Each version of Windows has had its upsides and downsides. My favorite in terms of looks and behavior is Windows 2000, and it's still in the top 5 when I think

Each version of Windows has had its upsides and downsides. My favorite in terms of looks and behavior is Windows 2000, and it's still in the top 5 when I think of desktop UIs that don't try to grab the user's attention. It was also much lighter on resources than XP, and didn't have poorly-animated dogs hiding behind the menus. But oh man, let me tell you, the first time I experienced one of the newer versions restart its graphics driver without losing state was magical. I can't remember how many hours I lost to blue screens with a stack trace deep inside some ATI/nVidia dll, and to this day I can get a kernel panic in Linux if I tickle the GPU the right way, but modern Windows has proper GPU driver isolation and they did it without wrecking performance. I wish it were somehow possible to run the pre-XP interface on the modern OS.