5 ms·

I miss Windows 2000. 3.11 and earlier were utter garbage. I was on an Amiga, and so thankfully avoided those steaming piles. 95, 98, and ME were brutal operat

I miss Windows 2000. 3.11 and earlier were utter garbage. I was on an Amiga, and so thankfully avoided those steaming piles. 95, 98, and ME were brutal operating systems, crashing all the time, corrupting data, and generally making life hell. There was an NT 3.51 mod that would give it the win95 interface, but there were too many software compatibility issues. Amiga was dead, so I switched to Red Hat. Then came Windows 2000. A nice, clean interface. Speedy operating system. Real memory protection. Most things were in sane places. It got out of your way and let you get real work done. When XP came out, I didn't really see the point. It had graphics that looked like a candy bar and slowed things down enormously. Thankfully, you could disable it. I'm still not sure what they actually improved in that operating system to make actual, real work easier to perform, but whatever they did, it took twice the memory to do it, and required a beefier processor. Then came Vista, which was unbearably slow. I upgraded to XP during this time because my software wouldn't run on 2000 anymore. Windows 7: A New Hope. It was still slow, but it turned out to be not an unbearable upgrade, although I still stuck to XP for as long as I could. Windows 8: Bigger. Slower. Unfathomable. I stuck to 7 through gritted teeth. Now we're at Windows 10. Schizoid is the best word I can use to describe it. Horrible UI half in the Vista world, half in the mobile world, Duplication everywhere, no clear path for getting things done, constant updates at inconvenient times (you can't seem to get even a month of uptime with this OS). I've since switched to Ubuntu, and run my Windows software in Wine.

zozbot123 8y ago
Broadly agreed, except that I find even Ubuntu to be quite slow these days. Sticking to plain vanilla Debian with a lightweight interface solves this quite nicely - XFCE and LXDE are incredibly snappy even on very low end hardware, quite a bit better than XP at least.
chaoticmass 8y ago
I remember Windows 2000 feeling like the height of Windows UI. Changed the gray color theme to a oh so slightly brownish gray which just seemed classy. That oh so subtle drop shadow on your mouse and other UI elements. Retaining all of the psuedo-3D box rendering for windows, buttons, borders, etc. Helpful and consistent signifiers revealing UI functionality at a glance. Then the new-wave of UI designers decided all of this was 'ugly' and needed to be cleaned up. Maybe the new stuff is 'prettier' (subjective) but we clearly took many steps backward with regard to usability. When Win 3.1 and especially 95 were developed, a lot of focus and testing was done on usability because it was expected that a lot of people wouldn't know how to use a GUI. Concepts of 'this is a button, you move the mouse pointer over it and you can click it' would be novel to a lot of users. All the signifiers had to be on point and consistent. All of that has gone out the window. I blame 1) Mac OS X, because it was pretty it made classic Windows UI look ancient and obsolete and 2) smart phones with UIs so opaque that apps often include little tutorials showing you how to use the UI, basically giving up on trying to be intuitive.

zozbot123 8y ago

Broadly agreed, except that I find even Ubuntu to be quite slow these days. Sticking to plain vanilla Debian with a lightweight interface solves this quite nicely - XFCE and LXDE are incredibly snappy even on very low end hardware, quite a bit better than XP at least.

chaoticmass 8y ago

I remember Windows 2000 feeling like the height of Windows UI. Changed the gray color theme to a oh so slightly brownish gray which just seemed classy. That oh so subtle drop shadow on your mouse and other UI elements. Retaining all of the psuedo-3D box rendering for windows, buttons, borders, etc. Helpful and consistent signifiers revealing UI functionality at a glance. Then the new-wave of UI designers decided all of this was 'ugly' and needed to be cleaned up. Maybe the new stuff is 'prettier' (subjective) but we clearly took many steps backward with regard to usability. When Win 3.1 and especially 95 were developed, a lot of focus and testing was done on usability because it was expected that a lot of people wouldn't know how to use a GUI. Concepts of 'this is a button, you move the mouse pointer over it and you can click it' would be novel to a lot of users. All the signifiers had to be on point and consistent. All of that has gone out the window. I blame 1) Mac OS X, because it was pretty it made classic Windows UI look ancient and obsolete and 2) smart phones with UIs so opaque that apps often include little tutorials showing you how to use the UI, basically giving up on trying to be intuitive.