Comment by Borg3
16 hours ago
Are you nuts? Or wait.. you must be Gen Z then, never really used Win95.. If so, you cant make any statements in the subject.
I still run Windows Classic GUI here, because its fast and confortable to use. Can you do better? Hmm, maybe. But im not conviced :)
>Are you nuts? Or wait.. you must be Gen Z then, never really used Win95.. If so, you cant make any statements in the subject.
What a terrible attitude to have as a comment reply. I've been using Windows since Windows 95, meaning I have plenty of experience and some emotional attachment to it and I'm as millenial with knee pain as they get, so not Gen-Z, and I can't imagine going back to using W95 today productively in a non-ironic way.
Windows 95 was perfect ... for what people did on computers back in 1995, not for what I do now in 2026 on the HW of today. May W95 rest in peace, but I'll take my modern OS for my moderns entertainment and productivity tasks on modern HW. There's no way in hell I'd want to go back to W95 even if that's what popped my cherry. People calming otherwise have rose tinted glasses and only remember the good parts of that era without the downsides.
Can you tell me more? What are you doing that good old classic windows would be barely usable? Im really curious, because I was using corporate Win10 and hell, it was really driving me crazy. Good that there is Cygwin, so I could move most stuff there. Classic Windows just works, and if you care, you can even customize it.
>Can you tell me more? What are you doing that good old classic windows would be barely usable?
In modern WIndows, from 7 onward, I can hit the meta key and type the first letters of the app I want to open, hit enter and boom, it's opened. I can mouse snap the two app windows side by side on my large monitor. I have 125% scaling so things don't look tiny on my 4k monitor.
Win 95 had none of that, the only way to launch an app was via shortcuts on the desktop or navigating a long and tedious star menu tree, which was perfectly fine for 1995 since you had ~10 app on your PC and you used it sparingly, but is really shit UX if your PC has 50+ apps like in 2026 and you use it for half a day. "Classic windows" only makes sense if you also use your PC in a classic way like it's the 90's, with like 1-2 concurrent apps opened at once, instead of 10+ leaving them on for days/weeks.
>Good that there is Cygwin, so I could move most stuff there.
Cygwin is CLI, not UI, which is what we were talking about. Are your complaints about the Windows CLI or about UI, because those are different topics you seem to mix up?
>Classic Windows just works, and if you care, you can even customize it.
I can also customize modern Windows, at least in the ways I need it to be productive. Sure, you can't customize it anymore in the W95 way, such as having a Matrix screensaver or Rollercoaster Tycoon theme on it, but I don't need that anymore since I'm old now and don't have time for that anymore. If I want a short hit of nostalgia I boot up my vintage Windows XP machine, but that's not my daily driver.
>Im really curious, because I was using corporate Win10 and hell, it was really driving me crazy.
If Win10 was driving you crazy, then "classic windows" would also drive you crazy even harder because it doesn't have any QoL over Win10. Please explain yourself here what you mean since you seem to be contradicting yourself. Or are you only talking about your limited corporate windows experience and and not what you can do as an admin on "home" windows?
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Scrolling through multiple lists for example. Windows 10 allows scrolling hovered lists like on macOS and various other systems, in previous versions the scroll wheel always scrolls the current focus and 3rd party implementations are never 100% reliable.
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Aero is a thorough evolution of the Windows UX, I think many people never realised just how much it improved when praising XP and prior.
I think they were referring to the latter part (downhill ever since) and not the former (win 95 is the best).
How are you running the classic GUI?
Im still running Win2003 here, hence classic GUI (Win2000 like). Works like a charm :) I do some hacking (programing, reverse engineering) and playing games (old of course) on it.
not sure if "can't say that X is the best if you haven't personally lived through every previous iteration" is an already established logical fallacy, but damn does it fall apart quickly.
Typical insulting boomer reply. Personal attacks, against the rules, and nothing useful added to the discussion. And the guy you insulted isn't even Gen Z...