6 ms·

Same old story. When XP came out, people were moaning that it looks like shit and how they wanted the XP kernel, but the 2000 look. When Vista came out, same

• cptskippy 8y ago
  It's interesting though that no one pined for Vista or 8.
  • ConceptJunkie 8y ago
    I actually won a copy of Vista Ultimate from an online contest. I never had a reason to install it.
    • lozaning 8y ago
      Microsoft sent me like $300 dollars worth of paper plates, cups, utensils, and gave me pizza vouchers and a bunch of free licenses because I signed up to host a Windows Vista launch party. No one came, and I have yet to ever install Vista on a machine either. The pizza was good though and my roommates and I used the plates for weeks.
      • rubatuga 8y ago
        That’s hilarious, wish I was invited to one!
  • 21 8y ago
    7 looks like Vista. 10 looks like 8. There are a lot of 10/7 fans around, thus they pin for the Vista/8 look. First you complain loudly "what is this shit". Then when the new one comes which is basically the same as the previous, but a bit more polished you say "I love this, you should always skip one Windows version"
    • SECProto 8y ago
      I dispute this. Vista focused heavily (on launch) on the sidebar and transparency (golly gee!). 7 and XP look very similar out-of-the-box. Honestly, I like 10 mostly. If they finished converting the settings menus to the new style, it'll feel a bit more complete. But that will also likely hide many of the useful (for "enthusiasts") settings. And if you could control updates, so it doesn't use huge amounts of memory/storage when booting when the machine has been off a week or two. Avoiding tracking would be nice too ... But I don't know much about that. Edit: my views of 10 are likely shaped by the fact that I use 1607 LTSB, which doesn't have a lot of the new windows 10 crap (app store, etc)
      • deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
  • dunnevens 8y ago
    I'm starting to see 8 nostalgia. Very few these days will defend the start screen, but some people are starting to miss the rest of the OS. Which is understandable. It was the last version of Windows without many of the things some consider objectionable about 10: no telemetry, no forced updates, no big feature updates which might break things, etc.
• jdhzzz 8y ago
  I could live happily in on a system that looked like Win2k.
  • maxxxxx 8y ago
    Me too. I would prefer that.
  • throwaway2048 8y ago
    Check out reactos its basically a UI clone of the win2k era.
• mschuster91 8y ago
  You should think deeper to see what drives this desire of yours. Decades of using it (21 years, by now), plus the total dislike to any kinds of advertising IN A PRODUCT I PAID FOR. Additionally, people had the CHOICE to keep Windows looking, basically, like Win95 - until Windows 8/10 came along. With Win10 that's not possible any more. It treats me like I'm either a child or using a touch device, and hell no. I want a clear optical distinction between a mobile and a desktop/laptop OS, alone because the operating mechanisms (mouse vs touchscreen) are so different. Who in their right mind thought people would touch on their big-time office PC screens and forced the UI to this absolutely crappy (for desktop!) tile stuff? Oh and don't get me started on the forced telemetry crap and the forced / silent updates and the reverts that these updates "accidentally" do once you managed to render your PC free of this crap. Microsoft has completely lost my trust by now, I switched happily to an Apple environment. At least it doesn't force Candy Crush upon me or injects ads in the Start Menu and Apple vendors (well, to be fair, there is only Apple itself) don't preload my machine with crap I don't need (a dozen updaters punching security holes in the system, "free" virus scanners, spyware)!
  • Paianni 8y ago
    From Windows 8 it is no longer possible to disable the Desktop Window Manager, presumably they made too many UI changes to be able to continue supporting it, except for the Server Core mode in the Server releases. Trouble with Core is that it's basically 3.1 with no program manager or any capability of running additional Windows applications.
    • mschuster91 8y ago
      From Windows 8 it is no longer possible to disable the Desktop Window Manager, presumably they made too many UI changes to be able to continue supporting it Hmm. Sounds sensible. But... shouldn't the kernel be backwards compatible? Like, take a Server Core and install the old Win7 user-land on it?
      • qball 8y ago
        There was a project that did something like this for Windows 8: https://www.afterdawn.com/software/system_tools/system_tweaking/ex7forw8.cfm https://www.afterdawn.com/software/system_tools/system_tweak...
• titanix2 8y ago
  Windows 10 UI is objectively bad on a lot of points like consistency, search from the Start menu, etc. At least up until Win8 you could switch to the classic theme to get something looking like 98’s UI. Now you have no choice but to suffer the big button dialogs made for tablet on any laptop / desktop without touchscreen.
  • simfoo 8y ago
    Install ClassicShell, it provides a start menu that feels exactly like Windows 7
  • InclinedPlane 8y ago
    It also inherited a ton of bad habit from Windows 8, such as shiny fancy-looking but overly simplistic configuration screens, except the original configuration dialogs are still there underneath. This is indicative of a bad development methodology: devs/teams work on useless small projects (jazz up these dialogs so that grandma can use them) which can easily be executed and completed within a year or so (you know, a review cycle). While leaving all the old mess little changed underneath (because of course the new shit is horribly incomplete and doesn't actually fully replace the old controls). They have a corporate/dev culture which actively discourages long term incremental improvements of core components and focuses instead of trivial window dressing that can be packaged up in a SMART-goals format so that people can tick off their commitments and get their bonuses, raises, and promotions.
• ConceptJunkie 8y ago
  But Windows XP, Vista and 7 _could_ look just like Windows 2000. Starting with Windows 8, that is no longer an option. I can't speak for anyone else, but I thought every version of Windows since 2000 looked like garbage by default. The difference was that you used to be able to do something about it.
• kitsunesoba 8y ago
  Win2K to this day remains my favorite Windows release. It was just so clean and practical. It had its frustrations (setting up a Win2K/WinXP/Win7 system from scratch was always a task and a half, with all the driver installs and updates involved) but once you got it set up it was great. XP/7 aren’t bad but they definitely felt more gimmicky.
  • romed 8y ago
    I’m still carrying a Win2K Pro image around in VMware. It runs all the windows software I need (and this is the right way to choose an operating system IMO) and if it gets screwed up I can always blow it away and revert to the snapshot that’s got all the service packs installed.
    • kitsunesoba 8y ago
      What software would that be, if you don’t mind my asking? I was under the impression that Win2K support had been dropped from most software several years ago.
      • romed 8y ago
        EDA and CAD programs. Expensive software but I don’t need the vendors’ “support” so their thoughts on my operating systems are not important to me.
  • basch 8y ago
    https://www.deviantart.com/kizo2703/art/Windows-classic-theme-for-Windows-8-RTM-8-1-10-325642288 https://www.deviantart.com/kizo2703/art/Windows-classic-them...
  • ben_bai 8y ago
    Of all the Windows version Win2k still has a special place in my head. Way better/stabler than Win95/Win98. For a long time my goto OS, I finally considered switching to XP SP2 but then Linux entered my world.
  • 8y ago
• nine_k 8y ago
  It appears that MS made a major design effort when they designed the "Windows 95" look and feel. They produced a number of coherent concepts and tried to stick to them everywhere. They kept the amount of fluff at bay. It also appears that since then, they've never made an equivalent re-design effort to produce a coherent design and stick to it. XP was mostly an incremental change + re-skinning. Win 10 looks haphazard, unfortunately, and, most of all, the new UI is only applied sparsely, so you can't expect it to be equally usable everywhere. A Linux desktop circa 2000 could have a hodge-podge of GUI programs based on of GTK, Motif, and Athena widgets. But I could not expect the same in 2018 from Microsoft's flagship desktop OS.
  • jamesgeck0 8y ago
    Every desktop environment is a hodgepodge of inconsistent UI design at this point. Windows has never been completely consistent; IIRC even Windows 95 had some settings dialogs that came along from Windows 3.1. Linux has GTK, Qt, and several toolkits aping aping them with various levels of success. MacOS comes closest to uniformity, until you start paying attention to title bars or run popular 3rd party applications on it.
    • nine_k 8y ago
      On Linux (and, generally, under X), you at least have copycat skinning engines, so that you can have your Qt programs mostly copy the look of the current GTK theme, and vice versa. Under Windows, no such thing existed and exists, unfortunately. One thing that I had hoped when installing Win 95 back in the day is that old binaries that use standard window-drawing functions will automatically upgrade to the new look and feel. Not all of them did, alas.
      • eropple 8y ago
        Copy the look, for sure, but not the feel. If the spacing is still wrong or the keyboard shortcuts are messed up, it's not really materially better.
  • maxxxxx 8y ago
• InclinedPlane 8y ago
  When 7 came out people said "hallelujah you listened!" even though it wasn't perfect. When 8 came out people said "why did you do this to us?" When 10 came out people said "at least it's better than 8." Windows 7 was probably the high point of actually doing the work to make the OS usable and clean instead of bloated and annoying. Before that Windows 95, for all its flaws, was built on a ton of actual real world usability research. Unfortunately, MS has a long history of ignoring fundamental research and common sense and dictating "the way things will be" with the OS UI/UX. They think this is what people want since Apple does it and gets away with, but MS isn't Apple. Also, the fact that people keep complaining doesn't mean that those people are wrong, it's possible for a company to continue fucking up year after year for decades. I could explain exactly why MS makes these mistakes (part of which is due fundamentally to bad corporate culture and a long legacy of bad incentives and performance review systems) but that's another conversation.