Windows 95 was a hard changeover for me from Workbench 3.x, but after the initial shock I actually liked it a lot better. Not needing to hold down the right but

Windows 95 was a hard changeover for me from Workbench 3.x, but after the initial shock I actually liked it a lot better. Not needing to hold down the right button to select things in the menus, the taskbar itself was amazing after flipping through endless screens using amiga-m and n. Being able to resize the window from any corner. High contrast UI components... It was all leaps and bounds better from a UX perspective. Sadly and disappointingly, Windows 95 was the apex of UX for desktop operating systems. After that, everything on the whole was just in systematic decline. Sure, there are plenty of things that could be improved over Win95, and things that did improve with later OS releases. Unfortunately the other baggage that came with it all wasn't worth the sacrifice. MacOS looks pretty, but there are too many things I hate about how it works because it keeps slowing me down or getting in the way. Now Windows is the same. It feels like we've gone from the renaissance of user interfaces to baroque, and now to unusable minimalist (dare I say brutalist?), all to stroke designer egos. Now I use Mac for work because I can only do certain things on a mac, and Windows for anything I can only do on Windows. But whenever I can get away with it, I just use Mate desktop. It's not the best, but it's fast, gets out of your way, works well with remote desktops, and has most of the important big ticket UI innovations (plus I can spin up hundreds of remote desktops using LXC).