since 7. It has some of the best updates to traditional Windows tooling in years: tabs in notepad, git preinstalled, finally the settings pane is in a good place, brand new command line interface, and Microsoft has had a great habit of putting new features in separate apps that can be installed optionally. (E.g., you can’t uninstall Apple News on a Mac, but you can uninstall ClipChamp on Windows)
Windows 11 is much slower for me than Windows 7 or 10. A noticeable sub-second delay to bring up the start menu and respond to typing, about 3 seconds for file explorer to load, 5-10 seconds to start a screenshot. I wouldn't be surprised if antivirus is to partially to blame (only use Windows at work where it is required), but it is the same antivirus we used on Windows 10 and it wasn't this bad.
“A noticeable sub-second delay” lol. I guess you never ran Windows 98 on a pentium 2 like I did. If I had a dime for every sub-second delay I experienced on that machine…
Settings > Accessibility > Animation Effects > Off
5-10 seconds to start a screenshot, yeah man now you’re just lying. You sure you didn’t leave the delay timer on?
Are we going to gloss over the fact that the screenshot interface in old windows versions basically didn’t exist? There was no keyboard shortcut to open snipping tool by default in Windows 7. You had to know to use your print screen key correctly and to paste the image into Paint, and there was no visual feedback. Of course that performed fast because there was no UI!
> My start menu doesn’t have ads, it really isn’t hard to manage that sort of thing.
I don't care. It is completely unacceptable to have ads in a product I paid them for. It doesn't matter how easy it is to remove, that doesn't fly.
You act like people are hating on Win11 for no reason, but truthfully you're just ignoring the reasons to hate it.
I haven’t given Microsoft a dime since Windows 7. Users who buy a computer have the OS preinstalled. Millions of people never activate it. The product is effectively free.
It’s a commercial OS but people can’t get over it. There isn’t a single commercial OS out there that doesn’t try to sell you something at some point.
Maybe that is unacceptable to you and I respect you for that. But it’s a commercial OS and always has been.
What gets annoying is when these aspects conflate it to being a bad OS or some monstrously unethical system. Seeing some ads that are easily disabled is treated by a certain community like the Microsoft is selling blood diamonds. The ferver doesn’t match the magnitude of the crime.
To me personally, it feels like Windows 2000 was the last and maybe only consistent UI onto which all later versions bolted what they considered improvements without ever overhauling the UI in full.
I think Windows XP did a pretty good job for the home market, making Windows appear friendly and easy to use to a wide audience (and without too many style inconstistencies).
Moreover, Windows XP let you switch the interface back to the classic 9x look, if you wanted a more serious appearance, and better performance.
> back to the classic 9x look
If i remember correctly this is the windows 2000 look.
We're both right. Windows XP had two different legacy themes: "Windows Standard" which looked like Windows 2000 and "Windows Classic" which looked like Windows 9x.
Totally agree!
Although I‘m a Mac user for a long time, I still remember that I got work done using Windows 2000.
I‘d buy a license and switch back to Windows if we could get the productivity of this UI.
Typing this on iOS with Liquid Glass that drives me nuts
Windows 8 was a pretty big overhaul. But I agree with the author it was a most unwelcome overhaul.
Yeah, but many of its 'advanced' settings and such still pop-up windows 95-styled interfaces. And these are actually the most user-friendly parts of the OS.
I think one of the fundamental issues is "...to those raised on computers, rather than smartphones"
I'm surprised nobody caught this, but both the screenshot for Windows 8.1 is not Windows 8.1, it's Windows Threshold, the development phase of Windows 10.
The specific screenshot they show is the very first start menu they cobbled together for Threshold, which would later be redesigned again before shipping as Windows 10. The screenshot is also showing off early adaptations of Windows 8 apps running in movable windows -- before that, they could only run full- or split-screen!
I am not surprised, from memory I only know like 3 people who ever willingly used 8.x. The active user base must be tiny compared to Windows 7 and 10 users (if we just stick to that range).
I have personally not used it for more than an hour total (on anyone's PC combined) and I have (co-)owned and used at least one Windows PC continuously since 1995.
8.1 was slightly better, but most people I know that used it, used one of the start menu replacements that looked/felt more like Win7.
Oh cool, someone else that appreciates Windows 2000 more than XP. There are dozens of us!
IMHO it would be more interesting to compare UI/UX of something like MS Office. That traces the evolution of the GUI pretty well.
> With Windows 95, Microsoft managed to produce a version of its OS that scared Apple so much they ended up bringing Steve Jobs back, along with his own operating system, NeXTSTEP
Funny because Windows 95 contains many ideas from the more ambitious project codenamed Windows Cairo that was intended to mimic NextSTEP. Cairo was never released, but the gray slab 3D look, the "X" button on the top-right corner on Windows 95 are the hallmarks of NextSTEP.
Windows 95's most original GUI idea was the Start menu.
I'm pretty sure that Windows 8.1 didn't have a start menu at all, just a windows button that opened that full screen metro launcher
And yet somehow it was faster and more accurate than the Win 10/11 start menus, where you're lucky if it doesn't pop in something else right as you hit enter after typing an app name, opening the completely wrong app/webpage/etc. It's always one step forward and two steps back with MS.
MSFT peaked at Windows 2000.
I hate the flat, borderless, barely visible scroll bar mess that is Windows 11. Just try to determine where one window starts and another ends with multiple overlapping windows open, especially in dark mode.
Windows UI peaked at Windows 7 and has been steadily in a race to the bottom ever since.
Windows 11 is going to be the final straw that prompts me to relegate it to a game playing or only-use-because-I-must secondary OS. Linux, here I come - if only I could decide which flavour...
I use Fedora Workstation. It's boring and less customizable than other distros out of the box, but I like it like that. I pretty much just add the extension 'dash to panel' and call it a day.
Microsoft has their own plans for where they want to go with Windows and it certainly is not catering to their users. The same could be said from most big companies I guess -- all about lock-in, value extraction, planned obsolescence. I see Valve/Steam as one of the few exceptions, probably because they are not publicly traded.
Been pretty happy with the PopOS Cosmic series so far.
XP, a regression? closes tab.
I started using keyboard navigation more and more around Win 7 and that has actually improved quite consistently since then and I remember Win 8 Win-key search was quite good, if you could look past the start menu…
Just based on the start menu alone I can‘t think of any reason for 11 to lead the ranking
You also can no longer drag stuff onto the taskbar in Win 11, and they refuse to fix it or provide a viable alternative. It's a dealbreaker for me, and the single thing that has prevented me from updating.
Start menu in I Windows 11 is quite bad. One things that really annoys me is how little space the start menu has for pinned shortcuts.
Give the Windows 2 a second look and try to ignore the colorful GAME in the screenshot.
It’s actually pretty ”elegant” design with white, black, grey with two shades of primary color: dark blue and light blue/cyan. Then complementary orange for active selection. The cyan is light enough for black text and blue is dark enough for white text. Really good palette choices.
Remember this was only 16 CGA colors, of which only few are delicate enough for UI components.
The tiny resolution makes things blocky, but if it had more space with an SVGA resolution, it’d be pretty great.
I would dare say, this might be the most ”designed” UI of the bunch, considering limitations.
-
Intresting aspect of the UI is the hilighting of the menu bar in each window:
These days it’s odd to hilight menus, but I think their importance must’ve been much higher due to lack of space in the UI itself. They were basiclly act as ”navigation” and action menus. We use sidepanels and tabs a lot, but those have hard time fittinh there. Also the apps were simpler.
I agree. That was the only unfair assessment in the article, IMHO. Windows 2 was based on the Presentation Manager standard which was developed by IBM and Microsoft, and also used with OS/2, and more importantly, CDE + Motif. That's why many Unix desktops used to look like 3D Microsoft Windows desktops back then. Because they all were based on the same GUI standard.
I really liked the fact they had full menu bars on resolutions far lower than phones had 15 years ago. No hamburger menus.
I think Windows XP should have shipped with the Watercolor theme, although Luna does a better job of setting it apart from previous versions
I remember hacking the "Start" button in 95 through 7 to say "Whee!" instead of "Start". Childish and silly, but I liked it. I miss being able to make little hacks like that.
Mine said “Über”, which seemed very clever to me for some reason.
As someone who grew up with Vista (yeah, I'm young) I will always love that look. Probably a good bit of nostalgia, but as a kid who couldn't really even manage files well that always looked so fancy and fun!
Even still have the laptop I used back then, fully with the barely functioning charging port that makes booting it up an exercise in dexterity.
I didn't grow up with Vista and I loved the look too. IMO it was by far the best looking version of Windows they ever produced. Win7 was pretty good too, though I preferred the look of Vista. The transparency on stuff looked (and still looks) really awesome.
I like the “did it improve or regress” angle.
I hope it’s not controversial if I say that in the Apple world, Liquid Glass is, if not the first, certainly the worst regression. And I think this could have been predicted if you agreee with OP about Vista.
Liquid Glass is such a horrible regression. I'm holding onto my Sequoia for the time being (and maybe I'll then switch to Linux).
I think the best version of macOS was High Sierra. After that, everything started becoming bloated and inconsistent.
They say "I am skipping over all versions of Windows NT" and then proceed to rate XP, Vista, 7, 8, 8.1, 10 and 11.
* Also 2000, but at least they seemed to be aware that this too was Windows NT.
"Windows NT" the brand, not "Windows" with NT the kernel.
In hindsight, I really love the way Vista looks. I don't think I ever used it as a daily driver (I went from the family XP computer to a Win7 laptop, I think), but the glassy transparency is certainly something.
I agree, I never felt it wasn’t beautiful- aside from the widget system, especially ultimate with the black frost and animated backgrounds- wow.. It was just much too heavy for the time.
I would even say it looks nicer than what Apple is doing right now, and that’s not nostalgia necessarily, its that there’s a stronger feeling of depth and more solid design for accessibility.
Most people only saw the non-transparent Vista windows: since it was such a performance pig otherwise. Especially on laptops with iGPU’s: these were the days where an intel GMA950 (4 pixel pipelines at 166MHz) was as modern as you got. :|
I cannot accept this slander of Windows XP.
It is, strictly going by looks, one of Microsoft's ugliest UIs. I will never understand how people tolerate it, let alone defend it publicly. Shameful, absolutely and thoroughly shameful!
I hated XP's style at the time, too, and switched to the classic style. I also hated the look of Vista and 7, but they weren't my problem anymore because I'd switched to Linux.
It was the style at the time. There are a lot of programs from that era with stupid, oversized nothing standard ui's, windows xp was a study in restraint compared to many applications. I think computers had just gotten powerful enough to have large bitmaps in the ui and the designers got a little crazy with their newfound power, as they tend to do. Our "modern" superflat look is probably the remnants of a reflexive recoil at all that excess. I expect it will start rebounding the other way in a few years as up and coming designers get nostalgic for their windows xp youth.
Yes and no. XP’s default theme was hideous even at the time. The silver was fine as was the olive, but that blue was horrible.
It was a product of its time, though. This was also the time of media players that used entirely custom skinning and mostly looked terrible (at least in retrospect).
The upside was that it was 100% customizable, there were tons of themes that redesigned the entire look of the desktop, and lots of resources for it.
Naturally, all mine looked like hot garbage, but it taught me about texture and image editing, and how transparencies worked in rendering (though xp themes were a special hell of using neon pink because transparent pixels werent usable yet)
Was it significantly customizable out of the box? I remember installing WindowBlinds specifically so I could theme the OS.
Dark theme, menu bar on the right side, icons only, auto hide. Out of site, out of mind.
Blue one was unbearable, but it looked pretty much okay with the gray theme.
That is an entirely subjective statement. I think it looks great.
Of course it is. What would an aesthetic judgement be except subjective?
I still consider Windows 2000's UI to be the peak of computer interfaces and nothing else has come close to its effectiveness and clarity for day to day work.
30 years ago, Microsoft was writing books that were hundreds of pages long detailing not just how to build effective and consistent user interfaces but also with explanations from user-centric research as to why those things mattered. Every user interface component carefully considered and rationalised, every reusable pattern carefully reinforced, all to build a desktop where interactive elements look interactive, skills learned in one application pretty reliably carry across to others, and avoiding dead ends that result in user panic. Windows 2000 was the last vaguely-consumer-oriented Microsoft operating system that was built with any of those lessons in mind.
Everything they have developed since then has strayed further and further from those principles. With Windows 11 and their "modern" application lineup, it is like they have absolute amnesia about ever having done any of this. It is clear as day that nobody inside Microsoft has ever gone back and read one of those books in the last decade or two, nor is there any evidence that they spend any amount of time researching and testing their products with real users or trying to understand the ways that users get stuck or fatigued.
All of the user interface consistency is gone thanks to the half-dozen competing/failed UI toolkits and webview-driven applications scattered everywhere. Visual cues and interactivity hints are either gone or are no longer reliable. You can't even tell when something in Windows will allow you to drag-and-drop or copy-and-paste or even what new and horrifying form the Open/Save/Print dialogs are going to take in any given application. "Disastrous" isn't a strong enough word for it.
I don't even mind WebView or otherwise flatter material design choices... but so many implementations fail at even that... If you actually read through the material design guidelines it makes a lot of sense. But then so many UI toolkits and programs that are allegedly following this are just plain not.
Performance issues aside that is.
So much so that one of the first things I do in fresh 10 and 11 installs is turn off all the transitions/whiz-bang visual effects to try to get back to the pure snappy functionality of that era of Windows.
Coming from 98/ME, Windows 2000 was utterly magic. It such a stable operating system compared to what came before it. Supposedly it was less compatible than 98/ME for games and other applications but in my experience this wasn’t true.
Looks were fine. Functionality was such a step up.
11 is indeed pretty good looking. Once you use it 10 feels so clunky.
11 is a step in the right direction for a modern consistent look of Windows.
But there's still a long way to go; they still haven't managed to put all the system settings in a single app. And I wonder if they'll ever be able to get rid of the Control Panel; too many legacy applications need it.
Was anyone surprised? This follows the classic pattern.
- XP was good
- vista was bad
- 7 was good
- 8 was bad
- 10 was good
- 11 is .....drumroll please.... bad.
- XP was good
- vista was bad
- 7 was good
- 8 was a disaster
- 10 was worse
- 11 is even worse
It's a downward spiral.
Windows 11 is bad but will only get worse with AI updates.
remember that there are still classic theme bois out there. 9x/2k is the best theme.
I assume there is a reason for leaving out Windows Me.
We don't talk about Windows Me.
From the article:
> Note: I am skipping Windows Millennium Edition (Me) because while it had changes under the hood, visually it is pretty much Windows 98 Third Edition.
Windows 1 had hamburger menus, originally from Xerox Star.
Kinda cool
I really hated the depressing grey GUI of Windows 95/98/NT/2000/Me. It looks like working in a dull grey concrete office with a grey PC and grey monitor while wearing a grey tie. I get that Windows XP and 8 look too colorful for many people (I like them), but Vista & Co, with their glass design, managed to avoid colors while still not making everything a drab grey.
I liked it although that was maybe because Windows 2000 was a great OS. Having seen the awful mess the Unix vendors made of CDE/Motif, 2000 felt more professional.
2000 had a nice shade of blue for its desktop background, IMO.
This begs the general question: why were PCs (and monitors, keyboards, mice etc) always sold in ugly grey, for decades? Before they finally relented and switched to black?
not an expert, but i vaguely recall that certain colors can make plastics weaker - maybe it was the case here for a while until technology improved
More likely, people just don't give a damn if their keyboards only last a coupe years and buy a new one.
Bring back the 2000s transparency in the hardware. Transparent phone (nokia 3310, of course), transparent PC, transparent everything!
I would do unsavory things to get a matching keyboard, mouse, and monitor in translucent plastic akin to an Atomic Purple Gameboy Color. I've tried retrofitting an iMac G3 multiple times, but they're so old now that taking them apart literally breaks them because the plastic's too brittle.
Dont forget the transparent landline phone, alarmclock, and tvs!
One underappreciated thing about Windows 8 is that even if the start menu was ugly and blocked the entire screen, you could press the windows key, immediately start typing, and then press enter to somewhat deterministically pick the top app. This made it feel quite fast.
Now on more recent windows editions, I find that I often need to wait for the menu to visually appear before it will accept any keyboard input, and the ranking shifts over time and includes web stuff, making this workflow basically useless.
I also really miss the aero look of windows 7... Eye-candy, sure, but I thought it was pretty, clean and modern looking. I am sad they moved away from it.
> One underappreciated thing about Windows 8 is that even if the start menu was ugly and blocked the entire screen, you could press the windows key, immediately start typing, and then press enter to somewhat deterministically pick the top app. This made it feel quite fast.
Decent operating systems support this, and have for decades. macOS has the spotlight search (cmd-space), and most Linux DEs have some form of it too (eg XFCE's appfinder).
OSX's command-space spotlight search has been degrading functionally (at least on my machines) for literally years now. It peaked around ~2012, when it would reliably search the full text of all documents on my local hard drive quickly, and not do anything dumb like "search the internet by sending whatever I typed up into the search field to the cloud."
Nowadays it fails to reliably search the full text of documents on my local hard drive, tries to search the internet despite my best efforts to prevent this, and often even fails to find a file ~/Documents/foo.txt when I explicitly search for the string foo.txt. This is uniformly true on several work Macbooks and a couple personal macbooks too.
A truly astounding regression in functionality!
Most Linux DE's it's even the same use of the Super/Win hotkey by itself. I do wish Linux distros would add an emoji picker with the Suler+. hotkey (matching Windows')... When it's there, I always forget the hotkey, same on mac for that matter.
KDE has Super+.
Bind it yourself?
Also I'm pretty sure default Gnome and KDE include emojis in their "start" menu search, which is its own kind of annoying.
Giving Windows 11 the highest rating and XP one of the worst ratings clearly demonstrates that this author is not a serious person.
I don't think it's meant to be taken seriously, at all. It's a pretty unserious surface level critique of past GUIs based on 2025 standards. It's a bit like ranking the Coolest Looking Batman's - there's not really an honest metric outside of ones personal favorite.
Is everyone who disagrees with you an unserious person, or just on this particular topic?
The disagreement isn't what makes him not serious; the hubris to declare Windows 11 the most usable OS does.
No one who has any real experience with *nix, legacy ios, legacy Windows, and modern Windows/ios UI/UX would rate win11 top without serious qualifiers
Just because you disagree , doesn’t mean that your opinion holds any weight over theirs.
Especially because you’ve provided no rebuttal of substance, and resorted to name calling.
Windows 11 usability is garbage compared to Windows 10. Windows 10 already had multiple desktops, docking(which does need app to augment), sandboxing, and the start menu worked. Further win 10 does not gimp the OS if not activated, doesn't require an online account, and has an identical update mechanism to win11.
There is nothing superior or even functionally 'new' in Windows 11 besides compute burning eye candy and embedded backdoored encryption
If Windows 7 had multi core enhancement, driver downloading, and updated libraries it would still be a superior OS from a weight of resources perspective.
GP has a point tho. The article ranks vista over XP, and that's just ludicrous. Even Microsoft has admitted that vista was hot garbage.
It's even become a slang expression: a app can have a "Vista moment", meaning they released a version that was completely unusable and a stark regression from previous versions.
Meanwhile XP is widely regarded to have been the best windows version ever. The only version that even compares in terms of popularity is 7.
I get the feeling the author of the post hasn't actually used any of the older versions of windows, and was ranking solely based on some screenshots they found online. There's no other reasonable explanation for rating vista higher than XP.
This article wasn’t ranking the quality of the OS overall, just the UI
Win2k was one of my favorite OSes of all time... I know there were a lot of security holes in the way some things were done, but it all just mostly fit well together in a relatively consistent way. The last version of windows with nearly this level of consistency. LiteStep on Win2K was amazingly good.
XP really looked like a Fisher Price toy... I liked the Media Center theme (as well as derivatives) so much more as part of that release.
Windows 7 was probably the best start menu of Windows' history, and Win10/11's taskbar enhancements (not the centering default) are pretty great as well. I'm hoping this gets better/similar in COSMIC.
8 for Windows 11? An OS that includes ads in the Start menu, made with React. I'm not even mentioning right-click, which has basically two views: you open it and see some uselessly chosen tools, and you still need to open the old version (with the old design, breaking design consistency) to access actually useful things. Viva Windows XP!
It's not made in React, only the "recommended" section is made with React Native which compiles to native XAML. No web technologies involved. And yes I will debunk this every time I see it :) .
You can use winutil to replace the new start menu with the old one. I think the option is in "advanced tweaks".
https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil
With that move to React or whatever web based monstrosity it is, it lost a lot of the existing user experience crafted over the years.
Not only OS pre-installed apps are much slower, but it broke shortcuts and common sense behaviors.
It’s not web but react native.
Whatever product manager team decided to jump into React Native with both feet for the Windows experience needs to be ejected from the industry permanently. Think of how many thousands of human hours per day are now spent waiting on React Native jank, all in order to save the Windows developers from having to program in Windows using Microsoft products.
MS could/should have just made other XAML/MAUI options a better experience in general over the React Native thing... It might be different if they actually embrace web as a whole and at least gave a consistent UX, more like say WebOS or ChromeOS, but that's not what they're doing here.
What MS really needs to do is create a really long checklist of all the UI defained configurations and options, along with a connected list of all the relevant API interfaces they connect to... then come up with a consistent, complete and competent component library to do a ground up re-implementation of all the things in a consistent way.
This would, of course mean stabilizing the released version of windows to mostly bug fixes for a couple years while frantically generating and dog-fooding the new UX... starting with a re-revamped task manager, and launcher/file-picker. Just a bare desktop and a hotkey that opens task manager as the first and only UI elements then working out from there.
But this article is only grading the styling of the OS GUI elements, not the functionality (or lack thereof) of the OS itself.
Fair point, but the article praises Windows 11 for "cohesion" while the right-click menu literally has two different visual styles, and many system apps still use old UI. Even judging purely on aesthetics, that's inconsistent.
On the surface, Explorer looks more modern on Windows 11. But when you use it, you can "feel" it's still based on old Win32 APIs with just a layer of paint on top.
IMO, in a good way. It has a nice feel compared to the new laggy context menus and selections
Windows 11 is far from the best at that though.
It doesn’t even look good.
I know taste is subjective, but a better comparison is the contemporaries of the time or at least taking a step back to consider the entire aesthetic.
If so, ironically, I think Vista should win.
They actually do mention bloatware in Windows 11, so it is a bit confused.
When you hit print screen, it takes a screenshot, waits a blatantly visible number of frames while you type more letters or stuff keeps moving on screen, and then eventually rewinds time by overlaying the now outdated screenshot for you to select a target area
Pressing escape can sometimes cancel out of this overlay (in case you bumped print screen by accident). But sometimes it doesn’t, because the full screen overlay in front of everything has managed to lose keyboard focus, and you need to click on it before it can respond to keyboard input.
Godawful trash OS and I hate that I’m stuck working on it.
On my very rasonably spec'd laptop it often takes 20 seconds for the snipping tool selection to pop up. Video recording is very nice though, definitely my favorite feature.
New Notepad had a broken typematic that took them 2 years to fix, but they added Copilot at the same patch. Resizing its window still rapidly still flickers and can max the CPU.
If you're using labels in the taskbar the buttons aren't fixed width, they resize to fit the window title - except that until recently they didnt, so if you cd from C:\ to a longer path you got the label "C...". That one is fixed, but not the one where I switch desktops with Ctrl+Alt+arrows and the entries have no icons.
If you have a folder with lots of audio files, sometimes explorer.exe will hang for 30 seconds while it dutifully extracts artist metadata (no way to disable). Possibly an old issue, but I've never hit it before.
Search is even worse than before, I have "alacrity.exe" both in PATH and as a shortcut on desktop, but when I type "alacr" I get a web suggestion until I fully type it out. "Visual..." toggles between VSCode and fat visual studio on every keypress.
I can't express my opinion on the Task Manager changes without using language inapropriate for this forum.
Those are my issues off the top of my head, if I record every single broken thing I see for a week this list would be way longer.
That's just the stuff that doesn't work, there's a similarly long list of things that work but are evil.
Wow, I hadn't realised it could do video as well. I installed a separate app for that purpose the other day.
Just tested on my very anaemic 5 year old laptop, it loaded in about 2/3 seconds.
I'm glad it's not just me struggling with the screenshot functionality. I've encountered the bugs you're describing, and recently, I've been encountering an incredibly frustrating one where hitting print screen just...doesn't do anything. The only way I've found to temporarily fix it is to manually open the Snipping Tool (via the Start menu) - then the print screen key starts working again for some indeterminate period of time.
Win+Shift+S. It launches the snipping tool. Its been a feature for over a decade.
Especially since it can open with selecting the area to screenshot and not have to manually crop it in Paint or be sending a 4K image to someone.
This is the most atrocious rating article I've stumbled upon in a while!
IMHO the right-click menu these days seems to get better, at least I can find "Open with Code" or "Open in Terminal", etc. Except that I need the old menu to create a desktop shortcut occasionally.
In my Windows 11 right-click menu, I can choose "Show More Options" at the bottom and then Send To > Desktop (create shortcut).
I want to opt out though. I use 7 zip all the time and I don't want this menu that can't have 7 zip...
Just use NanaZip
Does the end user care that the system is made with React? What is the tangible negative impact?
My start menu doesn’t have ads, it really isn’t hard to manage that sort of thing.
OneDrive is fully uninstalled, Copilot is fully uninstalled, I find my system to be quite clean.
And if you don’t like the start menu, there are ways to replace the start menu entirely with something else. Good luck replacing entire major elements of the macOS UI.
In contrast, Apple puts advertisements at the same urgency level as critical system updates in the settings. There’s no setting to disable them and they sometimes come back with a new version release, you just have to know the magic actions to get them dismissed.
Haters dog on Windows 11 for various things but it really is the best version of the OS since 7. It has some of the best updates to traditional Windows tooling in years: tabs in notepad, git preinstalled, finally the settings pane is in a good place, brand new command line interface, and Microsoft has had a great habit of putting new features in separate apps that can be installed optionally. (E.g., you can’t uninstall Apple News on a Mac, but you can uninstall ClipChamp on Windows)
Windows 11 is much slower for me than Windows 7 or 10. A noticeable sub-second delay to bring up the start menu and respond to typing, about 3 seconds for file explorer to load, 5-10 seconds to start a screenshot. I wouldn't be surprised if antivirus is to partially to blame (only use Windows at work where it is required), but it is the same antivirus we used on Windows 10 and it wasn't this bad.
“A noticeable sub-second delay” lol. I guess you never ran Windows 98 on a pentium 2 like I did. If I had a dime for every sub-second delay I experienced on that machine…
Settings > Accessibility > Animation Effects > Off
5-10 seconds to start a screenshot, yeah man now you’re just lying. You sure you didn’t leave the delay timer on?
Are we going to gloss over the fact that the screenshot interface in old windows versions basically didn’t exist? There was no keyboard shortcut to open snipping tool by default in Windows 7. You had to know to use your print screen key correctly and to paste the image into Paint, and there was no visual feedback. Of course that performed fast because there was no UI!
> My start menu doesn’t have ads, it really isn’t hard to manage that sort of thing.
I don't care. It is completely unacceptable to have ads in a product I paid them for. It doesn't matter how easy it is to remove, that doesn't fly.
You act like people are hating on Win11 for no reason, but truthfully you're just ignoring the reasons to hate it.
I haven’t given Microsoft a dime since Windows 7. Users who buy a computer have the OS preinstalled. Millions of people never activate it. The product is effectively free.
It’s a commercial OS but people can’t get over it. There isn’t a single commercial OS out there that doesn’t try to sell you something at some point.
Maybe that is unacceptable to you and I respect you for that. But it’s a commercial OS and always has been.
What gets annoying is when these aspects conflate it to being a bad OS or some monstrously unethical system. Seeing some ads that are easily disabled is treated by a certain community like the Microsoft is selling blood diamonds. The ferver doesn’t match the magnitude of the crime.
To me personally, it feels like Windows 2000 was the last and maybe only consistent UI onto which all later versions bolted what they considered improvements without ever overhauling the UI in full.
I think Windows XP did a pretty good job for the home market, making Windows appear friendly and easy to use to a wide audience (and without too many style inconstistencies).
Moreover, Windows XP let you switch the interface back to the classic 9x look, if you wanted a more serious appearance, and better performance.
> back to the classic 9x look
If i remember correctly this is the windows 2000 look.
We're both right. Windows XP had two different legacy themes: "Windows Standard" which looked like Windows 2000 and "Windows Classic" which looked like Windows 9x.
Totally agree!
Although I‘m a Mac user for a long time, I still remember that I got work done using Windows 2000.
I‘d buy a license and switch back to Windows if we could get the productivity of this UI.
Typing this on iOS with Liquid Glass that drives me nuts
Windows 8 was a pretty big overhaul. But I agree with the author it was a most unwelcome overhaul.
Yeah, but many of its 'advanced' settings and such still pop-up windows 95-styled interfaces. And these are actually the most user-friendly parts of the OS.
I think one of the fundamental issues is "...to those raised on computers, rather than smartphones"
I'm surprised nobody caught this, but both the screenshot for Windows 8.1 is not Windows 8.1, it's Windows Threshold, the development phase of Windows 10.
The specific screenshot they show is the very first start menu they cobbled together for Threshold, which would later be redesigned again before shipping as Windows 10. The screenshot is also showing off early adaptations of Windows 8 apps running in movable windows -- before that, they could only run full- or split-screen!
I am not surprised, from memory I only know like 3 people who ever willingly used 8.x. The active user base must be tiny compared to Windows 7 and 10 users (if we just stick to that range).
I have personally not used it for more than an hour total (on anyone's PC combined) and I have (co-)owned and used at least one Windows PC continuously since 1995.
8.1 was slightly better, but most people I know that used it, used one of the start menu replacements that looked/felt more like Win7.
Oh cool, someone else that appreciates Windows 2000 more than XP. There are dozens of us!
IMHO it would be more interesting to compare UI/UX of something like MS Office. That traces the evolution of the GUI pretty well.
> With Windows 95, Microsoft managed to produce a version of its OS that scared Apple so much they ended up bringing Steve Jobs back, along with his own operating system, NeXTSTEP
Funny because Windows 95 contains many ideas from the more ambitious project codenamed Windows Cairo that was intended to mimic NextSTEP. Cairo was never released, but the gray slab 3D look, the "X" button on the top-right corner on Windows 95 are the hallmarks of NextSTEP.
Windows 95's most original GUI idea was the Start menu.
I'm pretty sure that Windows 8.1 didn't have a start menu at all, just a windows button that opened that full screen metro launcher
And yet somehow it was faster and more accurate than the Win 10/11 start menus, where you're lucky if it doesn't pop in something else right as you hit enter after typing an app name, opening the completely wrong app/webpage/etc. It's always one step forward and two steps back with MS.
MSFT peaked at Windows 2000.
I hate the flat, borderless, barely visible scroll bar mess that is Windows 11. Just try to determine where one window starts and another ends with multiple overlapping windows open, especially in dark mode.
Windows UI peaked at Windows 7 and has been steadily in a race to the bottom ever since.
Windows 11 is going to be the final straw that prompts me to relegate it to a game playing or only-use-because-I-must secondary OS. Linux, here I come - if only I could decide which flavour...
I use Fedora Workstation. It's boring and less customizable than other distros out of the box, but I like it like that. I pretty much just add the extension 'dash to panel' and call it a day.
Microsoft has their own plans for where they want to go with Windows and it certainly is not catering to their users. The same could be said from most big companies I guess -- all about lock-in, value extraction, planned obsolescence. I see Valve/Steam as one of the few exceptions, probably because they are not publicly traded.
Been pretty happy with the PopOS Cosmic series so far.
XP, a regression? closes tab.
I started using keyboard navigation more and more around Win 7 and that has actually improved quite consistently since then and I remember Win 8 Win-key search was quite good, if you could look past the start menu…
Also reminds me of the layers of UI versions still present in Windows https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27556754
Windows 11 < Windows 10?
Just based on the start menu alone I can‘t think of any reason for 11 to lead the ranking
You also can no longer drag stuff onto the taskbar in Win 11, and they refuse to fix it or provide a viable alternative. It's a dealbreaker for me, and the single thing that has prevented me from updating.
Start menu in I Windows 11 is quite bad. One things that really annoys me is how little space the start menu has for pinned shortcuts.
Give the Windows 2 a second look and try to ignore the colorful GAME in the screenshot.
It’s actually pretty ”elegant” design with white, black, grey with two shades of primary color: dark blue and light blue/cyan. Then complementary orange for active selection. The cyan is light enough for black text and blue is dark enough for white text. Really good palette choices.
Remember this was only 16 CGA colors, of which only few are delicate enough for UI components.
The tiny resolution makes things blocky, but if it had more space with an SVGA resolution, it’d be pretty great.
I would dare say, this might be the most ”designed” UI of the bunch, considering limitations.
-
Intresting aspect of the UI is the hilighting of the menu bar in each window:
These days it’s odd to hilight menus, but I think their importance must’ve been much higher due to lack of space in the UI itself. They were basiclly act as ”navigation” and action menus. We use sidepanels and tabs a lot, but those have hard time fittinh there. Also the apps were simpler.
I agree. That was the only unfair assessment in the article, IMHO. Windows 2 was based on the Presentation Manager standard which was developed by IBM and Microsoft, and also used with OS/2, and more importantly, CDE + Motif. That's why many Unix desktops used to look like 3D Microsoft Windows desktops back then. Because they all were based on the same GUI standard.
I really liked the fact they had full menu bars on resolutions far lower than phones had 15 years ago. No hamburger menus.
I think Windows XP should have shipped with the Watercolor theme, although Luna does a better job of setting it apart from previous versions
I remember hacking the "Start" button in 95 through 7 to say "Whee!" instead of "Start". Childish and silly, but I liked it. I miss being able to make little hacks like that.
Mine said “Über”, which seemed very clever to me for some reason.
As someone who grew up with Vista (yeah, I'm young) I will always love that look. Probably a good bit of nostalgia, but as a kid who couldn't really even manage files well that always looked so fancy and fun!
Even still have the laptop I used back then, fully with the barely functioning charging port that makes booting it up an exercise in dexterity.
I didn't grow up with Vista and I loved the look too. IMO it was by far the best looking version of Windows they ever produced. Win7 was pretty good too, though I preferred the look of Vista. The transparency on stuff looked (and still looks) really awesome.
I like the “did it improve or regress” angle.
I hope it’s not controversial if I say that in the Apple world, Liquid Glass is, if not the first, certainly the worst regression. And I think this could have been predicted if you agreee with OP about Vista.
Liquid Glass is such a horrible regression. I'm holding onto my Sequoia for the time being (and maybe I'll then switch to Linux).
I think the best version of macOS was High Sierra. After that, everything started becoming bloated and inconsistent.
They say "I am skipping over all versions of Windows NT" and then proceed to rate XP, Vista, 7, 8, 8.1, 10 and 11.
* Also 2000, but at least they seemed to be aware that this too was Windows NT.
"Windows NT" the brand, not "Windows" with NT the kernel.
In hindsight, I really love the way Vista looks. I don't think I ever used it as a daily driver (I went from the family XP computer to a Win7 laptop, I think), but the glassy transparency is certainly something.
I agree, I never felt it wasn’t beautiful- aside from the widget system, especially ultimate with the black frost and animated backgrounds- wow.. It was just much too heavy for the time.
I would even say it looks nicer than what Apple is doing right now, and that’s not nostalgia necessarily, its that there’s a stronger feeling of depth and more solid design for accessibility.
Most people only saw the non-transparent Vista windows: since it was such a performance pig otherwise. Especially on laptops with iGPU’s: these were the days where an intel GMA950 (4 pixel pipelines at 166MHz) was as modern as you got. :|
I cannot accept this slander of Windows XP.
It is, strictly going by looks, one of Microsoft's ugliest UIs. I will never understand how people tolerate it, let alone defend it publicly. Shameful, absolutely and thoroughly shameful!
I hated XP's style at the time, too, and switched to the classic style. I also hated the look of Vista and 7, but they weren't my problem anymore because I'd switched to Linux.
It was the style at the time. There are a lot of programs from that era with stupid, oversized nothing standard ui's, windows xp was a study in restraint compared to many applications. I think computers had just gotten powerful enough to have large bitmaps in the ui and the designers got a little crazy with their newfound power, as they tend to do. Our "modern" superflat look is probably the remnants of a reflexive recoil at all that excess. I expect it will start rebounding the other way in a few years as up and coming designers get nostalgic for their windows xp youth.
Yes and no. XP’s default theme was hideous even at the time. The silver was fine as was the olive, but that blue was horrible.
It was a product of its time, though. This was also the time of media players that used entirely custom skinning and mostly looked terrible (at least in retrospect).
The upside was that it was 100% customizable, there were tons of themes that redesigned the entire look of the desktop, and lots of resources for it.
Naturally, all mine looked like hot garbage, but it taught me about texture and image editing, and how transparencies worked in rendering (though xp themes were a special hell of using neon pink because transparent pixels werent usable yet)
Was it significantly customizable out of the box? I remember installing WindowBlinds specifically so I could theme the OS.
Dark theme, menu bar on the right side, icons only, auto hide. Out of site, out of mind.
Blue one was unbearable, but it looked pretty much okay with the gray theme.
That is an entirely subjective statement. I think it looks great.
Of course it is. What would an aesthetic judgement be except subjective?
I still consider Windows 2000's UI to be the peak of computer interfaces and nothing else has come close to its effectiveness and clarity for day to day work.
30 years ago, Microsoft was writing books that were hundreds of pages long detailing not just how to build effective and consistent user interfaces but also with explanations from user-centric research as to why those things mattered. Every user interface component carefully considered and rationalised, every reusable pattern carefully reinforced, all to build a desktop where interactive elements look interactive, skills learned in one application pretty reliably carry across to others, and avoiding dead ends that result in user panic. Windows 2000 was the last vaguely-consumer-oriented Microsoft operating system that was built with any of those lessons in mind.
Everything they have developed since then has strayed further and further from those principles. With Windows 11 and their "modern" application lineup, it is like they have absolute amnesia about ever having done any of this. It is clear as day that nobody inside Microsoft has ever gone back and read one of those books in the last decade or two, nor is there any evidence that they spend any amount of time researching and testing their products with real users or trying to understand the ways that users get stuck or fatigued.
All of the user interface consistency is gone thanks to the half-dozen competing/failed UI toolkits and webview-driven applications scattered everywhere. Visual cues and interactivity hints are either gone or are no longer reliable. You can't even tell when something in Windows will allow you to drag-and-drop or copy-and-paste or even what new and horrifying form the Open/Save/Print dialogs are going to take in any given application. "Disastrous" isn't a strong enough word for it.
I don't even mind WebView or otherwise flatter material design choices... but so many implementations fail at even that... If you actually read through the material design guidelines it makes a lot of sense. But then so many UI toolkits and programs that are allegedly following this are just plain not.
Performance issues aside that is.
So much so that one of the first things I do in fresh 10 and 11 installs is turn off all the transitions/whiz-bang visual effects to try to get back to the pure snappy functionality of that era of Windows.
Coming from 98/ME, Windows 2000 was utterly magic. It such a stable operating system compared to what came before it. Supposedly it was less compatible than 98/ME for games and other applications but in my experience this wasn’t true.
Looks were fine. Functionality was such a step up.
11 is indeed pretty good looking. Once you use it 10 feels so clunky.
11 is a step in the right direction for a modern consistent look of Windows.
But there's still a long way to go; they still haven't managed to put all the system settings in a single app. And I wonder if they'll ever be able to get rid of the Control Panel; too many legacy applications need it.
Was anyone surprised? This follows the classic pattern.
Windows 11 is bad but will only get worse with AI updates.
remember that there are still classic theme bois out there. 9x/2k is the best theme.
I assume there is a reason for leaving out Windows Me.
We don't talk about Windows Me.
From the article:
> Note: I am skipping Windows Millennium Edition (Me) because while it had changes under the hood, visually it is pretty much Windows 98 Third Edition.
Windows 1 had hamburger menus, originally from Xerox Star.
Kinda cool
I really hated the depressing grey GUI of Windows 95/98/NT/2000/Me. It looks like working in a dull grey concrete office with a grey PC and grey monitor while wearing a grey tie. I get that Windows XP and 8 look too colorful for many people (I like them), but Vista & Co, with their glass design, managed to avoid colors while still not making everything a drab grey.
I liked it although that was maybe because Windows 2000 was a great OS. Having seen the awful mess the Unix vendors made of CDE/Motif, 2000 felt more professional.
2000 had a nice shade of blue for its desktop background, IMO.
This begs the general question: why were PCs (and monitors, keyboards, mice etc) always sold in ugly grey, for decades? Before they finally relented and switched to black?
not an expert, but i vaguely recall that certain colors can make plastics weaker - maybe it was the case here for a while until technology improved
More likely, people just don't give a damn if their keyboards only last a coupe years and buy a new one.
Bring back the 2000s transparency in the hardware. Transparent phone (nokia 3310, of course), transparent PC, transparent everything!
I would do unsavory things to get a matching keyboard, mouse, and monitor in translucent plastic akin to an Atomic Purple Gameboy Color. I've tried retrofitting an iMac G3 multiple times, but they're so old now that taking them apart literally breaks them because the plastic's too brittle.
Dont forget the transparent landline phone, alarmclock, and tvs!
Cooked take.