6 ms·

ReacOS is a testament to how solid were Windows 2000/XP's UI for everyday tasks. I wouldn't mind being back in a Windows env/shop with ReactOS.

chungy 6y ago
It's a real shame that Microsoft has seen fit to try to hide the ability to use the classic theme in Windows 8/10. There are ways to enable it again, but they tend to break on every update... The classic Windows 2000 theme has just the perfect balance of looking good, being totally usable, and not being overtly flashy.
- quietbritishjim 6y ago
  The classic theme doesn't use DWM sadly (at least it didn't in Windows 7, I assume it still true in 10). So it doesn't just change appearance but also how it performs: DWM offloads compositing from the CPU to the GPU.
  - userbinator 6y ago
    The classic theme is simple enough that it doesn't need GPU assistance (besides the usual 2D acceleration); and you get a noticeable decrease in latency from it: http://www.lofibucket.com/articles/dwm_latency.html http://www.lofibucket.com/articles/dwm_latency.html
    - vel0city 6y ago
      Gotta love when you cite a source which starts off with: > Note: These results are totally wrong.
  - inetknght 6y ago
    > DWM offloads compositing from the CPU to the GPU. That was actually a feature. I wanted to use my GPU for other things like gaming and rendering things I actually wanted to be pretty. The OS interface doesn't need to be pretty. It needs to be usable. The pretty and usable are usually conflicting goals.
    - nonbirithm 6y ago
      The issue is, at least when I tried it in Windows 7, without DWM you don't get Vsync. That means any video or game you play will have horrible screen tearing. I used to have a script to switch to Aero temporarily when I got fed up with it enough.
    - folkrav 6y ago
      > The pretty and usable are usually conflicting goals. That's a pretty bold statement.
      - inetknght 6y ago
        > That's a pretty bold statement. I use computers for 10-20 hours each day. I've come up with some pretty bold opinions based on actually wanting to improve efficiency of using computers. Someone else's ideas of aesthetics almost always conflicts with efficiently using the computer.
        folkrav 6y ago
        You presented it as a fact, not an opinion, thus my original answer. FWIW, as a general rule, I disagree: say you get to use two pieces of software with the same functionality, shortcuts et. al. for similar amounts of time, the first having 0 regard towards UI/UX, and the second having spent some time thinking about how it presents information and overall legibility. I'd be more than extremely surprised if most users couldn't possibly end up being more efficient using the second. However, sure, making things pretty for the sake of it tends to impede on usability.
        chungy 6y ago
        > FWIW, as a general rule, I disagree: say you get to use two pieces of software with the same functionality, shortcuts et. al. for similar amounts of time, the first having 0 regard towards UI/UX, and the second having spent some time thinking about how it presents information and overall legibility. I'd be more than extremely surprised if most users couldn't possibly end up being more efficient using the second. The Windows 95 through 2000 UI, I think, expresses the second idea perfectly. Rather than being clunky like older versions, they had thought put into how the layout and presentation looked. Granted, some of its qualities stemmed from needing to be renderable on a 386 in reasonable time, it still achieved something both visually appealing and productive. In contrast, whatever fad comes around to make buttons look like Play-Doh or glass or flat elements with no distinguishing features... they take away from it quite a lot.
- rob74 6y ago
  Maybe I'm a minority here, but I already used an alternative color scheme with beige backgrounds and dark red title bars (I think it was called "Brick") on Windows 95 because the various shades of grey looked too dreary for my taste. So I was happy to see that Windows XP kept the beige background and never looked back. Plus, under Windows XP an application that popped up with the "classic" styling was a red flag indicating that the developers didn't know how (or didn't care) to include a manifest file/resource to activate the "XP-style" controls...
ducktective 6y ago
I think you might enjoy Xfce from the GNU/Linux world.
- cheph 6y ago
  Can confirm, I loved windows 2000 UI and I'm now using XFCE. XFCE is of course better, just sad there is not more maintainers for it.
- theandrewbailey 6y ago
  I agree 100%, but you can go further. Like, all the way: https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95 https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95
  - afavour 6y ago
    Just looking at it I'm struck by how difficult it is to get the small details right. I don't even know exactly what's wrong but the spacing at the top and bottom of the title bar text is visibly wrong, and the menu bar is too high? I don't say it to be needlessly negative, it just amazes me how difficult this stuff can be. And I don't think I could actually use this, it would drive me insane for reasons I can't really justify.
    - theandrewbailey 6y ago
      For trying to reverse engineer a look, what has been done with this theme is amazing! I use it in a VM and on a laptop. Between higher resolution/PPI screens than CRTs that displayed this old Windows look, and familiarity with XFCE, the spacing doesn't look weird to me. For me, fonts are more important (and easier!) to get right than being pixel perfect, so I grabbed the real fonts from a Vista install DVD, and used those.
    - nitrogen 6y ago
      Part of it appears to be that the font descender may have been used for alignment/padding, rather than the baseline. Agree though, when something is so burned into your psyche, tiny differences create a really aggravating uncanny valley effect.
mhd 6y ago
As with many things, I think from a pure UI perspective every Windows/Office release made things worse. Win95 was pretty solid, even improved on a few things that they took from the state of art at that time (Nextstep, Classic Mac, OS/2). The Taskbar being a good example. I'm still not sure that the move from actual buttons on a button bar to just a flat series of icons was right, and many such changes happened after that (culminating in the horror of the ribbon bar). The big items Win2K/XP brought to the market was stability outside of the NT niche (I really enjoyed NT4). On the UI level, the downgrade continued, especially with that ugly blue standard theme and the bisque semi-rounded UI elements. But boy, would I like to see some "distro"-fication of that. And I'm not talking about just using different themes or "shell" replacements, but about putting the core parts to good use. It could be amazing to what some dedicated minds could do with COM, OLE, VCL and VBS. A much more modular environment, similar to what OpenDoc promised and didn't keep. (And maybe add some Amiga stuff) Not that my hopes are very high in that regard, as Linux and the BSDs didn't manage to do that either, despite having most of the technology and even doing some half-hearted attempts (CORBA was a part of early GNOME)… A Windows shop these days isn't that much different from any other enterprisey shop. Cloud, VM language, web UIs with enough whitespace to hide Moby Dick. Not that many of the smaller shops around that did custom desktop apps for small businesses. Oh, and as a final note: If you like the aestheticof 90s-ish Win, check out Serenity OS[1]. It's pretty awesome what they put together. A not slavishly POSIX-ish system with a Win95-like UI. Even the starts of a remarkably capable browser… [1]: http://serenityos.org/ http://serenityos.org/
- cies 6y ago
  > Win95 was pretty solid Win98SE was the peak IMHO. Nowadays I like KDE/Qt on Linux.
  - mhd 6y ago
    Note that I was only talking about the uniformity of the UI here. Stability-wise, every DOS Windows was pretty bad. Win98SE's toolbar were those big mozilla-ish ones, right, with both text and icon and no button border? Other than that, I can't remember anything distinguishing about the 98 UI. Were gradient in the window bars introduced with 98 or SE?
anthk 6y ago
Ditto with the 2.4x/2.6x kernels on Linux/ FreeBSD 4.x and KDE3 on top, with the first release of X.org. I am more like a Fluxbox + ROX guy, but if I had to choose a DE, KDE3 was rock solid and featureful, and you could disable Artsd just fine, dmix and OSS4 on earch respective systems worked well otherwise.

chungy 6y ago

It's a real shame that Microsoft has seen fit to try to hide the ability to use the classic theme in Windows 8/10. There are ways to enable it again, but they tend to break on every update... The classic Windows 2000 theme has just the perfect balance of looking good, being totally usable, and not being overtly flashy.

quietbritishjim 6y ago
The classic theme doesn't use DWM sadly (at least it didn't in Windows 7, I assume it still true in 10). So it doesn't just change appearance but also how it performs: DWM offloads compositing from the CPU to the GPU.
- userbinator 6y ago
  The classic theme is simple enough that it doesn't need GPU assistance (besides the usual 2D acceleration); and you get a noticeable decrease in latency from it: http://www.lofibucket.com/articles/dwm_latency.html http://www.lofibucket.com/articles/dwm_latency.html
  - vel0city 6y ago
    Gotta love when you cite a source which starts off with: > Note: These results are totally wrong.
- inetknght 6y ago
  > DWM offloads compositing from the CPU to the GPU. That was actually a feature. I wanted to use my GPU for other things like gaming and rendering things I actually wanted to be pretty. The OS interface doesn't need to be pretty. It needs to be usable. The pretty and usable are usually conflicting goals.
  - nonbirithm 6y ago
    The issue is, at least when I tried it in Windows 7, without DWM you don't get Vsync. That means any video or game you play will have horrible screen tearing. I used to have a script to switch to Aero temporarily when I got fed up with it enough.
  - folkrav 6y ago
    > The pretty and usable are usually conflicting goals. That's a pretty bold statement.
    - inetknght 6y ago
      > That's a pretty bold statement. I use computers for 10-20 hours each day. I've come up with some pretty bold opinions based on actually wanting to improve efficiency of using computers. Someone else's ideas of aesthetics almost always conflicts with efficiently using the computer.
      - folkrav 6y ago
        You presented it as a fact, not an opinion, thus my original answer. FWIW, as a general rule, I disagree: say you get to use two pieces of software with the same functionality, shortcuts et. al. for similar amounts of time, the first having 0 regard towards UI/UX, and the second having spent some time thinking about how it presents information and overall legibility. I'd be more than extremely surprised if most users couldn't possibly end up being more efficient using the second. However, sure, making things pretty for the sake of it tends to impede on usability.
        chungy 6y ago
        > FWIW, as a general rule, I disagree: say you get to use two pieces of software with the same functionality, shortcuts et. al. for similar amounts of time, the first having 0 regard towards UI/UX, and the second having spent some time thinking about how it presents information and overall legibility. I'd be more than extremely surprised if most users couldn't possibly end up being more efficient using the second. The Windows 95 through 2000 UI, I think, expresses the second idea perfectly. Rather than being clunky like older versions, they had thought put into how the layout and presentation looked. Granted, some of its qualities stemmed from needing to be renderable on a 386 in reasonable time, it still achieved something both visually appealing and productive. In contrast, whatever fad comes around to make buttons look like Play-Doh or glass or flat elements with no distinguishing features... they take away from it quite a lot.
rob74 6y ago
Maybe I'm a minority here, but I already used an alternative color scheme with beige backgrounds and dark red title bars (I think it was called "Brick") on Windows 95 because the various shades of grey looked too dreary for my taste. So I was happy to see that Windows XP kept the beige background and never looked back. Plus, under Windows XP an application that popped up with the "classic" styling was a red flag indicating that the developers didn't know how (or didn't care) to include a manifest file/resource to activate the "XP-style" controls...

ducktective 6y ago

I think you might enjoy Xfce from the GNU/Linux world.

cheph 6y ago
Can confirm, I loved windows 2000 UI and I'm now using XFCE. XFCE is of course better, just sad there is not more maintainers for it.
theandrewbailey 6y ago
I agree 100%, but you can go further. Like, all the way: https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95 https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95
- afavour 6y ago
  Just looking at it I'm struck by how difficult it is to get the small details right. I don't even know exactly what's wrong but the spacing at the top and bottom of the title bar text is visibly wrong, and the menu bar is too high? I don't say it to be needlessly negative, it just amazes me how difficult this stuff can be. And I don't think I could actually use this, it would drive me insane for reasons I can't really justify.
  - theandrewbailey 6y ago
    For trying to reverse engineer a look, what has been done with this theme is amazing! I use it in a VM and on a laptop. Between higher resolution/PPI screens than CRTs that displayed this old Windows look, and familiarity with XFCE, the spacing doesn't look weird to me. For me, fonts are more important (and easier!) to get right than being pixel perfect, so I grabbed the real fonts from a Vista install DVD, and used those.
  - nitrogen 6y ago
    Part of it appears to be that the font descender may have been used for alignment/padding, rather than the baseline. Agree though, when something is so burned into your psyche, tiny differences create a really aggravating uncanny valley effect.

mhd 6y ago

As with many things, I think from a pure UI perspective every Windows/Office release made things worse. Win95 was pretty solid, even improved on a few things that they took from the state of art at that time (Nextstep, Classic Mac, OS/2). The Taskbar being a good example. I'm still not sure that the move from actual buttons on a button bar to just a flat series of icons was right, and many such changes happened after that (culminating in the horror of the ribbon bar). The big items Win2K/XP brought to the market was stability outside of the NT niche (I really enjoyed NT4). On the UI level, the downgrade continued, especially with that ugly blue standard theme and the bisque semi-rounded UI elements. But boy, would I like to see some "distro"-fication of that. And I'm not talking about just using different themes or "shell" replacements, but about putting the core parts to good use. It could be amazing to what some dedicated minds could do with COM, OLE, VCL and VBS. A much more modular environment, similar to what OpenDoc promised and didn't keep. (And maybe add some Amiga stuff) Not that my hopes are very high in that regard, as Linux and the BSDs didn't manage to do that either, despite having most of the technology and even doing some half-hearted attempts (CORBA was a part of early GNOME)… A Windows shop these days isn't that much different from any other enterprisey shop. Cloud, VM language, web UIs with enough whitespace to hide Moby Dick. Not that many of the smaller shops around that did custom desktop apps for small businesses. Oh, and as a final note: If you like the aestheticof 90s-ish Win, check out Serenity OS[1]. It's pretty awesome what they put together. A not slavishly POSIX-ish system with a Win95-like UI. Even the starts of a remarkably capable browser… [1]: http://serenityos.org/ http://serenityos.org/

cies 6y ago
> Win95 was pretty solid Win98SE was the peak IMHO. Nowadays I like KDE/Qt on Linux.
- mhd 6y ago
  Note that I was only talking about the uniformity of the UI here. Stability-wise, every DOS Windows was pretty bad. Win98SE's toolbar were those big mozilla-ish ones, right, with both text and icon and no button border? Other than that, I can't remember anything distinguishing about the 98 UI. Were gradient in the window bars introduced with 98 or SE?

anthk 6y ago

Ditto with the 2.4x/2.6x kernels on Linux/ FreeBSD 4.x and KDE3 on top, with the first release of X.org. I am more like a Fluxbox + ROX guy, but if I had to choose a DE, KDE3 was rock solid and featureful, and you could disable Artsd just fine, dmix and OSS4 on earch respective systems worked well otherwise.