4 ms·

Everyone seems to love the Windows 7 era but for me, Windows peaked GUI-wise with Windows 2000 and everything since then has felt like a poor 'skin' or misplace

Everyone seems to love the Windows 7 era but for me, Windows peaked GUI-wise with Windows 2000 and everything since then has felt like a poor 'skin' or misplaced 'theme' on top of something else. Windows XP's level of 'plug and play' for devices/drivers ushered in the modern OS feel from a usability standpoint, but from a 'get-shit-done' GUI and responsiveness standpoint Win 2000 (and up to Windows Server 2003 by extension) was all I ever wanted/needed. These may be rose tinted glasses though, and I'd be interested to hear counterpoints.

bananaboy 5mo ago
Yeah I agree too. I never understood the love for the win7 aesthetic!
pelagicAustral 5mo ago
Agree, that 2000/Millennium aesthetic was absolutely peak design and usability.
qsort 5mo ago
Same here, Windows 2000 is peak UI, I never liked the Frutiger Aero aesthetics. My only criticism is that it was, in a sense, too successful and elements like the taskbar and start menu got ossified and the design stagnated. Apple's F3 show all windows, F4 spotlight is far better. Windows didn't even get multiple desktops until Windows 10. I guess I like the design language but I wouldn't be prepared to give back the usability of modern UIs.
- anthk 5mo ago
  Frutiger Aero was never called like that. It was just a non-copycat gloss theme cleraly inspired from OSX' Aqua design. Even KDE3 did that for some time (Everaldo/Crystal icons, Keramik...) were rounded, glossy designs were hip and transparencies with XRender were everywere. Both desktops tried to create someting shiny without being too close to Mac OS X. TBH KDE has better themes like the Slick icon set and plain but contrasted widget and menu themes, kinda like the semi-flat theme from Office 2003 (was it the .Net theme?) or something like that, which was modern but not baroque and overloaded like Keramik or XP's silver theme with too many gradients. That style would modernized would be several times than the unusable flat themes from today. Kinda like Zukitre for GTK2/3/4 under GNU/Linux and BSD desktops (ad QT5/6 being set to match the GTK3/4 themes under the settings).
  - aleph_minus_one 5mo ago
    > Frutiger Aero was never called like that. Indeed, the term "Frutiger Aero" was not really used among geeks in this time; I had to look up Wikipedia to get its precise meaning: > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frutiger_Aero https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frutiger_Aero On the other hand, basically everybody who had an opinion about Windows's design used the official terms - Windows XP: Luna; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_XP_visual_styles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_XP_visual_styles - Windows Vista, 7: (Windows) Aero: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Aero https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Aero and Liquid Glass (though the latter is an Apple term): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_Glass https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_Glass - Windows 8, 8.1: Metro; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro_(design_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro_(design_language)
    - anthk 5mo ago
      In case of KDE3 Slick icons and the .Net theme, you can try it under almost any distro (and BSD) with Trinity Desktop. https://wiki.trinitydesktop.org/Icon_Sets https://wiki.trinitydesktop.org/Icon_Sets
- snozolli 5mo ago
  Windows didn't even get multiple desktops until Windows 10. I believe that it has always supported multiple desktops since the introduction of the NT kernel. There just wasn't any UI provided in the OS for switching. I used a Microsoft PowerToy to switch between desktops, I think all the way back to NT 4.0.
  - masfuerte 5mo ago
    I just checked in the 2003 Platform SDK and desktop support was added in Windows NT 3.51, which came out in 1995.
  - toast0 5mo ago
    I think there was a PowerToy for virtual desktops for Windows 95? And alternate shells like litestep could do it too. Maybe that was Win98?
  - lproven 5mo ago
    > I used a Microsoft PowerToy to switch between desktops, I think all the way back to NT 4.0. Sure, yes, me too. And there were 3rd party add-ons like 9Desks: https://www.hexagora.com/en_dw_9desks.asp https://www.hexagora.com/en_dw_9desks.asp But the thing is that they were significantly crippled, because the OS didn't know about them. So there was no way to move a window from one vdesktop to another. And for me, that is perhaps the principle use case. I start some app, realise it will take ages, so I move it aside to a vdesktop so it can keep working but doesn't get in my way. Without that functionality then you need to plan ahead, and you simply cannot always do that. My go-to example made me about £150. A non-techie consultancy client of mine ran Office XP. He wanted the service pack. MS offered it on CD, as it was back when broadband internet was very new. So when he got it, I went there and installed it for him. Step 1: it's a CD. It's only about 25% full. Microsoft, in its infinite idiocy, makes step 1 of the installer to copy the compressed files to hard disk, and then decompress them. IT IS ON A CD. Why ship them compressed at all? Because some idiot of a manager stuck the download version on a CD and didn't think to ship the decompressed files when on a medium with the space. Second, once decompressed, it starts to install. A progress bar gets to the end... and then resets to the start again. SEVEN TIMES. You know the real reason progress bars disappeared, replaced by throbbers? Because of poorly-implemented crap like this: programmers found they were too much like hard work. I sat there and watched the damned thing work for an hour and 45 minutes, and I charged my client for it, because that was my job and my living. You do not always know if running a tool is going to take 2 minutes or 2 hours. You can't always pre-plan and think "this will take ages so I will start it on a secondary vdesktop where it will be out of the way, and I will flip screens and check occasionally." You don't know. You can't know. And so you need the ability to move something out of the way. Secondly, because these things were hacks, some programs insist on only running on the "real" primary display. Some will open there even if you're on a vdesktop when you run them. Sometimes you run it 2 or 3 times because you have no sign this is happening -- the OS can't flip you back because this is outside of OS control. Yes it was there. Yes it worked in a minimal sense. No, it often was not much use at all.
- hulitu 5mo ago
  > Windows didn't even get multiple desktops until Windows 10. Being used with fvwm, i tried to use them in Win 10. Boy, it was such a mess. Keyboard shortcuts were horrible, overview of where your windows were was horrible.
picsao 5mo ago
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drooopy 5mo ago
I've lived through every evolution of Windows from 3.1 up to 11 and Millenium/2000 still remains my favourite and I will always consider it the most 'get-shit-done' UI that Microsoft has ever built. Up until W10 removed the feature, I used to turn off the Themes service so that I could get the classic UI back. And I also completely agree with your point that everything else since then has felt like a poorly placed theme on top of something else.
- irishcoffee 5mo ago
  Wait a sec. Windows 2000 was probably their best operating system. Windows ME was absolutely their worst. They were so different I’m not sure the entire company wasn’t swapped into the set of Severance (tv show) or something of that ilk.
  - shin_lao 5mo ago
    Windows 2000 is based on the NT kernel which is a complete different operation system. ME is Windows 3.x with a 32-bit hack on top of MS-DOS.
  - ch_123 5mo ago
    They were developed by completely different teams. As an aside - as someone who used ME back in the day, I feel like I honestly had more problems with Vista. ME was a downgrade from 98SE for sure, but I don't remember it being the same level of performance and reliability degradation that I saw going from XP to Vista pre-SP2.
    - lachiflippi 5mo ago
      Vista was fine from the get-go if you had enough (>=4GB) RAM, which OEMs mostly didn't bother shipping. My ME machine would reliably BSOD when I opened / closed the CD tray.
      - ch_123 5mo ago
        I had a big problem with BSODs caused by Nvidia drivers. Of course, you could argue that this was Nvidia's fault, not Vista's, but this was somewhat academic. I moved back to XP (and also started using Linux) and all these problems went away, and I got a lot more out of my RAM to boot.
blobcat 5mo ago
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ch_123 5mo ago
For me, search integrated into the start menu was a major quality of life improvement. Particularly the ability to hit the Windows key and type the name of an application. Strictly speaking, this was introduced in Vista, but I feel like Windows 7 added a lot of useful polish to the Windows Vista style of UI. I otherwise agree that the older Win 2k era UI was pretty much an ideal UI. The whole "frutiger aero" look did not age well.
- Timwi 5mo ago
  The Start Menu integrated search would have been real nice if it worked properly, but unfortunately they decided on some kind of “search” algorithm that can't even do a substring match on items in the Start Menu. I have no clue what the thinking there was, but it drives me to not want to use it.
  - rincebrain 5mo ago
    I think what drives me mad is its nondeterminism. If I hit Winkey and type a string, it should not be the case that I get different results from doing that 6 times in a row because it depends whether some background task which changes the results finishes first.
    - jve 5mo ago
      Yeah... sometimes it doesn't find anything. Anyways, this has pitched me towards app "Everything" I occasionally check whether after all these years MS has fixed the search... no, no surprise there. I get that it depends on indexing service which may be buggy, etc... but I guess it is possible to prioritize/have alternate index for most important stuff like executables. This bugs me the most: there is a program, but I cannot find it. I must know to navigate my way within start menu or program files (for stuff like debugging/perf tools from Microsoft) And given lots of comments there are on HN about Windows search, why no MS guy here silently sitting has escalated this "sentiment" to the correct ears? Oh please.
      - Gathering6678 5mo ago
philamonster 5mo ago
Booting win2k with under 10 processes running at startup and ~50MB RAM consumed was glorious. Updated Warp on a child's computer last evening and 7GB consumed at boot with W11 reminded me of win2k days and how much they are missed...
everyone 5mo ago
7 was the peak though cus it actually worked flawlessly.. In my experience earlier versions of windows were kinda janky and unstable.
andai 5mo ago
Looks like this mod supports the "classic" theme too. That was the thing I missed most in Windows 10. With the previous versions of Windows (I think up to 7?) you could still switch back to classic theme.
Borg3 5mo ago
Nah, its not rose tinted glasses. Win2000/Win2003 were amazing. I still run Win2003 because it just workz. GUI is great, it snappy, I have all the tools to tinker here and there.. Leaked SRC code helps tiny bit ;) Win7 wasnt that bad, you still could set classic GUI. If they only kept it like this and plow money to improve kernel...
- ConceptJunkie 5mo ago
  In 2012, I was working for a company that did all the development for its Windows clients on an ancient version of Visual Studio running in a Windows 2003 VM, and I discovered that the Windows 2003 running in a VM could transfer files over the network faster than Windows 7 running on bare metal. I feel like transferring files over the network has been horrible in Windows ever since. Transferring over USB was often horrible as well, but that seems somewhat better now.
wolvoleo 5mo ago
Yes for me too. Windows 2000 was clean and efficient. With not too much bling.
xg15 5mo ago
Out of curiosity, are there any good comparisons in-detail between Windows 2000 and present-day Linux? I do have the same feeling that Windows 2000 was in many regards the best UI (tied with 7 maybe), but after switching to Linux I'm wondering if this is maybe more rose-colored glasses than I thought. KDE or XFCE seem to mimic the Windows 2000 design in many ways, but they are still far away from feeling as snappy or as well-thought out than Windows 2000 did. They also paradoxically feel more "gray" than I remember Windows, even though the "grayness" of Windows from that era is sort of famous. So I'd like to know if this is really just nostalgia/muscle memory or if there are really specific things that KDE does worse than Windows did.
- d3Xt3r 5mo ago
  I can't speak about the grayness, but the lack of snappiness I think is thanks to the bloat and complexity of modern UIs. KDE in particular is a beast with a ton legacy code built up over the time, and a lot of bits and pieces put together by people from around the world, which results in a lack of cohesiveness... but that goes for most Linux DEs. XFCE comes a bit closer to the old UX and cohesiveness, but is still a bit off. In saying that, Chicago95[1] for XFCE does a really great job of bringing that classic Win9X look to XFCE, so it's worth giving a shot. There's also a fork of it called MENT2K[2], which recreates the Win2K experience, also worth checking out. The DEs I've seen being closest to recreating that classic experience have unfortunately been outside of Linux: ReactOS being the most obvious choice, and the other one being SerenityOS. Although not viable for daily driving yet, still fun to play around with in a VM. [1] https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95/ https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95/ [2] https://github.com/User738git/MENT2K https://github.com/User738git/MENT2K
  - xg15 5mo ago
    Thanks a lot for the writeup and all the pointers. Yeah, I think incoherence might play a role here. Will definitely check out those themes and have a look at ReactOS (what I wanted to anyway but was procrastinating)
- ndiddy 5mo ago
  > KDE or XFCE seem to mimic the Windows 2000 design in many ways, but they are still far away from feeling as snappy or as well-thought out than Windows 2000 did. They also paradoxically feel more "gray" than I remember Windows, even though the "grayness" of Windows from that era is sort of famous. I haven't used XFCE, but you can attribute the lack of snappiness in KDE compared to early Windows to compositing and having more animations. There's not much you can do about compositing, it's kind of necessary on high resolution computers, but Wayland latency has been getting better and if you use a recent distro like Fedora it feels about the same as Windows 7 with compositing enabled. For animations, you can speed them up or disable them entirely using the "global animation speed" slider in the settings. For the grayness, you can re-enable colored window titlebars in the settings by going to "Colors & themes" -> "Colors" and then selecting "Breeze Classic". I don't know why they have them disabled by default.
mapontosevenths 5mo ago
I used to start with 2000 server (so I could RDP) and then install something like Aston Shell to make it customizable and beautiful. I miss the days when windows was a platform you could extend and customize.
- d3Xt3r 5mo ago
  Same, but blackbox (bb4win) was my shell of choice. Along with the Win32 Unix tools, Conemu, xyplorer and shell32.dll icon replacements, my Windows back then looked and behaved very similar to a Fluxbox/OpenBox Linux install. I also recall this 3D shell where your desktop was basically like an first-person shooter, where there would be a literal desk with files that you could click on, a media wall that would display your photos and so on. I forgot what it was called, but it was one of the coolest things ever. In reality it wasn't very practical, but it was still cool. I miss those days of crazy mods and customisation. Everything so locked up and dumbed down these days, in the name of "security".
  - mapontosevenths 5mo ago
    I loved bb4win, and used whenever I wanted FAST (boy was it). I used Blackbox on FreeBSD for the longest time so it was nice to have similar experiences. We used to have highly optimized C code. Now the freakin' start menu is a progressive web app that runs react components because even Microsoft hates developing in WinUI. Madness.
  - scrlk 5mo ago
    > I also recall this 3D shell where your desktop was basically like an first-person shooter, where there would be a literal desk with files that you could click on, a media wall that would display your photos and so on. Was it Task Gallery from Microsoft Research? https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/the-task-gallery-a-3d-window-manager/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/the-tas... https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/332040.332482 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/332040.332482
heresie-dabord 5mo ago
"Peak Windows GUI" and "Peak GUI" are two separate things. For "Peak Windows GUI", MW10 and MW11 both score high in my opinion, but the changes in Start Menu behaviour in MW11 and the horrible "Show more options" sub-menu in the MW11 right-click context menu are confusing. So I'll give MW10 the advantage for consistency and less insult to the principle of Least Surprise. For Peak GUI, I would say there's a tie. An Android device with Desktop Mode is just hard to beat for multi-context usability. Early OS X looked great and had mature GUI ideas. And my daily Linux box with the Sway tiling window manager is the right combination of mouse gestures and keyboard power.
- FuriouslyAdrift 5mo ago
  I still dream about a world where we ended up with BeOS instead of OS X. Fastest and lowest latency UI I have ever seen.
xattt 5mo ago
Y’all forgetting that Windows XP (and up to 7) had the classic boxy theme. It was just a menu toggle away in Display Properties. The difference was the Windows icon in the Start menu.
hoistbypetard 5mo ago
I agree. I rode Server 2003, then after that Server 2008 (which kept most of the 2000-era gui, though the start menu got more vista-shaped) for my Windows development desktop machine for as long as I could. By the time Server 2008 reached end-of-support, I didn't need a Windows development box anymore, and my only contact with Windows has been sporadic, but feels like a distinct downgrade. I've had VMs of each major desktop version for odd small tasks, and have been grateful not to need to spend a lot of time using them.
nixass 5mo ago
7 is better than anything coming after it. Microsoft finally figured out the design, no ads embedded into every corner, no app store, no integration of every MS service into it. Earlier than 7 versions can be discussed in terms of if they match or surpass 7 or not but for myself it was MS' pinnacle in OS design
Dwedit 5mo ago
I'm a big fan of the Windows XP Royale theme (from Media Center Edition). Like regular XP, but glossier and shinier.
shin_lao 5mo ago
Windows 2000 was such a major improvement over NT4 and of course 9x that yes, you're right, it was awesome, but it still had issues and in terms of device drivers future versions brought a lot of things that improved overall stability. I think the best benefit of Windows 2000 was that the GUI was extremely coherent. Even in Windows 11 for some sub menu and options you sometimes have a Windows 2000 UI popping up out of nowhere.
- ConceptJunkie 5mo ago
  26 years. You'd think they could update and unify the UI in 26 years. But they would have to care first.
  - shin_lao 5mo ago
    I think it's a backward compatibility problem.
  - hulitu 5mo ago
    They could, but they change their mind every couple of years. It is a generic problem in SW development. See CADT.
cosmic_cheese 5mo ago
As much as I appreciate the classic Win9X look, I also like some more modern features like full bit depth alpha blending and anti-aliasing. I actually like the Win7 version of Aero, but the real unlock of these features is the third party themes it enables. There were some really nice 7 themes that hold up even now.
ConceptJunkie 5mo ago
Windows 7 was the best Windows and one of the reasons was that you could still have the Windows 2000 GUI, the "Classic" theme. That was peak Windows. I'm so disappointed that all those years later, the Windows UI is literally less configurable than Windows 2.1, which is the earliest version I used. Yeah, I don't miss 16-color mode, but I definitely miss that you had so much flexibility to tweak the UI. Now you're just stuck with some art-school dropout's idea of "flat UI" (seeing as how Microsoft has thrown out most of the great HCI work they, IBM, and others did in the 1980s, in favor of lame aesthetics that are entirely orthogonal to usability) and there's almost nothing meaningful you can change about it.
dataflow 5mo ago
Every Windows up to 7 let you pick the classic UI if you preferred that, though, right?
lproven 5mo ago
> Windows peaked GUI-wise with Windows 2000 and everything since then has felt like a poor 'skin' or misplaced 'theme' on top of something else. I agree. But it's all relative, and I did actually like how Win7 looked. Then "flat design" came along and not only did things get visually boring, nowadays, it's frequently very hard to tell fields from buttons from other controls, where you're supposed or allowed to click and where it's just decoration, etc. It was a mercy on KDE Plasma: KDE has always been at best plain and homely, but at worst, retina-searingly fugly, IMHO. Flat design at least tamed that. But on everything else, it's worse than what went before. Win10 LTSC is now my version of choice. I rarely use Windows -- I mainly use macOS and Linux and am exploring BSD -- but when I need to, it's Win10. Win11 is worse than WinME and Vista put together. If this can make Win10 look like Win7, I'm interested.
xnx 5mo ago
You're correct. Everything in the Windows 2000 GUI served a purpose. Hard to think of any changes after that that weren't just decoration and styling.

bananaboy 5mo ago

Yeah I agree too. I never understood the love for the win7 aesthetic!

pelagicAustral 5mo ago

Agree, that 2000/Millennium aesthetic was absolutely peak design and usability.

qsort 5mo ago

Same here, Windows 2000 is peak UI, I never liked the Frutiger Aero aesthetics. My only criticism is that it was, in a sense, too successful and elements like the taskbar and start menu got ossified and the design stagnated. Apple's F3 show all windows, F4 spotlight is far better. Windows didn't even get multiple desktops until Windows 10. I guess I like the design language but I wouldn't be prepared to give back the usability of modern UIs.

anthk 5mo ago
Frutiger Aero was never called like that. It was just a non-copycat gloss theme cleraly inspired from OSX' Aqua design. Even KDE3 did that for some time (Everaldo/Crystal icons, Keramik...) were rounded, glossy designs were hip and transparencies with XRender were everywere. Both desktops tried to create someting shiny without being too close to Mac OS X. TBH KDE has better themes like the Slick icon set and plain but contrasted widget and menu themes, kinda like the semi-flat theme from Office 2003 (was it the .Net theme?) or something like that, which was modern but not baroque and overloaded like Keramik or XP's silver theme with too many gradients. That style would modernized would be several times than the unusable flat themes from today. Kinda like Zukitre for GTK2/3/4 under GNU/Linux and BSD desktops (ad QT5/6 being set to match the GTK3/4 themes under the settings).
- aleph_minus_one 5mo ago
  > Frutiger Aero was never called like that. Indeed, the term "Frutiger Aero" was not really used among geeks in this time; I had to look up Wikipedia to get its precise meaning: > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frutiger_Aero https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frutiger_Aero On the other hand, basically everybody who had an opinion about Windows's design used the official terms - Windows XP: Luna; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_XP_visual_styles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_XP_visual_styles - Windows Vista, 7: (Windows) Aero: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Aero https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Aero and Liquid Glass (though the latter is an Apple term): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_Glass https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_Glass - Windows 8, 8.1: Metro; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro_(design_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro_(design_language)
  - anthk 5mo ago
    In case of KDE3 Slick icons and the .Net theme, you can try it under almost any distro (and BSD) with Trinity Desktop. https://wiki.trinitydesktop.org/Icon_Sets https://wiki.trinitydesktop.org/Icon_Sets
snozolli 5mo ago
Windows didn't even get multiple desktops until Windows 10. I believe that it has always supported multiple desktops since the introduction of the NT kernel. There just wasn't any UI provided in the OS for switching. I used a Microsoft PowerToy to switch between desktops, I think all the way back to NT 4.0.
- masfuerte 5mo ago
  I just checked in the 2003 Platform SDK and desktop support was added in Windows NT 3.51, which came out in 1995.
- toast0 5mo ago
  I think there was a PowerToy for virtual desktops for Windows 95? And alternate shells like litestep could do it too. Maybe that was Win98?
- lproven 5mo ago
  > I used a Microsoft PowerToy to switch between desktops, I think all the way back to NT 4.0. Sure, yes, me too. And there were 3rd party add-ons like 9Desks: https://www.hexagora.com/en_dw_9desks.asp https://www.hexagora.com/en_dw_9desks.asp But the thing is that they were significantly crippled, because the OS didn't know about them. So there was no way to move a window from one vdesktop to another. And for me, that is perhaps the principle use case. I start some app, realise it will take ages, so I move it aside to a vdesktop so it can keep working but doesn't get in my way. Without that functionality then you need to plan ahead, and you simply cannot always do that. My go-to example made me about £150. A non-techie consultancy client of mine ran Office XP. He wanted the service pack. MS offered it on CD, as it was back when broadband internet was very new. So when he got it, I went there and installed it for him. Step 1: it's a CD. It's only about 25% full. Microsoft, in its infinite idiocy, makes step 1 of the installer to copy the compressed files to hard disk, and then decompress them. IT IS ON A CD. Why ship them compressed at all? Because some idiot of a manager stuck the download version on a CD and didn't think to ship the decompressed files when on a medium with the space. Second, once decompressed, it starts to install. A progress bar gets to the end... and then resets to the start again. SEVEN TIMES. You know the real reason progress bars disappeared, replaced by throbbers? Because of poorly-implemented crap like this: programmers found they were too much like hard work. I sat there and watched the damned thing work for an hour and 45 minutes, and I charged my client for it, because that was my job and my living. You do not always know if running a tool is going to take 2 minutes or 2 hours. You can't always pre-plan and think "this will take ages so I will start it on a secondary vdesktop where it will be out of the way, and I will flip screens and check occasionally." You don't know. You can't know. And so you need the ability to move something out of the way. Secondly, because these things were hacks, some programs insist on only running on the "real" primary display. Some will open there even if you're on a vdesktop when you run them. Sometimes you run it 2 or 3 times because you have no sign this is happening -- the OS can't flip you back because this is outside of OS control. Yes it was there. Yes it worked in a minimal sense. No, it often was not much use at all.
hulitu 5mo ago
> Windows didn't even get multiple desktops until Windows 10. Being used with fvwm, i tried to use them in Win 10. Boy, it was such a mess. Keyboard shortcuts were horrible, overview of where your windows were was horrible.

picsao 5mo ago

[dead]

drooopy 5mo ago

I've lived through every evolution of Windows from 3.1 up to 11 and Millenium/2000 still remains my favourite and I will always consider it the most 'get-shit-done' UI that Microsoft has ever built. Up until W10 removed the feature, I used to turn off the Themes service so that I could get the classic UI back. And I also completely agree with your point that everything else since then has felt like a poorly placed theme on top of something else.

irishcoffee 5mo ago
Wait a sec. Windows 2000 was probably their best operating system. Windows ME was absolutely their worst. They were so different I’m not sure the entire company wasn’t swapped into the set of Severance (tv show) or something of that ilk.
- shin_lao 5mo ago
  Windows 2000 is based on the NT kernel which is a complete different operation system. ME is Windows 3.x with a 32-bit hack on top of MS-DOS.
- ch_123 5mo ago
  They were developed by completely different teams. As an aside - as someone who used ME back in the day, I feel like I honestly had more problems with Vista. ME was a downgrade from 98SE for sure, but I don't remember it being the same level of performance and reliability degradation that I saw going from XP to Vista pre-SP2.
  - lachiflippi 5mo ago
    Vista was fine from the get-go if you had enough (>=4GB) RAM, which OEMs mostly didn't bother shipping. My ME machine would reliably BSOD when I opened / closed the CD tray.
    - ch_123 5mo ago
      I had a big problem with BSODs caused by Nvidia drivers. Of course, you could argue that this was Nvidia's fault, not Vista's, but this was somewhat academic. I moved back to XP (and also started using Linux) and all these problems went away, and I got a lot more out of my RAM to boot.

blobcat 5mo ago

[dead]

ch_123 5mo ago

For me, search integrated into the start menu was a major quality of life improvement. Particularly the ability to hit the Windows key and type the name of an application. Strictly speaking, this was introduced in Vista, but I feel like Windows 7 added a lot of useful polish to the Windows Vista style of UI. I otherwise agree that the older Win 2k era UI was pretty much an ideal UI. The whole "frutiger aero" look did not age well.

Timwi 5mo ago
The Start Menu integrated search would have been real nice if it worked properly, but unfortunately they decided on some kind of “search” algorithm that can't even do a substring match on items in the Start Menu. I have no clue what the thinking there was, but it drives me to not want to use it.
- rincebrain 5mo ago
  I think what drives me mad is its nondeterminism. If I hit Winkey and type a string, it should not be the case that I get different results from doing that 6 times in a row because it depends whether some background task which changes the results finishes first.
  - jve 5mo ago
    Yeah... sometimes it doesn't find anything. Anyways, this has pitched me towards app "Everything" I occasionally check whether after all these years MS has fixed the search... no, no surprise there. I get that it depends on indexing service which may be buggy, etc... but I guess it is possible to prioritize/have alternate index for most important stuff like executables. This bugs me the most: there is a program, but I cannot find it. I must know to navigate my way within start menu or program files (for stuff like debugging/perf tools from Microsoft) And given lots of comments there are on HN about Windows search, why no MS guy here silently sitting has escalated this "sentiment" to the correct ears? Oh please.
    - Gathering6678 5mo ago

philamonster 5mo ago

Booting win2k with under 10 processes running at startup and ~50MB RAM consumed was glorious. Updated Warp on a child's computer last evening and 7GB consumed at boot with W11 reminded me of win2k days and how much they are missed...

everyone 5mo ago

7 was the peak though cus it actually worked flawlessly.. In my experience earlier versions of windows were kinda janky and unstable.

andai 5mo ago

Looks like this mod supports the "classic" theme too. That was the thing I missed most in Windows 10. With the previous versions of Windows (I think up to 7?) you could still switch back to classic theme.

Borg3 5mo ago

Nah, its not rose tinted glasses. Win2000/Win2003 were amazing. I still run Win2003 because it just workz. GUI is great, it snappy, I have all the tools to tinker here and there.. Leaked SRC code helps tiny bit ;) Win7 wasnt that bad, you still could set classic GUI. If they only kept it like this and plow money to improve kernel...

ConceptJunkie 5mo ago
In 2012, I was working for a company that did all the development for its Windows clients on an ancient version of Visual Studio running in a Windows 2003 VM, and I discovered that the Windows 2003 running in a VM could transfer files over the network faster than Windows 7 running on bare metal. I feel like transferring files over the network has been horrible in Windows ever since. Transferring over USB was often horrible as well, but that seems somewhat better now.

wolvoleo 5mo ago

Yes for me too. Windows 2000 was clean and efficient. With not too much bling.

xg15 5mo ago

Out of curiosity, are there any good comparisons in-detail between Windows 2000 and present-day Linux? I do have the same feeling that Windows 2000 was in many regards the best UI (tied with 7 maybe), but after switching to Linux I'm wondering if this is maybe more rose-colored glasses than I thought. KDE or XFCE seem to mimic the Windows 2000 design in many ways, but they are still far away from feeling as snappy or as well-thought out than Windows 2000 did. They also paradoxically feel more "gray" than I remember Windows, even though the "grayness" of Windows from that era is sort of famous. So I'd like to know if this is really just nostalgia/muscle memory or if there are really specific things that KDE does worse than Windows did.

d3Xt3r 5mo ago
I can't speak about the grayness, but the lack of snappiness I think is thanks to the bloat and complexity of modern UIs. KDE in particular is a beast with a ton legacy code built up over the time, and a lot of bits and pieces put together by people from around the world, which results in a lack of cohesiveness... but that goes for most Linux DEs. XFCE comes a bit closer to the old UX and cohesiveness, but is still a bit off. In saying that, Chicago95[1] for XFCE does a really great job of bringing that classic Win9X look to XFCE, so it's worth giving a shot. There's also a fork of it called MENT2K[2], which recreates the Win2K experience, also worth checking out. The DEs I've seen being closest to recreating that classic experience have unfortunately been outside of Linux: ReactOS being the most obvious choice, and the other one being SerenityOS. Although not viable for daily driving yet, still fun to play around with in a VM. [1] https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95/ https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95/ [2] https://github.com/User738git/MENT2K https://github.com/User738git/MENT2K
- xg15 5mo ago
  Thanks a lot for the writeup and all the pointers. Yeah, I think incoherence might play a role here. Will definitely check out those themes and have a look at ReactOS (what I wanted to anyway but was procrastinating)
ndiddy 5mo ago
> KDE or XFCE seem to mimic the Windows 2000 design in many ways, but they are still far away from feeling as snappy or as well-thought out than Windows 2000 did. They also paradoxically feel more "gray" than I remember Windows, even though the "grayness" of Windows from that era is sort of famous. I haven't used XFCE, but you can attribute the lack of snappiness in KDE compared to early Windows to compositing and having more animations. There's not much you can do about compositing, it's kind of necessary on high resolution computers, but Wayland latency has been getting better and if you use a recent distro like Fedora it feels about the same as Windows 7 with compositing enabled. For animations, you can speed them up or disable them entirely using the "global animation speed" slider in the settings. For the grayness, you can re-enable colored window titlebars in the settings by going to "Colors & themes" -> "Colors" and then selecting "Breeze Classic". I don't know why they have them disabled by default.

mapontosevenths 5mo ago

I used to start with 2000 server (so I could RDP) and then install something like Aston Shell to make it customizable and beautiful. I miss the days when windows was a platform you could extend and customize.

d3Xt3r 5mo ago
Same, but blackbox (bb4win) was my shell of choice. Along with the Win32 Unix tools, Conemu, xyplorer and shell32.dll icon replacements, my Windows back then looked and behaved very similar to a Fluxbox/OpenBox Linux install. I also recall this 3D shell where your desktop was basically like an first-person shooter, where there would be a literal desk with files that you could click on, a media wall that would display your photos and so on. I forgot what it was called, but it was one of the coolest things ever. In reality it wasn't very practical, but it was still cool. I miss those days of crazy mods and customisation. Everything so locked up and dumbed down these days, in the name of "security".
- mapontosevenths 5mo ago
  I loved bb4win, and used whenever I wanted FAST (boy was it). I used Blackbox on FreeBSD for the longest time so it was nice to have similar experiences. We used to have highly optimized C code. Now the freakin' start menu is a progressive web app that runs react components because even Microsoft hates developing in WinUI. Madness.
- scrlk 5mo ago
  > I also recall this 3D shell where your desktop was basically like an first-person shooter, where there would be a literal desk with files that you could click on, a media wall that would display your photos and so on. Was it Task Gallery from Microsoft Research? https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/the-task-gallery-a-3d-window-manager/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/the-tas... https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/332040.332482 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/332040.332482

heresie-dabord 5mo ago

"Peak Windows GUI" and "Peak GUI" are two separate things. For "Peak Windows GUI", MW10 and MW11 both score high in my opinion, but the changes in Start Menu behaviour in MW11 and the horrible "Show more options" sub-menu in the MW11 right-click context menu are confusing. So I'll give MW10 the advantage for consistency and less insult to the principle of Least Surprise. For Peak GUI, I would say there's a tie. An Android device with Desktop Mode is just hard to beat for multi-context usability. Early OS X looked great and had mature GUI ideas. And my daily Linux box with the Sway tiling window manager is the right combination of mouse gestures and keyboard power.

FuriouslyAdrift 5mo ago
I still dream about a world where we ended up with BeOS instead of OS X. Fastest and lowest latency UI I have ever seen.

xattt 5mo ago

Y’all forgetting that Windows XP (and up to 7) had the classic boxy theme. It was just a menu toggle away in Display Properties. The difference was the Windows icon in the Start menu.

hoistbypetard 5mo ago

I agree. I rode Server 2003, then after that Server 2008 (which kept most of the 2000-era gui, though the start menu got more vista-shaped) for my Windows development desktop machine for as long as I could. By the time Server 2008 reached end-of-support, I didn't need a Windows development box anymore, and my only contact with Windows has been sporadic, but feels like a distinct downgrade. I've had VMs of each major desktop version for odd small tasks, and have been grateful not to need to spend a lot of time using them.

nixass 5mo ago

7 is better than anything coming after it. Microsoft finally figured out the design, no ads embedded into every corner, no app store, no integration of every MS service into it. Earlier than 7 versions can be discussed in terms of if they match or surpass 7 or not but for myself it was MS' pinnacle in OS design

Dwedit 5mo ago

I'm a big fan of the Windows XP Royale theme (from Media Center Edition). Like regular XP, but glossier and shinier.

shin_lao 5mo ago

Windows 2000 was such a major improvement over NT4 and of course 9x that yes, you're right, it was awesome, but it still had issues and in terms of device drivers future versions brought a lot of things that improved overall stability. I think the best benefit of Windows 2000 was that the GUI was extremely coherent. Even in Windows 11 for some sub menu and options you sometimes have a Windows 2000 UI popping up out of nowhere.

ConceptJunkie 5mo ago
26 years. You'd think they could update and unify the UI in 26 years. But they would have to care first.
- shin_lao 5mo ago
  I think it's a backward compatibility problem.
- hulitu 5mo ago
  They could, but they change their mind every couple of years. It is a generic problem in SW development. See CADT.

cosmic_cheese 5mo ago

As much as I appreciate the classic Win9X look, I also like some more modern features like full bit depth alpha blending and anti-aliasing. I actually like the Win7 version of Aero, but the real unlock of these features is the third party themes it enables. There were some really nice 7 themes that hold up even now.

ConceptJunkie 5mo ago

Windows 7 was the best Windows and one of the reasons was that you could still have the Windows 2000 GUI, the "Classic" theme. That was peak Windows. I'm so disappointed that all those years later, the Windows UI is literally less configurable than Windows 2.1, which is the earliest version I used. Yeah, I don't miss 16-color mode, but I definitely miss that you had so much flexibility to tweak the UI. Now you're just stuck with some art-school dropout's idea of "flat UI" (seeing as how Microsoft has thrown out most of the great HCI work they, IBM, and others did in the 1980s, in favor of lame aesthetics that are entirely orthogonal to usability) and there's almost nothing meaningful you can change about it.

dataflow 5mo ago

Every Windows up to 7 let you pick the classic UI if you preferred that, though, right?

lproven 5mo ago

> Windows peaked GUI-wise with Windows 2000 and everything since then has felt like a poor 'skin' or misplaced 'theme' on top of something else. I agree. But it's all relative, and I did actually like how Win7 looked. Then "flat design" came along and not only did things get visually boring, nowadays, it's frequently very hard to tell fields from buttons from other controls, where you're supposed or allowed to click and where it's just decoration, etc. It was a mercy on KDE Plasma: KDE has always been at best plain and homely, but at worst, retina-searingly fugly, IMHO. Flat design at least tamed that. But on everything else, it's worse than what went before. Win10 LTSC is now my version of choice. I rarely use Windows -- I mainly use macOS and Linux and am exploring BSD -- but when I need to, it's Win10. Win11 is worse than WinME and Vista put together. If this can make Win10 look like Win7, I'm interested.

xnx 5mo ago

You're correct. Everything in the Windows 2000 GUI served a purpose. Hard to think of any changes after that that weren't just decoration and styling.