11 ms·

Windows 2000 also represents the zenith of UI design for Microsoft software. I'm still rather baffled about how people look back fondly on XP, it looked like a

Windows 2000 also represents the zenith of UI design for Microsoft software. I'm still rather baffled about how people look back fondly on XP, it looked like a toy for toddlers, and installing the Zune theme was the first thing I did after a fresh install to try and tone it down. The in-your-face over decoration of UI's thankfully hasn't persisted, but instead we're seeing a similar kind of decadence among our supposedly minimal and flat interfaces. The misuse of space and screen real-estate has gotten pretty bad as of late, and I'm all for an appropriate amount of whitespace (I keep railing against certain linux DE's for not getting this right) but modern software seems to be devoid of any kind of efficiency with layout or a sensible information density.

zozbot234 6y ago
You could also revert to the classic widget theme, even in Windows Vista and 7. And people absolutely did that - the classic theme was a lot leaner on system resources and visually clearer in many ways.
- gruez 6y ago
  It's sad that they got rid of it in windows 8 and later. >the classic theme was a lot leaner on system resources maybe, but it probably also made things run slower because it forces everything to be done in software rather than hardware. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20130327-00/?p=4833 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20130327-00/?p=48... >Starting in Windows Vista, a lot of visual effects were offloaded to the graphics card. Consequently, the impact on system performance for those visual effects is negligible, and sometimes turning off the effect actually makes your system run slower because you disabled hardware acceleration, forcing operations to be performed in software.
  - sergeykish 6y ago
    Windows 10 is full of distractions, one time I thought my display was broken - transparency on title bar. And animations just add latency. Disable transparency and windows animations (Settings > Display > Show transparency on Windows, Show animations in windows). Also disable "Fade or slide menus into view". Much better experience and not much to offload.
    - vzidex 6y ago
      I just went through my settings on my work machine and: * Disabled transparency * Disabled animations * Disabled scroll-bars being auto-hidden Unfortunately, I couldn't find "Fade or slide menus into view", but the rest of the settings are night and day! Thank you.
      - sergeykish 6y ago
        You are welcome! I would not find myself: * My Computer * Right click * Properties * System properties * Advanced * Performance * Settings * Uncheck "Fade or slide menus into view" * Apply / OK
    - fomine3 6y ago
      I recommend to enable colors on Window Title Bar. It really improves visibility of foreground window.
  - derefr 6y ago
    There's no real way to translate the classic theme "as designed" to hi-DPI systems, AFAIK; let alone to allow it to freely morph between desktop and tablet interaction paradigms when you dock/undock a two-in-one. You could in theory design a modern UI that resembles the classic UI, but it wouldn't really be "the classic UI". A large part of what makes the classic UI have the particular look it does is that it has custom constraint-layout logic for each control, the outputs of which are fed as parameters into the arbitrary hand-written GDI draw-call logic used to draw each control. Some of the more interesting controls have Turing-hard constraint logic, which just can't be replicated in non-Turing-complete constraint-layout systems like XAML or CSS. (You can get close, but it requires using huge hierarchies of layout nodes with tons of overhead, where the Windows UI actually got by with very few.)
    - zozbot234 6y ago
      > There's no real way to translate the classic theme "as designed" to hi-DPI systems, AFAIK The classic theme supports arbitrary sizes (in px or "device-independent" units) for both text and widgets, which addresses HiDPI and touch readiness. What it might have trouble with however is mixed DPI, where moving a window across two screens requires rendering it with different pixel densities. But that was not on the horizon in the Windows 8.x days.
      - ajtjp 6y ago
        Indeed, and there also is a DPI scaling option at least as early as Windows 98, on top of the text/widget size configuration. I've used it on a 1200p monitor connected to a Windows 98 box, and it works. It doesn't always produce the most beautiful results, but it's serviceable. And to be fair, it's taken a long time for high-DPI to consistently look beautiful even on recent versions of Windows. I shudder to remember looking at Device Manager on a display set to 125% in the DPI settings.
        kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
        It was first available in Win95 Plus pack. Or you could use TweakUI.
  - tomc1985 6y ago
    What's really sad is the classic widgets are still there -- you can see them occasionally in Win10 when the compositor glitches out. Weirder, MDI windows use Win7's classic\b\b\b\b\b\b aero basic styling, so apparently some of the Win7 styling is also still available. Another major annoyance: the resize area for a window is seemingly 1 pixel wide. You used to be able to specify a width and all windows would be bordered with it. I get that Win10 looks sleeker but did they really have to take that control away What really bothered me was that back in XP days it seemed that .theme files seemed really interchangeable save for MS signing. I remember downloading numerous theme files, placing them in the right spot, and installing a cracked themes dll, and they'd just work.
    - gruez 6y ago
      > What's really sad is the classic widgets are still there -- you can see them occasionally in Win10 when the compositor glitches out. I wouldn't call them "classic". They're closer to the "aero basic" theme from vista/7 than the "classic" theme that was available from windows xp to windows 7.
      - tomc1985 6y ago
        You're right. And it was definitely aero basic.
    - whywhywhywhy 6y ago
      >the resize area for a window is seemingly 1 pixel wide. You used to be able to specify a width and all windows would be bordered with it. I get that Win10 looks sleeker but did they really have to take that control away It's really a bit of a mistake, maybe a limitation(?) of the Windows UI system. I mean the border on OS X is 1px too but the resize area is about 8 pixels. Would love it if MS could do another spin on the deep details and just make it all work nice.
      - iggldiggl 6y ago
        >> the resize area for a window is seemingly 1 pixel wide. >> You used to be able to specify a width and all windows >> would be bordered with it. I get that Win10 looks sleeker >> but did they really have to take that control away > It's really a bit of a mistake, maybe a limitation(?) > of the Windows UI system. > > I mean the border on OS X is 1px too > but the resize area is about 8 pixels. Is it? My impression is that Windows behaves the same there, i.e. the border is drawn 1 px wide, but the full width of it is still available for grabbing, only it's being drawn invisible. If I hover my mouse over a window border, the cursor certainly switches into resize mode for more than just 1 pixel's worth of distance.
- rasz 6y ago
  Switching to classic theme in Win 7 turns off hardware compositor and disables Vsync for the desktop and shock horror the browser, at least on Intel integrated graphics laptop. Ugly theme or a vsync artifact while watching youtube, your choice.
mixmastamyk 6y ago
Yes, they forgot to mention the fantastic, intuitive, and functional GUI rivaled by Mac OS 9, Nextstep, OS/2, BeOS etc. This era was the pinnacle. While we've been thrown a few bones like start menu search, most of the gratuitous changes have been for the worse. Sleeker but harder to use for professionals. Gnome 2 was approaching Win2k but then made a hard turn into tablet/novice land. XFCE is in the neighborhood but never got to the level of Win2k. I didn't care for skinz in the 90's and instead of going away, every app now is a unpredictable skinned mess.
- thaeli 6y ago
  MacOS 7.1 was the pinnacle, imo. MacOS 9 had lots of the space-wasting pretty chrome we're decrying here in WinXP.
  - duskwuff 6y ago
    Respectfully disagree. The Platinum appearance (which debuted in Mac OS 8, not 9) used roughly the same UI metrics which were typical for System 7 applications. It had to, as it was applied to all applications, not just ones which opted in! Beyond that... the system appearance used prior to Platinum was, simply put, crude. It was an outgrowth of a UI design which had originally been constructed for black-and-white systems with limited CPU power, and it wasn't especially consistent. It lacked standard UI elements for many controls which had become common, like dropdown menus, utility windows, disclosure triangles, or tristate checkboxes, forcing many applications to implement their own inconsistent versions of these items. Even for the UI elements it implemented, like buttons and checkboxes, its appearance was simplistic in the extreme -- buttons were black outlined round-rects; checkboxes were black outlined squares, etc. There was very little use of color or shading outside of window chrome -- most of the UI was black and white, just as it had been from the start.
  - julianz 6y ago
    I loved old-school Macs but come one, you couldn't even resize a window by dragging an edge. I think we've moved on from that.
linguae 6y ago
Exactly. One of my annoyances with Microsoft's post-Windows 2000 design philosophy is its penchant for consuming large amounts of vertical space. This started with the large title bars used in the Windows XP Luna theme. I wasn't impressed with this "Fischer-Price" theme and always switched to the Windows Classic theme, which I continued to do even during the Windows 7 days. Next, Microsoft introduced the ribbon in Office 2007. I've since gotten used to the ribbon (which has spread to Mac versions of Office, albeit with traditional menus still existing), but I still prefer toolbars and traditional menus. Finally, Windows 10's interface is just gaudy to me, with its oversized title bars and its liberal use of whitespace. It's acceptable on a high-resolution display, but on a 1366x768 display (common on corporate laptops) Windows 10 just looks downright ugly to me. I find it interesting that during the past 15 years the industry has switched away from 4:3 displays to 16:9 displays (which seem to provide more horizontal space at the expense of vertical space), yet Microsoft's designs seem to consume more vertical space as opposed to horizontal space. Instead of ribbons, I prefer the horizontal inspectors that are found in macOS applications. On Hacker News I'm seeing more interest lately in the desktop UIs from the 1990s and 2000s. For example, the latest beta release of Haiku, an operating system inspired by BeOS, garnered a lot of attention. What I like about Windows 2000, macOS (both the classic Mac OS and Mac OS X), BeOS, GNOME 2, and other classic desktops is their utilitarian focus on design, where form and function are intertwined. UI design isn't about "the bling"; it's about providing a good experience to the user. Mac OS X's Aqua interface did a good job providing a compelling interface to users that was also beautiful. Unfortunately, some people only saw the "bling" and not the functionality behind the Aqua theming, and thus we've been suffering from fashion-driven UIs for nearly 20 years, a trend that has been made worse by the advent of mobile computing. Hopefully the pendulum will swing back to how things were in the 1990s; we can learn a lot from the human interface guidelines Microsoft and Apple published in that era.
- sergeykish 6y ago
  Screen space consumption was on the rise since Windows 1.0 days, there was a story recently [1]. Horizontal tiling mode become unusable [2] vs [3]. I think it traces transition from power users to casual. It makes sense, but there was no alternative. Screen become cluttered so much that most applications run on full screen only. And web become spoiled too - sticky headers everywhere (uBlock fixes this), wide content (media queries kicks in much narrower windows, Stylus to the rescue). Explorer (shell) decorations is much to blame. Do we actually need task bar, title bar, menu bar, tool bar, status bar, scroll bar? I do not think so - plenty of space and distraction free [4]. There are a lot of tiling managers on Linux, but Windows has its share too. Like dwm port [5] (never tried on Windows) though I prefer wmii and xmonad with wmii layout. [1] Windows Explorer Through the Years https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23487698 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23487698 [2] Windows 1.0 tiling https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/df/Microsoft_Windows_1.0_screenshot.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/df/Microsof... [3] Windows 10 tiling https://i2.wp.com/www.nextofwindows.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Show-windows-stacked-on-Taskbar.png https://i2.wp.com/www.nextofwindows.com/wp-content/uploads/2... [4] No decorations http://sergeykish.com/side-by-side-no-decorations.png http://sergeykish.com/side-by-side-no-decorations.png [5] DWM on Windows https://www.brain-dump.org/projects/dwm-win32/ https://www.brain-dump.org/projects/dwm-win32/
airstrike 6y ago
> I'm still rather baffled about how people look back fondly on XP, it looked like a toy for toddlers Agreed, yet somehow its Start menu is still better than what you get on Windows 10 these days: https://i.stack.imgur.com/rwZqf.jpg https://i.stack.imgur.com/rwZqf.jpg > ...installing the Zune theme was the first thing I did after a fresh install to try and tone it down. Everyone knows the best XP theme was Royale Noir! https://www.istartedsomething.com/20061029/royale-noir/ https://www.istartedsomething.com/20061029/royale-noir/
- jimmaswell 6y ago
  My favorite was always HmmXP's Mono Blue. There aren't many screenshots of it but it looks just like this subtheme: https://www.deviantart.com/fugacious/art/HmmXPnoC-10312376 https://www.deviantart.com/fugacious/art/HmmXPnoC-10312376
- marcosdumay 6y ago
  That's beating a dead horse. Anything is better than the Windows 10 start menu, with the only exception of the Windows 8 (and a Server version, don't remember what) (lack of) one... Or, maybe the Win8 one was better. It's a bit hard to be sure about this, but the first half of the comment stands.
  - ajtjp 6y ago
    That would be Server 2012. Took me months to figure out how to restart it via the GUI. I actually came to like the 8.1 Start screen, though it took awhile. Basically my most-used programs are pinned to the start screen, so I can tap Windows, and use the mouse to select one, with a large margin for error. Or I can search based on the name of the program, and unlike Windows 10, it's only to match local items, and not include any web results.
anthony_barker 6y ago
NT 3.5.1 SP3 had all the internals - 2000 just added a new UI. Best if run on a DEC Alpha chip
- edoceo 6y ago
  NT4 and 2000 (NT5) were more than just UI. We added loads of features.
ogre_codes 6y ago
YES. Windows 2000 was also one of the most consistently designed versions of Windows. XP also introduced tons of design language chaos as they only migrated some of the UI over to the new controls and left big chunks of the OS to languish. I think Control Panel had widget rot well into Windows 10 (Maybe still has this issue?). I only grudgingly moved to XP and shortly after switched to Desktop Linux full time. > I'm still rather baffled about how people look back fondly on XP XP was the first consumer version of adult (non-w95 based) Windows. Relatively few people used Windows NT or Windows 2000. If you are one of the many people who's Windows use either started with XP or you went from W95 to XP, then XP was clearly the best Windows you've ever seen.
- zozbot234 6y ago
  XP introduced a "new" control panel arrangement by default, but you could easily revert to a simple folder view. Windows 10 is a mess today because of the overlap between the classic Control Panel and the new settings app, but there was nothing like this back then.
  - barking 6y ago
    One of the first things I do is to pin the control panel and a couple of its icons to start so I can avoid the settings way of getting there.
    - vezycash 6y ago
      appwiz.cpl run this from RUN or command prompt
      - barking 6y ago
        I didn't know about that. As I have it set up though, I can hit the windows key and type 'fea' (from Programs and Features) and then enter.
      - martinp 6y ago
        I haven't actively used Windows for almost a decade, but appwiz.cpl (Add/Remove programs), devmgmt.msc (Device manager), services.msc (Service manager), diskmgmt.msc (Hard drive manager) and compmgmt.msc (I forget what this is) are still burned into my brain.
EvanAnderson 6y ago
I agree with the Windows 2000 UI being great, but Windows XP ran better for me. To get the best of both worlds I ran a spare copy of Windows Server 2003 as my "daily driver" on a Thinkpad back in the early 2000's. It had the Windows 2000 UI with the behind-the-scenes updates that came with Windows XP. Most software that installed on XP installed fine on Server 2003. It was nice.
- ndespres 6y ago
  I also ran Windows Server 2003 as my regular desktop OS for a few years. I got an evaluation copy in the mail at some point and just kept using it. Even with the extra overhead of running network services on it for my household, it was still more performant than Windows XP on that same computer.
  - nix23 6y ago
    Hahah me too, problem was that no Antivirus worked because you needed the Antivirus-Server-version.
  - ajtjp 6y ago
    I ran it for awhile too, on my laptop. I think that was back in my post-Vista try-all-the-other-options-out-there days, as I cannot remember what advantage it gave me that XP didn't have, but I do remember it being a pain to get set up for DirectX and other things that you generally wouldn't use on a server. Still, it did look cool to see my laptop displaying its "Windows Server 2003" screensaver in the library.
deleted 6y ago
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octorian 6y ago
> I'm still rather baffled about how people look back fondly on XP, it looked like a toy for toddlers I think a big part of this is a combination of two factors: First, most non-tech people never ran Win2k. They went straight from 98/ME to XP. Second, no one remembers WinXP before SP2. (You know, when it was a complete trainwreck.) FWIW, when I was doing software development in the latter days of XP, I found that I actually liked the style of the UI widgets from the default theme. Its just the titlebar and taskbar styles that I couldn't stand. However, some size tweaks made them more tolerable.
- erichurkman 6y ago
  Windows XP even before SP2 was a _delight_ compared to the true train wreck that shipped on consumer PCs before it: Windows "Mistake Edition" Me.
  - hyperman1 6y ago
    Windows Me was a strange beast. On some (most?) PCs it was an absolute disaster up to corrupting hard disks, on others it was a solid step up from win98. But you could never say beforehand how it was going to behave, even on 2 identical PCs. I never understood what triggered its abysmall behaviour. Oh well, who cares now, it lies in its well deserved grave, I guess.
    - nonamenoslogan 6y ago
      I have similar recollection of ME, on my personal 333MHz Celeron with 128mb of RAM laptop it ran fantastically, never had issues and was stable and while 2000/XP were also stable, ME was fast compared to 2000/XP on the same hardware. Other people I know couldn't get past a VxD error on the first install, others couldn't get faster K6 or PIII's to be stable with it. It was a love it or hate it thing--my opinion of Vista and 8.0 are similar.
  - sjm-lbm 6y ago
    It was also preferred (by most people, at least) to Windows Vista, the product that usually shipped on PCs after it. It was an almost undeniable local maximum in Windows releases from the consumer side, which does make some of the fond memories make sense.
jhoechtl 6y ago
All true. But please do not forget the startup times which was almost an eternity to boot up. In a time without SSDs and no prefetch cache.
theodric 6y ago
You know you can turn off the theming shit, right? XP or even Win7 can look mostly like Win2k.
WalterBright 6y ago
> sensible information density I see this all the time. A great deal of whitespace, and the "meat" of the display is confined to a small subsection with scroll bars. One thing I like about HN is the focus on using the display for content, rather than decoration.
qubex 6y ago
The design of the GUIs were one of the reasons I got interested in two of the exotic beasts of the 1990s OS wars: BeOS and NeXT. BeOS was a deliberately “vapourwave chiselled look with 90s cartoon icons” that screamed F.R.E.N.D.S and Melrose Place and edgy or avant-garde typography in nineties magazines. NeXT on the other hand was austere, alabaster, eminently workable, but... so regular, so regular, so well thought-out, so utterly restrained and so internally consistent. Those were wonderful GUIs. They had no pretence of disappearing into the background. They had to be clear signage for generations educated in the age of text-mode (and sometimes even still coming from the tail-end of the “typographic age”).
- anthk 6y ago
  More like vaporwave, 90's were industrial and office design: something to make you feel productive. No 00's kid would understand this, we did. BeOS was a mix between the potential MS Office killer and the multimedia machine capabilities from the late 90's. No cyberpunk, no friends, no avant-garde. Just a boring office cubicle + multimedia production for artists. No, not for vaporwave music. Any music. Techno, classical, R&B, metal... anything. That, and video/image editing. The late 90's screamed "workplace", "multimedia" and the information exchange era. Brutalist and futurism. OFC Helvetica was mimicked from press, the media and press were HUGE back in the day, they had the same power as MS, Amazon, FB, Google and Netflix today. So we tried to clone magazines, VCRs, TV's, cubicles and stereos/radios in our computers. We succeeded. Trying to explain the 90's with "vaporwave" is ridiculous. Those could be maybe for the early 90's demoscene for PC/Amiga. They were as obsolete in late 90's as Windows 98 today. The late 90's were about replicating the mainstream media in your computer.
mostlysimilar 6y ago
Completely agree about Windows 2000. I keep hoping Microsoft will do a faithful recreation of the classic UI for Windows 10. I've tried to find community-built options but nothing gets it right. I don't mind XP's look so much, but I always switched back to classic style. I loved the ability to customize every color, font, etc. The rainy day theme is still my favorite.
kccqzy 6y ago
Windows 2000 always reminded me of brutalist architecture. It was efficient, functional, and worked well, but it wasn't pretty at all. This is probably a very unpopular opinion but I rather liked Windows Vista's design. It was still very compact compared with later designs, and it had a certain charm from its prevalent use of translucency. I disliked XP for the same reason you cited, and upgraded to Vista almost as soon as it came out, despite early Vista's instability.
- julianz 6y ago
  Once Vista became stable it was a really nice OS. I installed it for a parent at some point because that's what we had a license for, and was really surprised how fast and clean it was compared to Windows 8.
- kjs3 6y ago
  I like the brutalist comparison. And it's why I ran 2000 server as a desktop for a long time. I wanted efficient, functional and worked well...pretty was not gonna pay the bills.
- kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
  You could always revert XP to classic mode. That's what I do for Win7 VMs to cut down on resource requirements.
- int_19h 6y ago
  Vista was too bubbly and glossy, much like early OS X. Win7 had a fairly decent balance of shiny chrome and usability by reducing both of those, while still retaining enough visual cues to e.g. clearly highlight buttons.
- brnt 6y ago
  But, and I say that as a brutalist hater, W2K is then one of those more humane brutalist designs. Some detailing, rounded instead of sharp edges, a concrete that is ever so slightly warmed toned than basic concrete, nooks and crannies to break up long flat surfaces. I find flatUI far more brutalist in the way it disorients by removing and humane clues as to its structure and use.
thought_alarm 6y ago
I actually hated Win2K when it came out and tried to hold to NT 4.0 as long as I could, although I'm sure some of that was just youthful arrogance. If I recall correctly, Win2K was a lot slower than NT 4.0 on the same hardware, and it featured some really bad UI ideas, like menus that auto-hide advanced menu items. By the time XP was released I gave up the fight. The initial XP theme was just awful; clearly a knee-jerk reaction to the OS X Aqua. It's too bad. The MS Whistler prototype screenshots looked great. https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/whistler2257 https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/whistler2257 The later XP theme (Powerpack?) was half decent.
- Koshkin 6y ago
  Some would say even today that it was NT4 that was the pinnacle. There are many things that can be said, but indeed Win2k was a hog compared to NT4 while being a fairly modest improvement (despite all the new features like Active Directory).
  - UIZealot 6y ago
    I'm sympathetic to that point of view, I loved NT4 too. I really liked the warmer shade of gray in W2K, but to me the biggest improvement W2K had over NT4 was the ability to revert to the previous display setting if you didn't confirm the new setting. I remember one time setting the refresh rate higher than my CRT monitor could handle on NT4, leaving me with a blank display. I had to borrow the better CRT monitor from my boss's office so that I could go back to a lower refresh rate. Nowadays I only run Windows 2000 in a VM, and CRT refresh rate is no longer a concern, it may be worth considering going backing to NT4, as I'm pretty sure I can set the background to the warmer W2K gray in NT4. Thanks for the idea!
- ajtjp 6y ago
  I remember those menus. Office 2000 had them as well. You had a menu with the options, but there was also an option to expand the menu, which revealed more options, with a lighter gray background than the main options. It was an interesting idea about how to combat the problem of having too many menu items, but it wasn't great for discoverability. I can understand why it faded out.
freeflight 6y ago
> I'm still rather baffled about how people look back fondly on XP Imho that's probably based on Windows Vista setting the bar so low that, in contrast, XP looked like something rather good.

zozbot234 6y ago

You could also revert to the classic widget theme, even in Windows Vista and 7. And people absolutely did that - the classic theme was a lot leaner on system resources and visually clearer in many ways.

gruez 6y ago
It's sad that they got rid of it in windows 8 and later. >the classic theme was a lot leaner on system resources maybe, but it probably also made things run slower because it forces everything to be done in software rather than hardware. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20130327-00/?p=4833 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20130327-00/?p=48... >Starting in Windows Vista, a lot of visual effects were offloaded to the graphics card. Consequently, the impact on system performance for those visual effects is negligible, and sometimes turning off the effect actually makes your system run slower because you disabled hardware acceleration, forcing operations to be performed in software.
- sergeykish 6y ago
  Windows 10 is full of distractions, one time I thought my display was broken - transparency on title bar. And animations just add latency. Disable transparency and windows animations (Settings > Display > Show transparency on Windows, Show animations in windows). Also disable "Fade or slide menus into view". Much better experience and not much to offload.
  - vzidex 6y ago
    I just went through my settings on my work machine and: * Disabled transparency * Disabled animations * Disabled scroll-bars being auto-hidden Unfortunately, I couldn't find "Fade or slide menus into view", but the rest of the settings are night and day! Thank you.
    - sergeykish 6y ago
      You are welcome! I would not find myself: * My Computer * Right click * Properties * System properties * Advanced * Performance * Settings * Uncheck "Fade or slide menus into view" * Apply / OK
  - fomine3 6y ago
    I recommend to enable colors on Window Title Bar. It really improves visibility of foreground window.
- derefr 6y ago
  There's no real way to translate the classic theme "as designed" to hi-DPI systems, AFAIK; let alone to allow it to freely morph between desktop and tablet interaction paradigms when you dock/undock a two-in-one. You could in theory design a modern UI that resembles the classic UI, but it wouldn't really be "the classic UI". A large part of what makes the classic UI have the particular look it does is that it has custom constraint-layout logic for each control, the outputs of which are fed as parameters into the arbitrary hand-written GDI draw-call logic used to draw each control. Some of the more interesting controls have Turing-hard constraint logic, which just can't be replicated in non-Turing-complete constraint-layout systems like XAML or CSS. (You can get close, but it requires using huge hierarchies of layout nodes with tons of overhead, where the Windows UI actually got by with very few.)
  - zozbot234 6y ago
    > There's no real way to translate the classic theme "as designed" to hi-DPI systems, AFAIK The classic theme supports arbitrary sizes (in px or "device-independent" units) for both text and widgets, which addresses HiDPI and touch readiness. What it might have trouble with however is mixed DPI, where moving a window across two screens requires rendering it with different pixel densities. But that was not on the horizon in the Windows 8.x days.
    - ajtjp 6y ago
      Indeed, and there also is a DPI scaling option at least as early as Windows 98, on top of the text/widget size configuration. I've used it on a 1200p monitor connected to a Windows 98 box, and it works. It doesn't always produce the most beautiful results, but it's serviceable. And to be fair, it's taken a long time for high-DPI to consistently look beautiful even on recent versions of Windows. I shudder to remember looking at Device Manager on a display set to 125% in the DPI settings.
      - kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
        It was first available in Win95 Plus pack. Or you could use TweakUI.
- tomc1985 6y ago
  What's really sad is the classic widgets are still there -- you can see them occasionally in Win10 when the compositor glitches out. Weirder, MDI windows use Win7's classic\b\b\b\b\b\b aero basic styling, so apparently some of the Win7 styling is also still available. Another major annoyance: the resize area for a window is seemingly 1 pixel wide. You used to be able to specify a width and all windows would be bordered with it. I get that Win10 looks sleeker but did they really have to take that control away What really bothered me was that back in XP days it seemed that .theme files seemed really interchangeable save for MS signing. I remember downloading numerous theme files, placing them in the right spot, and installing a cracked themes dll, and they'd just work.
  - gruez 6y ago
    > What's really sad is the classic widgets are still there -- you can see them occasionally in Win10 when the compositor glitches out. I wouldn't call them "classic". They're closer to the "aero basic" theme from vista/7 than the "classic" theme that was available from windows xp to windows 7.
    - tomc1985 6y ago
      You're right. And it was definitely aero basic.
  - whywhywhywhy 6y ago
    >the resize area for a window is seemingly 1 pixel wide. You used to be able to specify a width and all windows would be bordered with it. I get that Win10 looks sleeker but did they really have to take that control away It's really a bit of a mistake, maybe a limitation(?) of the Windows UI system. I mean the border on OS X is 1px too but the resize area is about 8 pixels. Would love it if MS could do another spin on the deep details and just make it all work nice.
    - iggldiggl 6y ago
      >> the resize area for a window is seemingly 1 pixel wide. >> You used to be able to specify a width and all windows >> would be bordered with it. I get that Win10 looks sleeker >> but did they really have to take that control away > It's really a bit of a mistake, maybe a limitation(?) > of the Windows UI system. > > I mean the border on OS X is 1px too > but the resize area is about 8 pixels. Is it? My impression is that Windows behaves the same there, i.e. the border is drawn 1 px wide, but the full width of it is still available for grabbing, only it's being drawn invisible. If I hover my mouse over a window border, the cursor certainly switches into resize mode for more than just 1 pixel's worth of distance.
rasz 6y ago
Switching to classic theme in Win 7 turns off hardware compositor and disables Vsync for the desktop and shock horror the browser, at least on Intel integrated graphics laptop. Ugly theme or a vsync artifact while watching youtube, your choice.

mixmastamyk 6y ago

Yes, they forgot to mention the fantastic, intuitive, and functional GUI rivaled by Mac OS 9, Nextstep, OS/2, BeOS etc. This era was the pinnacle. While we've been thrown a few bones like start menu search, most of the gratuitous changes have been for the worse. Sleeker but harder to use for professionals. Gnome 2 was approaching Win2k but then made a hard turn into tablet/novice land. XFCE is in the neighborhood but never got to the level of Win2k. I didn't care for skinz in the 90's and instead of going away, every app now is a unpredictable skinned mess.

thaeli 6y ago
MacOS 7.1 was the pinnacle, imo. MacOS 9 had lots of the space-wasting pretty chrome we're decrying here in WinXP.
- duskwuff 6y ago
  Respectfully disagree. The Platinum appearance (which debuted in Mac OS 8, not 9) used roughly the same UI metrics which were typical for System 7 applications. It had to, as it was applied to all applications, not just ones which opted in! Beyond that... the system appearance used prior to Platinum was, simply put, crude. It was an outgrowth of a UI design which had originally been constructed for black-and-white systems with limited CPU power, and it wasn't especially consistent. It lacked standard UI elements for many controls which had become common, like dropdown menus, utility windows, disclosure triangles, or tristate checkboxes, forcing many applications to implement their own inconsistent versions of these items. Even for the UI elements it implemented, like buttons and checkboxes, its appearance was simplistic in the extreme -- buttons were black outlined round-rects; checkboxes were black outlined squares, etc. There was very little use of color or shading outside of window chrome -- most of the UI was black and white, just as it had been from the start.
- julianz 6y ago
  I loved old-school Macs but come one, you couldn't even resize a window by dragging an edge. I think we've moved on from that.

linguae 6y ago

Exactly. One of my annoyances with Microsoft's post-Windows 2000 design philosophy is its penchant for consuming large amounts of vertical space. This started with the large title bars used in the Windows XP Luna theme. I wasn't impressed with this "Fischer-Price" theme and always switched to the Windows Classic theme, which I continued to do even during the Windows 7 days. Next, Microsoft introduced the ribbon in Office 2007. I've since gotten used to the ribbon (which has spread to Mac versions of Office, albeit with traditional menus still existing), but I still prefer toolbars and traditional menus. Finally, Windows 10's interface is just gaudy to me, with its oversized title bars and its liberal use of whitespace. It's acceptable on a high-resolution display, but on a 1366x768 display (common on corporate laptops) Windows 10 just looks downright ugly to me. I find it interesting that during the past 15 years the industry has switched away from 4:3 displays to 16:9 displays (which seem to provide more horizontal space at the expense of vertical space), yet Microsoft's designs seem to consume more vertical space as opposed to horizontal space. Instead of ribbons, I prefer the horizontal inspectors that are found in macOS applications. On Hacker News I'm seeing more interest lately in the desktop UIs from the 1990s and 2000s. For example, the latest beta release of Haiku, an operating system inspired by BeOS, garnered a lot of attention. What I like about Windows 2000, macOS (both the classic Mac OS and Mac OS X), BeOS, GNOME 2, and other classic desktops is their utilitarian focus on design, where form and function are intertwined. UI design isn't about "the bling"; it's about providing a good experience to the user. Mac OS X's Aqua interface did a good job providing a compelling interface to users that was also beautiful. Unfortunately, some people only saw the "bling" and not the functionality behind the Aqua theming, and thus we've been suffering from fashion-driven UIs for nearly 20 years, a trend that has been made worse by the advent of mobile computing. Hopefully the pendulum will swing back to how things were in the 1990s; we can learn a lot from the human interface guidelines Microsoft and Apple published in that era.

sergeykish 6y ago
Screen space consumption was on the rise since Windows 1.0 days, there was a story recently [1]. Horizontal tiling mode become unusable [2] vs [3]. I think it traces transition from power users to casual. It makes sense, but there was no alternative. Screen become cluttered so much that most applications run on full screen only. And web become spoiled too - sticky headers everywhere (uBlock fixes this), wide content (media queries kicks in much narrower windows, Stylus to the rescue). Explorer (shell) decorations is much to blame. Do we actually need task bar, title bar, menu bar, tool bar, status bar, scroll bar? I do not think so - plenty of space and distraction free [4]. There are a lot of tiling managers on Linux, but Windows has its share too. Like dwm port [5] (never tried on Windows) though I prefer wmii and xmonad with wmii layout. [1] Windows Explorer Through the Years https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23487698 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23487698 [2] Windows 1.0 tiling https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/df/Microsoft_Windows_1.0_screenshot.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/df/Microsof... [3] Windows 10 tiling https://i2.wp.com/www.nextofwindows.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Show-windows-stacked-on-Taskbar.png https://i2.wp.com/www.nextofwindows.com/wp-content/uploads/2... [4] No decorations http://sergeykish.com/side-by-side-no-decorations.png http://sergeykish.com/side-by-side-no-decorations.png [5] DWM on Windows https://www.brain-dump.org/projects/dwm-win32/ https://www.brain-dump.org/projects/dwm-win32/

airstrike 6y ago

> I'm still rather baffled about how people look back fondly on XP, it looked like a toy for toddlers Agreed, yet somehow its Start menu is still better than what you get on Windows 10 these days: https://i.stack.imgur.com/rwZqf.jpg https://i.stack.imgur.com/rwZqf.jpg > ...installing the Zune theme was the first thing I did after a fresh install to try and tone it down. Everyone knows the best XP theme was Royale Noir! https://www.istartedsomething.com/20061029/royale-noir/ https://www.istartedsomething.com/20061029/royale-noir/

jimmaswell 6y ago
My favorite was always HmmXP's Mono Blue. There aren't many screenshots of it but it looks just like this subtheme: https://www.deviantart.com/fugacious/art/HmmXPnoC-10312376 https://www.deviantart.com/fugacious/art/HmmXPnoC-10312376
marcosdumay 6y ago
That's beating a dead horse. Anything is better than the Windows 10 start menu, with the only exception of the Windows 8 (and a Server version, don't remember what) (lack of) one... Or, maybe the Win8 one was better. It's a bit hard to be sure about this, but the first half of the comment stands.
- ajtjp 6y ago
  That would be Server 2012. Took me months to figure out how to restart it via the GUI. I actually came to like the 8.1 Start screen, though it took awhile. Basically my most-used programs are pinned to the start screen, so I can tap Windows, and use the mouse to select one, with a large margin for error. Or I can search based on the name of the program, and unlike Windows 10, it's only to match local items, and not include any web results.

anthony_barker 6y ago

NT 3.5.1 SP3 had all the internals - 2000 just added a new UI. Best if run on a DEC Alpha chip

edoceo 6y ago
NT4 and 2000 (NT5) were more than just UI. We added loads of features.

ogre_codes 6y ago

YES. Windows 2000 was also one of the most consistently designed versions of Windows. XP also introduced tons of design language chaos as they only migrated some of the UI over to the new controls and left big chunks of the OS to languish. I think Control Panel had widget rot well into Windows 10 (Maybe still has this issue?). I only grudgingly moved to XP and shortly after switched to Desktop Linux full time. > I'm still rather baffled about how people look back fondly on XP XP was the first consumer version of adult (non-w95 based) Windows. Relatively few people used Windows NT or Windows 2000. If you are one of the many people who's Windows use either started with XP or you went from W95 to XP, then XP was clearly the best Windows you've ever seen.

zozbot234 6y ago
XP introduced a "new" control panel arrangement by default, but you could easily revert to a simple folder view. Windows 10 is a mess today because of the overlap between the classic Control Panel and the new settings app, but there was nothing like this back then.
- barking 6y ago
  One of the first things I do is to pin the control panel and a couple of its icons to start so I can avoid the settings way of getting there.
  - vezycash 6y ago
    appwiz.cpl run this from RUN or command prompt
    - barking 6y ago
      I didn't know about that. As I have it set up though, I can hit the windows key and type 'fea' (from Programs and Features) and then enter.
    - martinp 6y ago
      I haven't actively used Windows for almost a decade, but appwiz.cpl (Add/Remove programs), devmgmt.msc (Device manager), services.msc (Service manager), diskmgmt.msc (Hard drive manager) and compmgmt.msc (I forget what this is) are still burned into my brain.

EvanAnderson 6y ago

I agree with the Windows 2000 UI being great, but Windows XP ran better for me. To get the best of both worlds I ran a spare copy of Windows Server 2003 as my "daily driver" on a Thinkpad back in the early 2000's. It had the Windows 2000 UI with the behind-the-scenes updates that came with Windows XP. Most software that installed on XP installed fine on Server 2003. It was nice.

ndespres 6y ago
I also ran Windows Server 2003 as my regular desktop OS for a few years. I got an evaluation copy in the mail at some point and just kept using it. Even with the extra overhead of running network services on it for my household, it was still more performant than Windows XP on that same computer.
- nix23 6y ago
  Hahah me too, problem was that no Antivirus worked because you needed the Antivirus-Server-version.
- ajtjp 6y ago
  I ran it for awhile too, on my laptop. I think that was back in my post-Vista try-all-the-other-options-out-there days, as I cannot remember what advantage it gave me that XP didn't have, but I do remember it being a pain to get set up for DirectX and other things that you generally wouldn't use on a server. Still, it did look cool to see my laptop displaying its "Windows Server 2003" screensaver in the library.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

octorian 6y ago

> I'm still rather baffled about how people look back fondly on XP, it looked like a toy for toddlers I think a big part of this is a combination of two factors: First, most non-tech people never ran Win2k. They went straight from 98/ME to XP. Second, no one remembers WinXP before SP2. (You know, when it was a complete trainwreck.) FWIW, when I was doing software development in the latter days of XP, I found that I actually liked the style of the UI widgets from the default theme. Its just the titlebar and taskbar styles that I couldn't stand. However, some size tweaks made them more tolerable.

erichurkman 6y ago
Windows XP even before SP2 was a _delight_ compared to the true train wreck that shipped on consumer PCs before it: Windows "Mistake Edition" Me.
- hyperman1 6y ago
  Windows Me was a strange beast. On some (most?) PCs it was an absolute disaster up to corrupting hard disks, on others it was a solid step up from win98. But you could never say beforehand how it was going to behave, even on 2 identical PCs. I never understood what triggered its abysmall behaviour. Oh well, who cares now, it lies in its well deserved grave, I guess.
  - nonamenoslogan 6y ago
    I have similar recollection of ME, on my personal 333MHz Celeron with 128mb of RAM laptop it ran fantastically, never had issues and was stable and while 2000/XP were also stable, ME was fast compared to 2000/XP on the same hardware. Other people I know couldn't get past a VxD error on the first install, others couldn't get faster K6 or PIII's to be stable with it. It was a love it or hate it thing--my opinion of Vista and 8.0 are similar.
- sjm-lbm 6y ago
  It was also preferred (by most people, at least) to Windows Vista, the product that usually shipped on PCs after it. It was an almost undeniable local maximum in Windows releases from the consumer side, which does make some of the fond memories make sense.

jhoechtl 6y ago

All true. But please do not forget the startup times which was almost an eternity to boot up. In a time without SSDs and no prefetch cache.

theodric 6y ago

You know you can turn off the theming shit, right? XP or even Win7 can look mostly like Win2k.

WalterBright 6y ago

> sensible information density I see this all the time. A great deal of whitespace, and the "meat" of the display is confined to a small subsection with scroll bars. One thing I like about HN is the focus on using the display for content, rather than decoration.

qubex 6y ago

The design of the GUIs were one of the reasons I got interested in two of the exotic beasts of the 1990s OS wars: BeOS and NeXT. BeOS was a deliberately “vapourwave chiselled look with 90s cartoon icons” that screamed F.R.E.N.D.S and Melrose Place and edgy or avant-garde typography in nineties magazines. NeXT on the other hand was austere, alabaster, eminently workable, but... so regular, so regular, so well thought-out, so utterly restrained and so internally consistent. Those were wonderful GUIs. They had no pretence of disappearing into the background. They had to be clear signage for generations educated in the age of text-mode (and sometimes even still coming from the tail-end of the “typographic age”).

anthk 6y ago
More like vaporwave, 90's were industrial and office design: something to make you feel productive. No 00's kid would understand this, we did. BeOS was a mix between the potential MS Office killer and the multimedia machine capabilities from the late 90's. No cyberpunk, no friends, no avant-garde. Just a boring office cubicle + multimedia production for artists. No, not for vaporwave music. Any music. Techno, classical, R&B, metal... anything. That, and video/image editing. The late 90's screamed "workplace", "multimedia" and the information exchange era. Brutalist and futurism. OFC Helvetica was mimicked from press, the media and press were HUGE back in the day, they had the same power as MS, Amazon, FB, Google and Netflix today. So we tried to clone magazines, VCRs, TV's, cubicles and stereos/radios in our computers. We succeeded. Trying to explain the 90's with "vaporwave" is ridiculous. Those could be maybe for the early 90's demoscene for PC/Amiga. They were as obsolete in late 90's as Windows 98 today. The late 90's were about replicating the mainstream media in your computer.

mostlysimilar 6y ago

Completely agree about Windows 2000. I keep hoping Microsoft will do a faithful recreation of the classic UI for Windows 10. I've tried to find community-built options but nothing gets it right. I don't mind XP's look so much, but I always switched back to classic style. I loved the ability to customize every color, font, etc. The rainy day theme is still my favorite.

kccqzy 6y ago

Windows 2000 always reminded me of brutalist architecture. It was efficient, functional, and worked well, but it wasn't pretty at all. This is probably a very unpopular opinion but I rather liked Windows Vista's design. It was still very compact compared with later designs, and it had a certain charm from its prevalent use of translucency. I disliked XP for the same reason you cited, and upgraded to Vista almost as soon as it came out, despite early Vista's instability.

julianz 6y ago
Once Vista became stable it was a really nice OS. I installed it for a parent at some point because that's what we had a license for, and was really surprised how fast and clean it was compared to Windows 8.
kjs3 6y ago
I like the brutalist comparison. And it's why I ran 2000 server as a desktop for a long time. I wanted efficient, functional and worked well...pretty was not gonna pay the bills.
kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
You could always revert XP to classic mode. That's what I do for Win7 VMs to cut down on resource requirements.
int_19h 6y ago
Vista was too bubbly and glossy, much like early OS X. Win7 had a fairly decent balance of shiny chrome and usability by reducing both of those, while still retaining enough visual cues to e.g. clearly highlight buttons.
brnt 6y ago
But, and I say that as a brutalist hater, W2K is then one of those more humane brutalist designs. Some detailing, rounded instead of sharp edges, a concrete that is ever so slightly warmed toned than basic concrete, nooks and crannies to break up long flat surfaces. I find flatUI far more brutalist in the way it disorients by removing and humane clues as to its structure and use.

thought_alarm 6y ago

I actually hated Win2K when it came out and tried to hold to NT 4.0 as long as I could, although I'm sure some of that was just youthful arrogance. If I recall correctly, Win2K was a lot slower than NT 4.0 on the same hardware, and it featured some really bad UI ideas, like menus that auto-hide advanced menu items. By the time XP was released I gave up the fight. The initial XP theme was just awful; clearly a knee-jerk reaction to the OS X Aqua. It's too bad. The MS Whistler prototype screenshots looked great. https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/whistler2257 https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/whistler2257 The later XP theme (Powerpack?) was half decent.

Koshkin 6y ago
Some would say even today that it was NT4 that was the pinnacle. There are many things that can be said, but indeed Win2k was a hog compared to NT4 while being a fairly modest improvement (despite all the new features like Active Directory).
- UIZealot 6y ago
  I'm sympathetic to that point of view, I loved NT4 too. I really liked the warmer shade of gray in W2K, but to me the biggest improvement W2K had over NT4 was the ability to revert to the previous display setting if you didn't confirm the new setting. I remember one time setting the refresh rate higher than my CRT monitor could handle on NT4, leaving me with a blank display. I had to borrow the better CRT monitor from my boss's office so that I could go back to a lower refresh rate. Nowadays I only run Windows 2000 in a VM, and CRT refresh rate is no longer a concern, it may be worth considering going backing to NT4, as I'm pretty sure I can set the background to the warmer W2K gray in NT4. Thanks for the idea!
ajtjp 6y ago
I remember those menus. Office 2000 had them as well. You had a menu with the options, but there was also an option to expand the menu, which revealed more options, with a lighter gray background than the main options. It was an interesting idea about how to combat the problem of having too many menu items, but it wasn't great for discoverability. I can understand why it faded out.

freeflight 6y ago

> I'm still rather baffled about how people look back fondly on XP Imho that's probably based on Windows Vista setting the bar so low that, in contrast, XP looked like something rather good.