Comment by mk_stjames
1 month ago
Everyone seems to love the Windows 7 era but for me, Windows peaked GUI-wise with Windows 2000 and everything since then has felt like a poor 'skin' or misplaced 'theme' on top of something else.
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.
For me, search integrated into the start menu was a major quality of life improvement. Particularly the ability to hit the Windows key and type the name of an application. Strictly speaking, this was introduced in Vista, but I feel like Windows 7 added a lot of useful polish to the Windows Vista style of UI.
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.
The Start Menu integrated search would have been real nice if it worked properly, but unfortunately they decided on some kind of “search” algorithm that can't even do a substring match on items in the Start Menu. I have no clue what the thinking there was, but it drives me to not want to use it.
I think what drives me mad is its nondeterminism.
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.
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It was a little clunky in Windows 7. Typing in "device" brings up "Devices and Printers" before what you likely want, "Device Manager". It also sometimes just forgets about things that definitely exist. Like on my Windows 7 machine, I have two command prompt shortcuts to python venvs pinned to the start menu. One is called AppName Python and the other is AppName Python Dev. Both shortcuts exist in the same folder yet when I use the search function in the start menu, only the Dev shortcut shows up. Before I made the Dev venv, the main shortcut would always show up but now it doesn't.
I've got another PC with the same setup running Windows 10 but they both show up in search results just fine.
Yeah, I never used it. I have barely ever used it since then.
Now you can hit the Windows key, type Visual Studio and open a Bing search for Visual Studio, instead of actually opening VS. It’s great - if your KPI is bing DAU
I know it should be the default, but if you turn off online searches for the Start Menu, it operates exactly how you'd expect it to on Windows 11.
Windows 11 is also a lot faster than 7 was on equivalent systems. Windows 7 would take minutes to boot.
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I use the Win-key+[start typing] search all the time, but I also used it in the XP era. Only then it was a third-party app, with order of magnitude more customization and control. I actually have a worse experience now, but it's just above my tolerance threshold so I don't do anything about it.
I've navigated systems this way for so long, I forget people do it any other way. Someone from IT had to remote-connect to my system yesterday to do something, and to get to the control panel they opened the start menu --> clicked the Settings gear --> Bluetooth & devices --> Scrolled all the way to the bottom of that page to click "More devices and printer settings", which then opens 'Control Panel\Hardware and Sound\Devices and Printers', then clicked "control panel" in the address bar. I was baffled. Winkey --> type "CON" --> hit Enter is so many fewer steps.
O R D E R O F M A G N I T U D E
THEY SAID THE THING!
Wouldn't it be below your tolerance threshold then? ;)
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.
>search integrated into the start menu was a major quality of life improvement.
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.
I've lived through every evolution of Windows from 3.1 up to 11 and Millenium/2000 still remains my favourite and I will always consider it the most 'get-shit-done' UI that Microsoft has ever built. Up until W10 removed the feature, I used to turn off the Themes service so that I could get the classic UI back.
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.
Wait a sec. Windows 2000 was probably their best operating system. Windows ME was absolutely their worst. They were so different I’m not sure the entire company wasn’t swapped into the set of Severance (tv show) or something of that ilk.
They were developed by completely different teams.
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.
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I used Windows 95 for a few months and switched to NT and never looked back.
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.
Windows 2000 is based on the NT kernel which is a complete different operation system. ME is Windows 3.x with a 32-bit hack on top of MS-DOS.
Nah, its not rose tinted glasses. Win2000/Win2003 were amazing. I still run Win2003 because it just workz. GUI is great, it snappy, I have all the tools to tinker here and there.. Leaked SRC code helps tiny bit ;)
Win7 wasnt that bad, you still could set classic GUI. If they only kept it like this and plow money to improve kernel...
In 2012, I was working for a company that did all the development for its Windows clients on an ancient version of Visual Studio running in a Windows 2003 VM, and I discovered that the Windows 2003 running in a VM could transfer files over the network faster than Windows 7 running on bare metal. I feel like transferring files over the network has been horrible in Windows ever since. Transferring over USB was often horrible as well, but that seems somewhat better now.
7 is better than anything coming after it. Microsoft finally figured out the design, no ads embedded into every corner, no app store, no integration of every MS service into it. Earlier than 7 versions can be discussed in terms of if they match or surpass 7 or not but for myself it was MS' pinnacle in OS design
Windows 2000 was such a major improvement over NT4 and of course 9x that yes, you're right, it was awesome, but it still had issues and in terms of device drivers future versions brought a lot of things that improved overall stability.
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.
26 years. You'd think they could update and unify the UI in 26 years. But they would have to care first.
They could, but they change their mind every couple of years. It is a generic problem in SW development. See CADT.
I think it's a backward compatibility problem.
Booting win2k with under 10 processes running at startup and ~50MB RAM consumed was glorious. Updated Warp on a child's computer last evening and 7GB consumed at boot with W11 reminded me of win2k days and how much they are missed...
Looks like this mod supports the "classic" theme too.
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.
Agree, that 2000/Millennium aesthetic was absolutely peak design and usability.
Same here, Windows 2000 is peak UI, I never liked the Frutiger Aero aesthetics. My only criticism is that it was, in a sense, too successful and elements like the taskbar and start menu got ossified and the design stagnated. Apple's F3 show all windows, F4 spotlight is far better. Windows didn't even get multiple desktops until Windows 10.
I guess I like the design language but I wouldn't be prepared to give back the usability of modern UIs.
Windows didn't even get multiple desktops until Windows 10.
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.
I just checked in the 2003 Platform SDK and desktop support was added in Windows NT 3.51, which came out in 1995.
I think there was a PowerToy for virtual desktops for Windows 95? And alternate shells like litestep could do it too. Maybe that was Win98?
> 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.
Frutiger Aero was never called like that. It was just a non-copycat gloss theme cleraly inspired from OSX' Aqua design. Even KDE3 did that for some time (Everaldo/Crystal icons, Keramik...) were rounded, glossy designs were hip and transparencies with XRender were everywere.
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).
> Frutiger Aero was never called like that.
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)
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> Windows didn't even get multiple desktops until Windows 10.
Being used with fvwm, i tried to use them in Win 10. Boy, it was such a mess. Keyboard shortcuts were horrible, overview of where your windows were was horrible.
> Windows peaked GUI-wise with Windows 2000 and everything since then has felt like a poor 'skin' or misplaced 'theme' on top of something else.
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.
Out of curiosity, are there any good comparisons in-detail between Windows 2000 and present-day Linux?
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.
I can't speak about the grayness, but the lack of snappiness I think is thanks to the bloat and complexity of modern UIs. KDE in particular is a beast with a ton legacy code built up over the time, and a lot of bits and pieces put together by people from around the world, which results in a lack of cohesiveness... but that goes for most Linux DEs.
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.
[1] https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95/
[2] https://github.com/User738git/MENT2K
Thanks a lot for the writeup and all the pointers. Yeah, I think incoherence might play a role here.
Will definitely check out those themes and have a look at ReactOS (what I wanted to anyway but was procrastinating)
> 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.
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.
"Peak Windows GUI" and "Peak GUI" are two separate things.
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.
I still dream about a world where we ended up with BeOS instead of OS X.
Fastest and lowest latency UI I have ever seen.
I agree. I rode Server 2003, then after that Server 2008 (which kept most of the 2000-era gui, though the start menu got more vista-shaped) for my Windows development desktop machine for as long as I could. By the time Server 2008 reached end-of-support, I didn't need a Windows development box anymore, and my only contact with Windows has been sporadic, but feels like a distinct downgrade. I've had VMs of each major desktop version for odd small tasks, and have been grateful not to need to spend a lot of time using them.
As much as I appreciate the classic Win9X look, I also like some more modern features like full bit depth alpha blending and anti-aliasing.
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.
Yes for me too. Windows 2000 was clean and efficient. With not too much bling.
I used to start with 2000 server (so I could RDP) and then install something like Aston Shell to make it customizable and beautiful.
I miss the days when windows was a platform you could extend and customize.
Same, but blackbox (bb4win) was my shell of choice. Along with the Win32 Unix tools, Conemu, xyplorer and shell32.dll icon replacements, my Windows back then looked and behaved very similar to a Fluxbox/OpenBox Linux install.
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".
> 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.
Was it Task Gallery from Microsoft Research?
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/the-tas...
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/332040.332482
I loved bb4win, and used whenever I wanted FAST (boy was it). I used Blackbox on FreeBSD for the longest time so it was nice to have similar experiences.
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.
Y’all forgetting that Windows XP (and up to 7) had the classic boxy theme. It was just a menu toggle away in Display Properties. The difference was the Windows icon in the Start menu.
You're correct. Everything in the Windows 2000 GUI served a purpose. Hard to think of any changes after that that weren't just decoration and styling.
7 was the peak though cus it actually worked flawlessly.. In my experience earlier versions of windows were kinda janky and unstable.
Windows 7 was the best Windows and one of the reasons was that you could still have the Windows 2000 GUI, the "Classic" theme. That was peak Windows.
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.
I'm a big fan of the Windows XP Royale theme (from Media Center Edition). Like regular XP, but glossier and shinier.
Every Windows up to 7 let you pick the classic UI if you preferred that, though, right?
Yeah I agree too. I never understood the love for the win7 aesthetic!
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