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I'll be the first to say the unpopular take on HN: I don't think Windows 95 looks that good (compared to today). I personally find more modern (like MacOS 10)

I'll be the first to say the unpopular take on HN: I don't think Windows 95 looks that good (compared to today). I personally find more modern (like MacOS 10) styles to look the best, and flat designs to be just as usable as more skeumorphic ones. It seems to me that preference for UI styles is completely personal, probably being influenced by what OS we initially used. As someone (potentially a lot) younger than many of those on HN, I like newer designs, and vice versa holds as well.

debo_ 5y ago
mynameismon 5y ago
Yup, I think we fall in a similar age group, and lack the nostalgia that most HN readers have. At the same time, flat design is objectively worse. Barely any indication as to whether something is a button or a text box or a label. Personally, I really like the path taken by WinUI3, since it addresses the UX concerns with a fresh paint of UI
- Shared404 5y ago
  > Yup, I think we fall in a similar age group, and lack the nostalgia that most HN readers have. > At the same time, flat design is objectively worse. Gonna jump in this boat as well, though I do actively search out older UI's and OS's to use.
theandrewbailey 5y ago
The default Windows 95 didn't look that great, but almost everyone agrees that 98 or 2000 are much better (at least they have gradients). But I'm not 100% old school, and I think that Windows 7 Aero looked good, too. I'm sad that someone decided that glassy transparent windows were an abomination and broke them all :(
- kitsunesoba 5y ago
  To me the biggest improvement that 2000 makes to the 9x look are the move to a lighter base gray, as well as changing the default desktop color from that funky teal to a much nicer blue. As minor as those two things may seem they made the OS feel more pleasant. But that may just be the classic Mac OS fanboy in me speaking. Mac OS never used particularly dark grays, so the almost-perfectly-middle-gray seen in 95/98 felt almost depressing in comparison.
  - rbanffy 5y ago
    95 copied more the NeXT than the Mac look. The grey is much closer, as are the button corners, an explicit rejection of the Windows 3 rounded corners. The NeXT greys made sense for the original cube, which was limited to black, white and two greys.
- anthk 5y ago
  I hated gradients on Windows. They looked as if the "stepped out" from the GUI. They broke the "3D layering" illusion.
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    Gradients would have looked bad with 8-bit color, which was still very much in use in the 1990s. Solid color was the reasonable choice back then.
    - theandrewbailey 5y ago
      Windows 98 didn't allow gradients on 256 color (8-bit) modes. You had to use at least high color (16-bit). (Win 95 didn't have gradients.)
DougWebb 5y ago
I originally used a ZX-81. Can't say I miss the UI.
- II2II 5y ago
  I grew up with a Commodore 64, can't say that I miss the UI either. That said, I recently learnt that it was possible to cursor up to a prior command/statement to edit and re-execute it (in other words, the screen was the history buffer). That's an awesome feature. It is also an illustration of how older user interfaces had some redeeming and forgotten UI features.
  - madphilosopher 5y ago
    I grew up with a Commodore 128, and it had two screen buffers---one for 40-column mode and one for 80-column mode. I remember listing some code on the 80-column side of things so that I could edit it there and insert it into the code I had over on the 40-column side. I felt clever that day.
FpUser 5y ago
>"I personally find more modern (like MacOS 10) styles to look the best, and flat designs to be just as usable as more skeumorphic ones." I am not familiar with MacOS styles. But from what I see on other platforms my problem with "modern flat" is not that it is in any way inferior by design. Problem is that the designers make for example clickable elements not any visually different than unclickable, make scroll bars that are impossible to locate, put light gray text on white background and lots of other demented things.
- projektfu 5y ago
  Even worse, they’re now intentionally using it for dark patterns, making buttons grey and disabled looking when they’re active, using links instead of buttons, making things clickable that shouldn’t be (and bringing up surprising behavior). Note that there’s no visual language, all bets are off.
eyelidlessness 5y ago
I’m a greybeard, my first OS was either DOS or some OtherDOS, my first GUI environment was System 7 (Mac). The latter was mostly flat other than some dithered shading mostly on icons, significantly flatter than macOS is today. Even with MacOS 8 which gained more depth in its design I always found Windows’ hard bevels through 2k/ME overstated, and when I did use Windows I’d do my best to configure it to be as flat as possible. So yeah I think early GUI exposure might be a contributing factor, probably moreso than age.
- anthk 5y ago
  System7 had clear widgets over flat menus.
- projektfu 5y ago
  System 7 added depth to things like title bars, and then there were extensions like Greg’s Buttons that went all in for apps that used the default controls. With system 7, finder icons went seriously 3D because it was finally allowed to have multiple icons for different color depths. The use of color or even grey was one place where System 4.2-6 had fallen behind Windows 3.0, even though the graphics hardware was more advanced. https://www.macintoshrepository.org/1644-greg-s-buttons https://www.macintoshrepository.org/1644-greg-s-buttons
- flenserboy 5y ago
  You're probably on to something with that. My tastes are such that I'd love a System 6 version of this project. 7 always felt wrong, like they were forcing something the hardware wasn't ready to do yet.
2143 5y ago
> I don't think Windows 95 looks that good (compared to today). Me neither. I dislike anything that reminds me of old Windows. Some people are the opposite — when they move to other platforms, they seek out things that look like old Windows so that it becomes supposedly easier to use (?). I like MacOS. I liked the old Unity. I like Gnome 3 except for the fact that it's consumes a lot of resources. I shy away from KDE even though I hear it's now more efficient because it reminds me of Vista from certain angles. And even though XFCE can be a little bit like old Windows, I like it because it's very efficient, and therefore I give it a pass :) . The no-bullshit DE. I've been on Gnome 3 for years now. However, I might switch to XFCE eventually because I tend to do memory intensive things.
- tannhaeuser 5y ago
  > I like MacOS. I liked the old Unity. I like Gnome 3 except for the fact that it's consumes a lot of resources. I shy away from KDE even though I hear it's now more efficient because it reminds me of Vista from certain angles. Same. Definitely don't like gnome/gnome-shell 3+ dropping the global menu, featuring a useless file picker, and overall just wasting a lot of space on my favourite notebook sizes of 13.3" and 14", though preferring dark themes I could see that gnome maybe wanted to get rid of those cheesy non-scaling, always-black-on-white icon menus as leftovers from the 90s. Regarding KDE (Plasma) though, I've learned you can customize the hell out of it to get back most of gnome 2 + Unity [1], so that's something I'm going to try next when I get around to it. [1]: https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/plasma-look-like-unity.html https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/plasma-look-like-unity.h...
dredmorbius 5y ago
I go the other direction: NeXT (WindowMaker), or good old twm.
jp0d 5y ago
I completely agree with you. I don't miss Windows and quite despise the UI. Even the modern one. I've been using Macs since several years and the only thing that comes close to a distant second is Gnome. I'm actually quite surprised to see how many actually like Windows 95!
lewiscollard 5y ago
My brain believes two things simultaneously: * that Windows 95 was the first GUI I used for any extended period of time and that I will naturally think it's the best one for this reason, for the same reason people tend to think things they liked when they were teenagers peaked when they were teenagers; and * that Windows 95 really did rule - to repurpose Hoare, "not only an improvement on its predecessors but also on nearly all its successors" ...and those two could fight each other all day. Taking off the rose-tinted glasses, I might miss the UI, but I definitely don't miss how unstable it was. 25 years on I can still rattle off a Windows 95 product key off the top of my head as a consequence of reinstalling it so often.
- rbanffy 5y ago
  > but I definitely don't miss how unstable it was We had NT4 with that same look and it was much better.
  - anthk 5y ago
    2000 was pretty much Windows 95 alike with the classic theme and the window colors to an ungradiented one, buch much more stable and compatible.
    - smilespray 5y ago
      As a Mac user, Windows 2000 was the first good non-Apple OS to use as a daily driver. I then ran a PC and a Mac side by side for several years, until OS X finally got into the groove.
IYasha 5y ago
I find it astonishing how Win/Mac UI divides people with different, opposite I'd say, mindsets. Really, way too often I see completely different people arguing over some subject who turn out to be Apple vs. Android users. Or mac/win users. Sometimes it's as vivid as than cultural or religious division. I could draw a psychological portrait of a typical representatives of these groups but it'll be a bit biased :) But the sad part is - they both fall into hands of evil corporations, who only pretend to give users a choice...
ogogmad 5y ago
What do you think of the shiny, glassy look of Vista and/or early MacOS 10? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Vista https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Vista and https://www.techradar.com/reviews/phones/mobile-phones/iphone-4-694980/review https://www.techradar.com/reviews/phones/mobile-phones/iphon... Looked "space age", and less like the drab office building which Win 9x/MacOS 9 looked like. Is there any nostalgia for that?
- BenjiWiebe 5y ago
  Yes, there is. Well, Windows 7's version of Aero anyways. It's my favorite UI in terms of graphics.
badsectoracula 5y ago
> It seems to me that preference for UI styles is completely personal, probably being influenced by what OS we initially used. My first GUI "OS" was Win3.1 and while i do have some bits of nostalgia for it, i do not think it is a particularly good UI. It is a bit better than Win95 in one element where they tried to introduce a consistency where every element that represented a command was supposed to have a 3D/bevel look while every element that was an input entry was supposed to have a 2D/flat look, but ultimately they didn't succeed completely (e.g. menus are flat even though they invoke commands) - and was ultimately abandoned once the "3d controls" were introduced (and later became the default style in Win95). However i do think that Win95 is among the best styles not because it has the most pleasing looks, but because it is the most visually neutral while at the same time being among the most functional. During the 90s there were even games that used regular desktop controls and it felt fine because Win95's style didn't really clash with them (well, unless the user customized it, but that was up to the user's choice).
- drewzero1 5y ago
  I was always annoyed by the apparent lack of consistency between flat and beveled elements in Win3.1, and liked 95 better for its relative homogeneity across the UI. Now I get why they did 3.1 that way! Thanks for explaining this.
anthk 5y ago
Well, Mac OS Tiger and Windows 95 are perfectly usable, but anything newer than Snow Leopard looks unusable. To me Amiga OS looks weird and "chaotic", but Windows 95 it's the perfect OS on usability, on par on Mac OS 6 and 7.
II2II 5y ago
> It seems to me that preference for UI styles is completely personal, probably being influenced by what OS we initially used. As someone (potentially a lot) younger than many of those on HN, I like newer designs, and vice versa holds as well. I agree that most of the preference is personal. I am not so sure on the age thing. I am likely on the old end of the curve here, yet mostly prefer the flat appearance. That said, there are a few elements of those old designs that I prefer. There are a few areas where those old interfaces shone: being able to distinguish between UI elements, higher contrast, consistency, and exposing functionality. That is to say: buttons don't need to be raised and links don't need to be underlined, but it is useful to know when you are looking at a button and a link.
mrweasel 5y ago
> I don't think Windows 95 looks that good (compared to today). Not doubt about it, the Windows 95 UI was never pretty, but I also don't believe that's why people like it... well, hate it less perhaps. As someone how got started with Windows 95, looking back at my options over the past 25 years, functionally Windows 95 was less terrible than some of the current options. Sure, macOS is pretty (and I do prefer that UI), but the Windows 95 UI was simpler, it had to be. Part of the issue, as I see it, is that we added more and more stuff to desktops as years has past us by, but how many of those features do I really use? There's absolutely nothing that I do my laptop today, that I couldn't do using a Windows 95 UI. On top of being much simpler, the Windows 95 UI is also consistent, much more so than any current alternatives. Finally, Windows 95 has useful hints all over, allowing you to actually learn how to effectively use the UI. Microsoft had to add these hints, because when it was release no one knew who to use their new interface. It's very clear that talented UX people where involved, most likely the last project ever to care about good UX, everything is downhill from 95. Bundle all that together, simplicity, ease of use and consistency, that's why people still care about the Windows 95 UI. It's not pretty, it was never pretty, but it is incredibly well designed, it has just taken some of us 20 year to come to that realization.
periheli0n 5y ago
> I personally find more modern (like MacOS 10) styles to look the best, and flat designs to be just as usable as more skeumorphic ones. Shouldn’t we separate looks from usability? KDE’s multifunctional search bar (similar to Spotlight on OSX) was a game changer for me. Every time I booted back into Windows (to play Anno 1602) I felt crippled. Never cared much about looks, but functionality like that is what separates a great UI from an OK one. For me at least.
drewzero1 5y ago
To be slightly obtuse: MacOS 10 is a really broad category, encompassing the last 20+ years of desktop Mac UI and including probably the peak of skeumorphic design. Personally I think Mac OS X hit its prime around 10.5-10.6 Leopard and Snow Leopard. But I know that's not everyone's cup of tea. :) When I was using Windows 95 (and 98) the first thing I would do was change the colors to try to make my windows and buttons look less like a bunch of sidewalk blocks. When XP came out I was excited for the colorful, plasticky theme, but it hasn't aged well. Even Vista/7's glassy Aero has grown old, but for me Aero is still the best standard Windows theme (honorable mention to Royale and Watercolor). I think you're probably 100% right about the personal preference being the key here.

debo_ 5y ago

mynameismon 5y ago

Yup, I think we fall in a similar age group, and lack the nostalgia that most HN readers have. At the same time, flat design is objectively worse. Barely any indication as to whether something is a button or a text box or a label. Personally, I really like the path taken by WinUI3, since it addresses the UX concerns with a fresh paint of UI

Shared404 5y ago
> Yup, I think we fall in a similar age group, and lack the nostalgia that most HN readers have. > At the same time, flat design is objectively worse. Gonna jump in this boat as well, though I do actively search out older UI's and OS's to use.

theandrewbailey 5y ago

The default Windows 95 didn't look that great, but almost everyone agrees that 98 or 2000 are much better (at least they have gradients). But I'm not 100% old school, and I think that Windows 7 Aero looked good, too. I'm sad that someone decided that glassy transparent windows were an abomination and broke them all :(

kitsunesoba 5y ago
To me the biggest improvement that 2000 makes to the 9x look are the move to a lighter base gray, as well as changing the default desktop color from that funky teal to a much nicer blue. As minor as those two things may seem they made the OS feel more pleasant. But that may just be the classic Mac OS fanboy in me speaking. Mac OS never used particularly dark grays, so the almost-perfectly-middle-gray seen in 95/98 felt almost depressing in comparison.
- rbanffy 5y ago
  95 copied more the NeXT than the Mac look. The grey is much closer, as are the button corners, an explicit rejection of the Windows 3 rounded corners. The NeXT greys made sense for the original cube, which was limited to black, white and two greys.
anthk 5y ago
I hated gradients on Windows. They looked as if the "stepped out" from the GUI. They broke the "3D layering" illusion.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  Gradients would have looked bad with 8-bit color, which was still very much in use in the 1990s. Solid color was the reasonable choice back then.
  - theandrewbailey 5y ago
    Windows 98 didn't allow gradients on 256 color (8-bit) modes. You had to use at least high color (16-bit). (Win 95 didn't have gradients.)

DougWebb 5y ago

I originally used a ZX-81. Can't say I miss the UI.

II2II 5y ago
I grew up with a Commodore 64, can't say that I miss the UI either. That said, I recently learnt that it was possible to cursor up to a prior command/statement to edit and re-execute it (in other words, the screen was the history buffer). That's an awesome feature. It is also an illustration of how older user interfaces had some redeeming and forgotten UI features.
- madphilosopher 5y ago
  I grew up with a Commodore 128, and it had two screen buffers---one for 40-column mode and one for 80-column mode. I remember listing some code on the 80-column side of things so that I could edit it there and insert it into the code I had over on the 40-column side. I felt clever that day.

FpUser 5y ago

>"I personally find more modern (like MacOS 10) styles to look the best, and flat designs to be just as usable as more skeumorphic ones." I am not familiar with MacOS styles. But from what I see on other platforms my problem with "modern flat" is not that it is in any way inferior by design. Problem is that the designers make for example clickable elements not any visually different than unclickable, make scroll bars that are impossible to locate, put light gray text on white background and lots of other demented things.

projektfu 5y ago
Even worse, they’re now intentionally using it for dark patterns, making buttons grey and disabled looking when they’re active, using links instead of buttons, making things clickable that shouldn’t be (and bringing up surprising behavior). Note that there’s no visual language, all bets are off.

eyelidlessness 5y ago

I’m a greybeard, my first OS was either DOS or some OtherDOS, my first GUI environment was System 7 (Mac). The latter was mostly flat other than some dithered shading mostly on icons, significantly flatter than macOS is today. Even with MacOS 8 which gained more depth in its design I always found Windows’ hard bevels through 2k/ME overstated, and when I did use Windows I’d do my best to configure it to be as flat as possible. So yeah I think early GUI exposure might be a contributing factor, probably moreso than age.

anthk 5y ago
System7 had clear widgets over flat menus.
projektfu 5y ago
System 7 added depth to things like title bars, and then there were extensions like Greg’s Buttons that went all in for apps that used the default controls. With system 7, finder icons went seriously 3D because it was finally allowed to have multiple icons for different color depths. The use of color or even grey was one place where System 4.2-6 had fallen behind Windows 3.0, even though the graphics hardware was more advanced. https://www.macintoshrepository.org/1644-greg-s-buttons https://www.macintoshrepository.org/1644-greg-s-buttons
flenserboy 5y ago
You're probably on to something with that. My tastes are such that I'd love a System 6 version of this project. 7 always felt wrong, like they were forcing something the hardware wasn't ready to do yet.

2143 5y ago

> I don't think Windows 95 looks that good (compared to today). Me neither. I dislike anything that reminds me of old Windows. Some people are the opposite — when they move to other platforms, they seek out things that look like old Windows so that it becomes supposedly easier to use (?). I like MacOS. I liked the old Unity. I like Gnome 3 except for the fact that it's consumes a lot of resources. I shy away from KDE even though I hear it's now more efficient because it reminds me of Vista from certain angles. And even though XFCE can be a little bit like old Windows, I like it because it's very efficient, and therefore I give it a pass :) . The no-bullshit DE. I've been on Gnome 3 for years now. However, I might switch to XFCE eventually because I tend to do memory intensive things.

tannhaeuser 5y ago
> I like MacOS. I liked the old Unity. I like Gnome 3 except for the fact that it's consumes a lot of resources. I shy away from KDE even though I hear it's now more efficient because it reminds me of Vista from certain angles. Same. Definitely don't like gnome/gnome-shell 3+ dropping the global menu, featuring a useless file picker, and overall just wasting a lot of space on my favourite notebook sizes of 13.3" and 14", though preferring dark themes I could see that gnome maybe wanted to get rid of those cheesy non-scaling, always-black-on-white icon menus as leftovers from the 90s. Regarding KDE (Plasma) though, I've learned you can customize the hell out of it to get back most of gnome 2 + Unity [1], so that's something I'm going to try next when I get around to it. [1]: https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/plasma-look-like-unity.html https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/plasma-look-like-unity.h...

dredmorbius 5y ago

I go the other direction: NeXT (WindowMaker), or good old twm.

jp0d 5y ago

I completely agree with you. I don't miss Windows and quite despise the UI. Even the modern one. I've been using Macs since several years and the only thing that comes close to a distant second is Gnome. I'm actually quite surprised to see how many actually like Windows 95!

lewiscollard 5y ago

My brain believes two things simultaneously: * that Windows 95 was the first GUI I used for any extended period of time and that I will naturally think it's the best one for this reason, for the same reason people tend to think things they liked when they were teenagers peaked when they were teenagers; and * that Windows 95 really did rule - to repurpose Hoare, "not only an improvement on its predecessors but also on nearly all its successors" ...and those two could fight each other all day. Taking off the rose-tinted glasses, I might miss the UI, but I definitely don't miss how unstable it was. 25 years on I can still rattle off a Windows 95 product key off the top of my head as a consequence of reinstalling it so often.

rbanffy 5y ago
> but I definitely don't miss how unstable it was We had NT4 with that same look and it was much better.
- anthk 5y ago
  2000 was pretty much Windows 95 alike with the classic theme and the window colors to an ungradiented one, buch much more stable and compatible.
  - smilespray 5y ago
    As a Mac user, Windows 2000 was the first good non-Apple OS to use as a daily driver. I then ran a PC and a Mac side by side for several years, until OS X finally got into the groove.

IYasha 5y ago

I find it astonishing how Win/Mac UI divides people with different, opposite I'd say, mindsets. Really, way too often I see completely different people arguing over some subject who turn out to be Apple vs. Android users. Or mac/win users. Sometimes it's as vivid as than cultural or religious division. I could draw a psychological portrait of a typical representatives of these groups but it'll be a bit biased :) But the sad part is - they both fall into hands of evil corporations, who only pretend to give users a choice...

ogogmad 5y ago

What do you think of the shiny, glassy look of Vista and/or early MacOS 10? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Vista https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Vista and https://www.techradar.com/reviews/phones/mobile-phones/iphone-4-694980/review https://www.techradar.com/reviews/phones/mobile-phones/iphon... Looked "space age", and less like the drab office building which Win 9x/MacOS 9 looked like. Is there any nostalgia for that?

BenjiWiebe 5y ago
Yes, there is. Well, Windows 7's version of Aero anyways. It's my favorite UI in terms of graphics.

badsectoracula 5y ago

> It seems to me that preference for UI styles is completely personal, probably being influenced by what OS we initially used. My first GUI "OS" was Win3.1 and while i do have some bits of nostalgia for it, i do not think it is a particularly good UI. It is a bit better than Win95 in one element where they tried to introduce a consistency where every element that represented a command was supposed to have a 3D/bevel look while every element that was an input entry was supposed to have a 2D/flat look, but ultimately they didn't succeed completely (e.g. menus are flat even though they invoke commands) - and was ultimately abandoned once the "3d controls" were introduced (and later became the default style in Win95). However i do think that Win95 is among the best styles not because it has the most pleasing looks, but because it is the most visually neutral while at the same time being among the most functional. During the 90s there were even games that used regular desktop controls and it felt fine because Win95's style didn't really clash with them (well, unless the user customized it, but that was up to the user's choice).

drewzero1 5y ago
I was always annoyed by the apparent lack of consistency between flat and beveled elements in Win3.1, and liked 95 better for its relative homogeneity across the UI. Now I get why they did 3.1 that way! Thanks for explaining this.

anthk 5y ago

Well, Mac OS Tiger and Windows 95 are perfectly usable, but anything newer than Snow Leopard looks unusable. To me Amiga OS looks weird and "chaotic", but Windows 95 it's the perfect OS on usability, on par on Mac OS 6 and 7.

II2II 5y ago

> It seems to me that preference for UI styles is completely personal, probably being influenced by what OS we initially used. As someone (potentially a lot) younger than many of those on HN, I like newer designs, and vice versa holds as well. I agree that most of the preference is personal. I am not so sure on the age thing. I am likely on the old end of the curve here, yet mostly prefer the flat appearance. That said, there are a few elements of those old designs that I prefer. There are a few areas where those old interfaces shone: being able to distinguish between UI elements, higher contrast, consistency, and exposing functionality. That is to say: buttons don't need to be raised and links don't need to be underlined, but it is useful to know when you are looking at a button and a link.

mrweasel 5y ago

> I don't think Windows 95 looks that good (compared to today). Not doubt about it, the Windows 95 UI was never pretty, but I also don't believe that's why people like it... well, hate it less perhaps. As someone how got started with Windows 95, looking back at my options over the past 25 years, functionally Windows 95 was less terrible than some of the current options. Sure, macOS is pretty (and I do prefer that UI), but the Windows 95 UI was simpler, it had to be. Part of the issue, as I see it, is that we added more and more stuff to desktops as years has past us by, but how many of those features do I really use? There's absolutely nothing that I do my laptop today, that I couldn't do using a Windows 95 UI. On top of being much simpler, the Windows 95 UI is also consistent, much more so than any current alternatives. Finally, Windows 95 has useful hints all over, allowing you to actually learn how to effectively use the UI. Microsoft had to add these hints, because when it was release no one knew who to use their new interface. It's very clear that talented UX people where involved, most likely the last project ever to care about good UX, everything is downhill from 95. Bundle all that together, simplicity, ease of use and consistency, that's why people still care about the Windows 95 UI. It's not pretty, it was never pretty, but it is incredibly well designed, it has just taken some of us 20 year to come to that realization.

periheli0n 5y ago

> I personally find more modern (like MacOS 10) styles to look the best, and flat designs to be just as usable as more skeumorphic ones. Shouldn’t we separate looks from usability? KDE’s multifunctional search bar (similar to Spotlight on OSX) was a game changer for me. Every time I booted back into Windows (to play Anno 1602) I felt crippled. Never cared much about looks, but functionality like that is what separates a great UI from an OK one. For me at least.

drewzero1 5y ago

To be slightly obtuse: MacOS 10 is a really broad category, encompassing the last 20+ years of desktop Mac UI and including probably the peak of skeumorphic design. Personally I think Mac OS X hit its prime around 10.5-10.6 Leopard and Snow Leopard. But I know that's not everyone's cup of tea. :) When I was using Windows 95 (and 98) the first thing I would do was change the colors to try to make my windows and buttons look less like a bunch of sidewalk blocks. When XP came out I was excited for the colorful, plasticky theme, but it hasn't aged well. Even Vista/7's glassy Aero has grown old, but for me Aero is still the best standard Windows theme (honorable mention to Royale and Watercolor). I think you're probably 100% right about the personal preference being the key here.