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.
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.
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.
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.
Another thing these "search boxes" (happens on macOS/iOS also AFAIK) is that sometimes even exact matches don't match unless you're using some specific length.
So if I type "ABC" I see the right application. If I type "AB" I don't see it anymore. But if I do "A" then I see the right application. So you have to then always remember to do either "A" or "ABC", because doing "AB" shows a completely different result as the first hit.
Completely bonkers behavior, and shit like this convinced me that neither Microsoft nor Apple has actual UX professionals employed anymore, or they don't have sufficient power to actually influence how things are made.
A personal pet peeve of mine as well, and a good example of when a product is trying to be too clever. I think (suspect) what is happening is that it is remembering partial matches and your selection, but like you I find it has the opposite effect.
If I type `f`, the first item on the list is Firefox, if I then type `fi`, it selects Figma instead. Keep typing, `fig`, now it has a Safari tab selected instead for figma.com. Pinnacle UX.
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.
Given that Windows search has been this broken for decades, do you think Microsoft is going to start caring _now_?!
Next thing you'll be asking to make OneDrive even remotely predictable in its behavior (other than the predictability of "never doing what I expect or want").
Everything is an absolute gem. I literally cannot survive on the work computer without it. At home on Linux, this is one of things (probably the only one even) I really missed from Windows.
Yes, there have been some obvious race conditions - especially with the web results or on gnome/linux with the listing of open browser tabs.
In a similar vein the browser search bar keeps remembering things you mistype once, and if your automatism is to type "n" and then press enter to go to "news.ycombinator.com" you will end up on the wrong page over and over again, because internally it keeps a counter and ranks higher depending on number of times you have "clicked" it.
Quite annoying UX with many search bar implementations and it makes me feel like the people who design these are not actual power users of their own software.
I use the Win-key+[start typing] search all the time, but I also used it in the XP era. Only then it was a third-party app, with order of magnitude more customization and control. I actually have a worse experience now, but it's just above my tolerance threshold so I don't do anything about it.
I've navigated systems this way for so long, I forget people do it any other way. Someone from IT had to remote-connect to my system yesterday to do something, and to get to the control panel they opened the start menu --> clicked the Settings gear --> Bluetooth & devices --> Scrolled all the way to the bottom of that page to click "More devices and printer settings", which then opens 'Control Panel\Hardware and Sound\Devices and Printers', then clicked "control panel" in the address bar.
I was baffled.
Winkey --> type "CON" --> hit Enter is so many fewer steps.
Wouldn't it be below your tolerance threshold then? ;)
I feel during XP times it was basic string matching, and sometimes I miss that. At one point on linux they also started matching on description text, but then application maintainers started to add keywords to their description text for their app to rank higher, which again made it worse to find whatever you are looking for.
Now you can hit the Windows key, type Visual Studio and open a Bing search for Visual Studio, instead of actually opening VS. It’s great - if your KPI is bing DAU
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.
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.
I used Windows 95 for a few months and switched to NT and never looked back.
I did later run Windows 98 on my kids' machine for games, but I never tried, or wanted to try Windows ME.
Windows 2000 has the best look and feel for the GUI, but I do recall that I usually saw my first Explorer crash within an hour of a fresh install. Windows 7 was peak Windows because you could still get the "Classic" Windows 2000 theme, but with all the under-the-hood improvements. I've gotten used to the Windows 10/11 UI, but I've never liked it and just wish I could go back to the way it looked when Microsoft cared about usability, as opposed to trying to make everything look like a phone.
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.
My first (and only) experience with Vista was with a stripped-back Toshiba Satellite A135 my mom bought my brother and I during some Black Friday sale. It had one single 512MB RAM stick. I still have a screenshot kicking around somewhere of the "Windows Experience Index" of 1.0 or 1.5 or something (1.0 was the lowest) that also shows the RAM amount. We made it work, though. Many good memories of recoding Xbox360 footage using some Lexar capture box that only accepted analog RCA in as the laptop cooked itself alive sitting on the carpet in front of the TV.
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.
People did all the XP customization with compositor 3d effects and matrix screensavers. Then they hyped up Longhorn with all the magazines and delivered the Vista dumpster fire.
IIRC ME would just randomly crash explorer.exe with task bar disappearing but you could recover some of it. On Vista it was just overall sluggish and laggy visual experience.
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
> 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.
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.
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...
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.
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...
"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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
> 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 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.
The Win7 UI was comfortable, and still configurable enough that I could make the tool work for me rather than having to work for the tool.
I'd be more interested if it brought back the performance of Win7. That OS was released into a world that still had HDD boot drives and had to pay attention to the details. I still run a Win7 machine that boots in under ten seconds.
Sadly no extension can bring either of those back and we are unlikely to see anything along those lines from MS ever again.
From everything I've heard, running LTSC is not a good idea for a daily-driver pc. App support/compatibility is annoying and not guaranteed. I guess if you have a small set of unchanging apps that you use and that's all it could be a good pick.
Interestingly, I hear a lot of people talk about LTSC, but few talking about their positive experiences. Is this the "I'm moving to Canada," of operating systems?
It's been great for me. I have a secondary PC that's been running Windows 10 LTSC IoT for 5 years now. I’m still getting security updates but nothing else (that's a feature to me).
The only time I had an issue was when a DAW installer required me to upgrade to 22H2. I grabbed the enablement package directly and used the DISM tool to install it.
I tried it last year, was impressed, and have now moved all my Windows partitions to it. I don't use it much (mainly Mac and Linux here) but it does all I need and more. I have not seen a single problem. Everything I've tried works fine, even installing the Windows Store and a Store app. (Which then complained my GPU was inadequate and barfed, but it ran.)
> Is there a decent way to buy this LTSC edition of Windows?
If you are a student or work at a supported educational institution: I think Windows 11 Education is to my knowledge basically identical to Windows 11 Enterprise (at least for Windows 10, this was the case). In these versions, you can use LTSC updates if you want.
There's two flavors of Windows for Education. One is more or less Windows Professional, the other is more or less Windows Enterprise. Both disable some stuff by default, I think the Microsoft Store and Clippy/Cortana/Copilot, maybe some other things... But you can do that with policy editor too.
You don't need to make peace with it. You have no obligation to accept a greater risk of malware than before. If anything, you should be more cautious because AI helps attackers.
(We don't actually know if this has anything to do with AI training.)
Don't think it's really accurate to describe restoring an old theme to an OS as "stealing". It would be stealing if they made their own OS using the Win7 theme.
2 applications: StartAllBack and Winaero Tweaker are both lifesavers, as far as I'm concerned. Both allow you to customize the look and feel of different elements so you can run the latest Windows 11 but still preserve elements of the traditional UI's - classic Start Menu, analog clock (sounds quaint but it has a second hand and the calendar is much more responsive), different versions of Windows Explorer, etc.
What I miss about Windows 7 is the total control over the system, not the GUI styling. In fact, some features of Windows 10+ are quite handy, for example the desktop tiles, windows corners or build-in virtual desktops.
However, on Windows 7 you can set many things independently: windows caption bar size, menu font, message texts etc, which all require tweaking the registry in Windows 10+.
Classic 7 is only a styling tool and it will not bring me back these settings and control.
The 2d design of modern interfaces is terrible. Everything looks like a "Label". Scrollbars are terrible. Light gray on dark gray.
And, worst of all, they need 3d acceleration to draw a bloody 2d label.
Automatic updates are not bad. Quite the opposite, it’s the lack of automatic patching that is dangerous.
Win10/11’s problem isn’t auto updates, it’s the severely reduced user agency in the matter (and the quality of said updates, but that’s another story).
At work I am made to use Windows 11 and I hate it immensely. Everything's so slow. Nothing operates properly. In addition to forced reboots which are annoying as hell, it also reboots after some time on sleep, for no reason whatsoever. Copilot is everywhere and cannot be truly disabled without admin rights. While not strictly a Windows issue, Outlook is an incredible piece of garbage. It doesn't know if it's running and so can be launched more than once; the icon for new messages doesn't show when it should; search is still as broken as ever; the ribbon, which makes little sense in other Office apps, is absurd in Outlook; folders are useless and confusing; etc.
At home, while I have a Mac Mini 4, a MacBook Air, and several Linux boxes, I still use an old PC on Win7 as my primary machine. Is it insecure? Probably. But today "insecure" feels more like a feature than a limitation. No forced updates of anything => everything that works, keeps working indefinitely.
> I still use an old PC on Win7 as my primary machine
So do I. I've had to deal with 10 and 11 at work and had the same sort of problems, so I've refused to "downgrade" this PC.
It particularly used to really piss me off that when I was partway through working on something and had several applications open, with data loaded, that if I tried to leave it like that overnight so I'd be able to continue immediately the next morning, chances are Windows would decide to update and reboot, closing everything.
I found several ways online to supposedly stop it from doing that, but nothing ever worked.
Although 7's UI is much better than the flat nonsense we get these days, I don't find the UI to be the biggest problem. If using Windows 11, I'd want to replace the underlying OS, not keep it and replace just the UI. So while this project looks interesting, to me it's not fixing the real problem.
Just thinking more about how we're told it's "insecure". It's unfortunate that so many tech people are so gullible when it comes to the industry's marketing around this.
Many of us know a huge proportion of news stories come from PR firms that just want to sell us something (it comes up on HN every now and then). In the mid-2000s or so, Microsoft had a particular problem selling Office - there was no reason to upgrade to the current version, because the older one already did everything you wanted. Until that time, established practice was to buy new software only if you wanted its new features; the vendor had to give you a good reason to pay for it. To some of us, the PR that immediately followed the stories of struggles to sell their newer versions - PR that suddenly exploded everywhere - was obvious and transparent. "You must upgrade because old software is insecure!" But it grew into the monster we have today. Some people literally panic if they discover an older piece of software.
Think of young people growing up with that being blasted at them constantly. It must have contributed to the has-to-be-new-and-shiny mindset of Javascript developers, where they're terrified to touch anything that hasn't been updated for a few months.
That long, sustained, and paradigm-shifting PR campaign has been a huge win for many software vendors, and for Microsoft in particular. (Of course, after that, and after a few failed attempts, they managed to get the subscription-based model to work for Office, which in that particular case, bypasses the mess left by their earlier selling strategy anyway.)
But... Old software is often going to be insecure on the network. Are you arguing that an OS from 2013 with a browser from the same time is fine on the Web?
Who's using a browser from 2013? When I said I'm running Windows 7, I'm specifically talking about the OS, including an awful lot of updates it's had since 2013, not all software I run on it. Updates added such things as support for the later versions of TLS, several years ago. Although Google and Mozilla have dropped official W7 support from Chrome and Firefox, there are forks that add it back, which is why I'm running up-to-date browsers.
If we were talking about even older browsers though... 20 years ago, because of the insecure way browsers generally worked, everybody used third-party antivirus or e.g. Norton Internet Security, which seemed to cause as many problems as it solved. But browsers (and OSes) haven't been so open for years - we don't have quite that class of problems anymore, where just visiting a site was enough to get the browser to download and run all sorts of nasties. I don't remember quite when it was that we'd left the most dangerous period behind, when the security of browsers and OSes had been considerably hardened, but it was before 2013. Windows 7 was, and is, much safer on the network than XP, by design.
> It particularly used to really piss me off that when I was partway through working on something and had several applications open, with data loaded, that if I tried to leave it like that overnight so I'd be able to continue immediately the next morning, chances are Windows would decide to update and reboot, closing everything.
Whenever I use a recent(ish) Windows (rarely :-), it's annoyances like this that make for a poor UX. Again & again.
When you put a computer to sleep/hibernate, you expect it to come out of sleep in a similar state as before. When you select "shut down", you expect that. Not "installing update 1..20, then shut down".
It keeps amazing me that within Microsoft, after having done so many OSes used by millions, some eggheads think that breaking user expectations is a good design decision. It is not.
I work with Windows 11 and don't see any major issue whatsoever. But note that 16GB RAM is "just" enough to run it smoothly. 32GB is better for serious (e.g development) work. I have run it even on Intel 4200U/4200M CPUs fine (CPU is from year 2014).
I agree that new Outlook is buggy and not fully functional - that's why I still use old native MS Outlook.
It's possible half of my problems are because I don't have admin rights, and the other half is because the machine is too weak.
Why do modern OSes need so much power and RAM anyway? I used to produce documents on an Amstrad PPC640. 640 stood for 640k of RAM (no hard disk). It was fine.
I understand the above makes me sound like an old fart (or fool), and we have moved on from DOS. But what does Windows 11 do that Windows 7 couldn't?
I honestly think this is a difficult and fascinating question. This is like the dark energy of software cosmology. Why is the natural state to get larger and more complex for un-proportionate pleasure of use?
Largely, I think, because devs are given too powerful computers. It's easier for companies to "fix" or preemptively had off performance bugs by giving developers high-end computers than to spend extra development time truly fixing them.
Windows 11 can run many more different UI toolkits, all jumbled together. It has more graphical effects in there. It has so much telemetry and Microsoft Defender will never-ever give up and will inspect everything, all the time.
My main issue with Windows 11 (and where I use it I do see quite a lot of issues) is that apparently it won't run on my personal PC at home - and no way am I going to buy a new PC just to run Windows 11. So installed Linux Mint and I'm perfectly happy!
> In addition to forced reboots which are annoying as hell
Not to defend Microslop here, but your workplace should disable this via Group Policies. Sounds a like badly or unmanaged work environment.
Obviously you shouldn't have to pay your works to constantly fight against and disable microslop's bullshit all the time, just so your other employees can actually get work done.
How large is the company you work at? I'm guessing large. What is the general sentiment across layers in the company? My guess is everybody hates it (all layers)?
It's a client of mine; the IT department is extremely small (fewer than 5) but the company has maybe 500 employees total? Since I work there, I've not heard anyone complain specifically about their computer or the Windows version. Most people don't care / don't know better, they just use what they're given.
I daily drive Windows 11 (with WSL) and with some tweaks it feels okay: the O&O ShutUp10++ utility (or any number of similar ones, as long as you trust them), some group policy, maybe Everything if you want fast search, LibreOffice instead of MS office and just some Settings changes. It sucks if you don't have the permissions to change that stuff and are stuck with the bad defaults.
In some ways it's a bit like having to customize a Mac to feel comfy (AutoRaise, Rectangle, DiscreteScroll, ...), except in Apple's case it's because they believe that they know better what my computing experience should be like, and in Microsoft's, it's some enshittification and pushing me towards features that I don't really want or need.
At the same time, games work (even the shitty rootkit anti-cheat), lovely software is all there like Notepad++, MobaXTerm, SourceTree (though GitKraken is really good if you want to pay for it), SteelSeries Sonar (the only experience of managing audio devices that wasn't unnecessarily messy or complex, tbh even VoiceMeeter has weird UI/UX), oh and FreeFileSync and ofc all of my dev tools and other software. It's just passable in most categories.
I still believe that something like Linux Mint would give me the best desktop computing experience, cause it almost never is actively hostile to me as a user - all of the instances of it sucking and being broken are either growing pains, ecosystem fragmentation, insufficient development effort (given that there isn't a multi-billion dollar org behind it, or at least not really the DEs or most userland software, or that the drivers don't always get as much love from vendors), or circumstances outside of their control (e.g. the anti-cheat situation with games), rather than a conscious choice on the part of the developers.
I've used Win/Mac both very extensively as daily drivers, but since 2021 using exclusively Ubuntu LTS. In practice I don´t notice any lesser quality, or drivers not being good. I basically have no complaints. I'd say my Ubuntu 22 LTS is a lot less buggy than the megacorp stuff I used to use.
Outlook should be illegal. My biggest pet peeve is that its search doesn't work properly and it misses showing emails. I cannot count how many times I had relative crying calling me that someone is deleting her emails. The emails were there, just incredibly hard to find. Oh and the "Focused" mode that has zero sense.
I don't know how businesses operate using this garbage.
I once got abuse from an Income Tax official for claiming that an email with the details they requested had been sent to them, as the official opened Outlook and searched for it in front of me and couldn't find it! Had to convince the guy to try multiple different keywords before it luckily emerged in the search results.
Just to offer a counter point - I'm at Windows 11 Enterprise at work(as a game developer) and it just works. We don't have any copilot stuff because it has been disabled by corporate policy. I don't see any ads. The system is mega stable, for search I just use Everything, I don't have any issues with Explorer really, other than the stupid change of copy/paste into icons, which I've undone with one powershell command. I think as a C++ dev it's a great environment to work in.
That basically means resetting the annoyance back to win7 level. And yeah, it’s a great OS if you can do that. Just like linux is great if your hardware is supported or macOS was great before catalina.
I just want my brightness/volume indicator back in the middle of my screen without fluffy graphics.... :( I dont know why it isnt even a power-user option....
There aren’t any 1:1 recreations as far as I know, just themes of varying levels of quality.
It’s a missed opportunity in my opinion, “here’s an accurate Win2K/XP/7 replica desktop that you get to keep forever” is a strong pitch for Linux for a lot of potential users.
It has massive nostalgia appeal but is also practical because it signals to users that they won’t need to learn any new UI bits or behaviors and that they’ll be comfortable right away. It removes a lot of the spookiness of switching that comes with even the most Windows-like DEs like KDE.
Yea I wonder about the same thing too. I understand what other people suggest when mentioning to use KDE skins but I for one would love to see an accurate replica if possible.
I'd rather have KDE on windows 10.
Or, better, the whole lot of tiny UX improvements kde has (all the visual/audio controls, the system settings that make sense and are not buried withing 4-5 menus, things like that)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Another thing these "search boxes" (happens on macOS/iOS also AFAIK) is that sometimes even exact matches don't match unless you're using some specific length.
So if I type "ABC" I see the right application. If I type "AB" I don't see it anymore. But if I do "A" then I see the right application. So you have to then always remember to do either "A" or "ABC", because doing "AB" shows a completely different result as the first hit.
Completely bonkers behavior, and shit like this convinced me that neither Microsoft nor Apple has actual UX professionals employed anymore, or they don't have sufficient power to actually influence how things are made.
A personal pet peeve of mine as well, and a good example of when a product is trying to be too clever. I think (suspect) what is happening is that it is remembering partial matches and your selection, but like you I find it has the opposite effect.
If I type `f`, the first item on the list is Firefox, if I then type `fi`, it selects Figma instead. Keep typing, `fig`, now it has a Safari tab selected instead for figma.com. Pinnacle UX.
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.
Given that Windows search has been this broken for decades, do you think Microsoft is going to start caring _now_?!
Next thing you'll be asking to make OneDrive even remotely predictable in its behavior (other than the predictability of "never doing what I expect or want").
Everything is an absolute gem. I literally cannot survive on the work computer without it. At home on Linux, this is one of things (probably the only one even) I really missed from Windows.
Have you seen FSearch? https://github.com/cboxdoerfer/fsearch It's quite similar to Everything.
Btw, there's also fooyin which you may say is "modeled" after foobar2000 https://github.com/fooyin/fooyin - another piece I miss from Windows.
That's annoying, but I think what's worse is these:
Start typing a word, see the thing you want, finish the word, it disappears.
And
Start typing, see what you want, stop typing and hit enter, but it changed to something else between when you saw it and when you hit enter.
Yes, there have been some obvious race conditions - especially with the web results or on gnome/linux with the listing of open browser tabs.
In a similar vein the browser search bar keeps remembering things you mistype once, and if your automatism is to type "n" and then press enter to go to "news.ycombinator.com" you will end up on the wrong page over and over again, because internally it keeps a counter and ranks higher depending on number of times you have "clicked" it.
Quite annoying UX with many search bar implementations and it makes me feel like the people who design these are not actual power users of their own software.
Yeah, I never used it. I have barely ever used it since then.
I use the Win-key+[start typing] search all the time, but I also used it in the XP era. Only then it was a third-party app, with order of magnitude more customization and control. I actually have a worse experience now, but it's just above my tolerance threshold so I don't do anything about it.
I've navigated systems this way for so long, I forget people do it any other way. Someone from IT had to remote-connect to my system yesterday to do something, and to get to the control panel they opened the start menu --> clicked the Settings gear --> Bluetooth & devices --> Scrolled all the way to the bottom of that page to click "More devices and printer settings", which then opens 'Control Panel\Hardware and Sound\Devices and Printers', then clicked "control panel" in the address bar. I was baffled. Winkey --> type "CON" --> hit Enter is so many fewer steps.
Wouldn't it be below your tolerance threshold then? ;)
I feel during XP times it was basic string matching, and sometimes I miss that. At one point on linux they also started matching on description text, but then application maintainers started to add keywords to their description text for their app to rank higher, which again made it worse to find whatever you are looking for.
Now you can hit the Windows key, type Visual Studio and open a Bing search for Visual Studio, instead of actually opening VS. It’s great - if your KPI is bing DAU
I know it should be the default, but if you turn off online searches for the Start Menu, it operates exactly how you'd expect it to on Windows 11.
Windows 11 is also a lot faster than 7 was on equivalent systems. Windows 7 would take minutes to boot.
Windows 7 had a good chance of being installed on spinning disks. I think even the cheapo Win11 systems at Walmart have SSDs now.
Windows 7 never took minutes to boot on a reasonable computer.
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.
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.
I used Windows 95 for a few months and switched to NT and never looked back.
I did later run Windows 98 on my kids' machine for games, but I never tried, or wanted to try Windows ME.
Windows 2000 has the best look and feel for the GUI, but I do recall that I usually saw my first Explorer crash within an hour of a fresh install. Windows 7 was peak Windows because you could still get the "Classic" Windows 2000 theme, but with all the under-the-hood improvements. I've gotten used to the Windows 10/11 UI, but I've never liked it and just wish I could go back to the way it looked when Microsoft cared about usability, as opposed to trying to make everything look like a phone.
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.
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.
My first (and only) experience with Vista was with a stripped-back Toshiba Satellite A135 my mom bought my brother and I during some Black Friday sale. It had one single 512MB RAM stick. I still have a screenshot kicking around somewhere of the "Windows Experience Index" of 1.0 or 1.5 or something (1.0 was the lowest) that also shows the RAM amount. We made it work, though. Many good memories of recoding Xbox360 footage using some Lexar capture box that only accepted analog RCA in as the laptop cooked itself alive sitting on the carpet in front of the TV.
I bought a machine with similar capability for my wife that shipped with Vista and it was literally unusable. I think I ended up "upgrading" it to XP.
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.
Vista was an absolute dumpster fire but in no way compares to the awfulness of ME.
Vista wasn't remotely a dumpster fire. I used it for almost its entire lifetime, it was totally fine.
People did all the XP customization with compositor 3d effects and matrix screensavers. Then they hyped up Longhorn with all the magazines and delivered the Vista dumpster fire.
IIRC ME would just randomly crash explorer.exe with task bar disappearing but you could recover some of it. On Vista it was just overall sluggish and laggy visual experience.
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.
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
> 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.
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.
26 years. You'd think they could update and unify the UI in 26 years. But they would have to care first.
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...
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.
Agree, that 2000/Millennium aesthetic was absolutely peak design and usability.
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...
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
I just checked in the 2003 Platform SDK and desktop support was added in Windows NT 3.51, which came out in 1995.
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).
> 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
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
- Windows Vista, 7: (Windows) Aero: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Aero and Liquid Glass (though the latter is an Apple term): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_Glass
- Windows 8, 8.1: Metro; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro_(design_language)
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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/
[2] https://github.com/User738git/MENT2K
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)
Every Windows up to 7 let you pick the classic UI if you preferred that, though, right?
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.
I'm a big fan of the Windows XP Royale theme (from Media Center Edition). Like regular XP, but glossier and shinier.
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.
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.
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".
> 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-tas...
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/332040.332482
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.
Yes for me too. Windows 2000 was clean and efficient. With not too much bling.
Yeah I agree too. I never understood the love for the win7 aesthetic!
7 was the peak though cus it actually worked flawlessly.. In my experience earlier versions of windows were kinda janky and unstable.
The Win7 UI was comfortable, and still configurable enough that I could make the tool work for me rather than having to work for the tool.
I'd be more interested if it brought back the performance of Win7. That OS was released into a world that still had HDD boot drives and had to pay attention to the details. I still run a Win7 machine that boots in under ten seconds.
Sadly no extension can bring either of those back and we are unlikely to see anything along those lines from MS ever again.
I still have a windows 7 system from 16 years ago. Works great.
From everything I've heard, running LTSC is not a good idea for a daily-driver pc. App support/compatibility is annoying and not guaranteed. I guess if you have a small set of unchanging apps that you use and that's all it could be a good pick.
Interestingly, I hear a lot of people talk about LTSC, but few talking about their positive experiences. Is this the "I'm moving to Canada," of operating systems?
It's been great for me. I have a secondary PC that's been running Windows 10 LTSC IoT for 5 years now. I’m still getting security updates but nothing else (that's a feature to me).
The only time I had an issue was when a DAW installer required me to upgrade to 22H2. I grabbed the enablement package directly and used the DISM tool to install it.
I run it, it's good other than WSL.
[[citation needed]]
I tried it last year, was impressed, and have now moved all my Windows partitions to it. I don't use it much (mainly Mac and Linux here) but it does all I need and more. I have not seen a single problem. Everything I've tried works fine, even installing the Windows Store and a Store app. (Which then complained my GPU was inadequate and barfed, but it ran.)
Sorry for being (slightly?) off-topic: Is there a decent way to buy this LTSC edition of Windows?
Just use the well know script to activate it and send a donation to MS or something. The margin of profit from individual keys is nothing.
(Can I post the link, to the open source repo? Is it against the rules? I mean MS owns github and has no problem hosting it)
https://github.com/massgravel/Microsoft-Activation-Scripts
> Is there a decent way to buy this LTSC edition of Windows?
If you are a student or work at a supported educational institution: I think Windows 11 Education is to my knowledge basically identical to Windows 11 Enterprise (at least for Windows 10, this was the case). In these versions, you can use LTSC updates if you want.
There's two flavors of Windows for Education. One is more or less Windows Professional, the other is more or less Windows Enterprise. Both disable some stuff by default, I think the Microsoft Store and Clippy/Cortana/Copilot, maybe some other things... But you can do that with policy editor too.
It depends on your definition of "decent". Legal: yes, simple: maybe not. Search in past threads.
Not really. Even for smaller companies it's basically impossible to get 10-20 LTSC or IoT licenses.
Only way is usually to buy devices that have such a license included.
I love this kind of thing but feel really worried when I can't see source.
Looks like the repo is here - https://github.com/Classic7-Mod/WindowsOOBERecreation
The repo is only 8 months old, which could be seen as good or bad.
That is only the out of box experience but the whole thing
I think you'll need to slowly make peace with the fact that people don't want their work stolen by AIs.
You don't need to make peace with it. You have no obligation to accept a greater risk of malware than before. If anything, you should be more cautious because AI helps attackers.
(We don't actually know if this has anything to do with AI training.)
Ironic, considering that this whole project is built upon stealing the design of Windows 7
Don't think it's really accurate to describe restoring an old theme to an OS as "stealing". It would be stealing if they made their own OS using the Win7 theme.
2 applications: StartAllBack and Winaero Tweaker are both lifesavers, as far as I'm concerned. Both allow you to customize the look and feel of different elements so you can run the latest Windows 11 but still preserve elements of the traditional UI's - classic Start Menu, analog clock (sounds quaint but it has a second hand and the calendar is much more responsive), different versions of Windows Explorer, etc.
What I miss about Windows 7 is the total control over the system, not the GUI styling. In fact, some features of Windows 10+ are quite handy, for example the desktop tiles, windows corners or build-in virtual desktops. However, on Windows 7 you can set many things independently: windows caption bar size, menu font, message texts etc, which all require tweaking the registry in Windows 10+. Classic 7 is only a styling tool and it will not bring me back these settings and control.
I have used windows 7 since it launched and moved to 10 & 11. I like some design elements of windows 7, but I would absolutely not use it today.
If you think, "I should try this", Any reason why? I'm really curious to know
> Any reason why?
The 2d design of modern interfaces is terrible. Everything looks like a "Label". Scrollbars are terrible. Light gray on dark gray. And, worst of all, they need 3d acceleration to draw a bloody 2d label.
I really do miss the design of Windows 7 and the apps of that era (think Office 2007 style)
I hope it comes back
Office 2007 was the last time someone had a vision and fully executed it.
Every design refresh since then has been half finished and pushed out the door with too many bits of the old left.
Yes like the control panel. They've been at it for 10 years and there's still random bits of the old one appearing.
"Please do not power off your machine. Installing update 1 of 100."
I definitely prefer XP over 7. No automatic updates."
Automatic updates are not bad. Quite the opposite, it’s the lack of automatic patching that is dangerous.
Win10/11’s problem isn’t auto updates, it’s the severely reduced user agency in the matter (and the quality of said updates, but that’s another story).
Auto updates are bad for a user's sense of control over their machine. Auto updates are generally good for security.
Have you never used Group Policy?
Similarly I think Android 4 or 8 were the best UI for phones, and anything beyond 8 just gets in the way.
At work I am made to use Windows 11 and I hate it immensely. Everything's so slow. Nothing operates properly. In addition to forced reboots which are annoying as hell, it also reboots after some time on sleep, for no reason whatsoever. Copilot is everywhere and cannot be truly disabled without admin rights. While not strictly a Windows issue, Outlook is an incredible piece of garbage. It doesn't know if it's running and so can be launched more than once; the icon for new messages doesn't show when it should; search is still as broken as ever; the ribbon, which makes little sense in other Office apps, is absurd in Outlook; folders are useless and confusing; etc.
At home, while I have a Mac Mini 4, a MacBook Air, and several Linux boxes, I still use an old PC on Win7 as my primary machine. Is it insecure? Probably. But today "insecure" feels more like a feature than a limitation. No forced updates of anything => everything that works, keeps working indefinitely.
> I still use an old PC on Win7 as my primary machine
So do I. I've had to deal with 10 and 11 at work and had the same sort of problems, so I've refused to "downgrade" this PC.
It particularly used to really piss me off that when I was partway through working on something and had several applications open, with data loaded, that if I tried to leave it like that overnight so I'd be able to continue immediately the next morning, chances are Windows would decide to update and reboot, closing everything.
I found several ways online to supposedly stop it from doing that, but nothing ever worked.
Although 7's UI is much better than the flat nonsense we get these days, I don't find the UI to be the biggest problem. If using Windows 11, I'd want to replace the underlying OS, not keep it and replace just the UI. So while this project looks interesting, to me it's not fixing the real problem.
Just thinking more about how we're told it's "insecure". It's unfortunate that so many tech people are so gullible when it comes to the industry's marketing around this.
Many of us know a huge proportion of news stories come from PR firms that just want to sell us something (it comes up on HN every now and then). In the mid-2000s or so, Microsoft had a particular problem selling Office - there was no reason to upgrade to the current version, because the older one already did everything you wanted. Until that time, established practice was to buy new software only if you wanted its new features; the vendor had to give you a good reason to pay for it. To some of us, the PR that immediately followed the stories of struggles to sell their newer versions - PR that suddenly exploded everywhere - was obvious and transparent. "You must upgrade because old software is insecure!" But it grew into the monster we have today. Some people literally panic if they discover an older piece of software.
Think of young people growing up with that being blasted at them constantly. It must have contributed to the has-to-be-new-and-shiny mindset of Javascript developers, where they're terrified to touch anything that hasn't been updated for a few months.
That long, sustained, and paradigm-shifting PR campaign has been a huge win for many software vendors, and for Microsoft in particular. (Of course, after that, and after a few failed attempts, they managed to get the subscription-based model to work for Office, which in that particular case, bypasses the mess left by their earlier selling strategy anyway.)
But... Old software is often going to be insecure on the network. Are you arguing that an OS from 2013 with a browser from the same time is fine on the Web?
Who's using a browser from 2013? When I said I'm running Windows 7, I'm specifically talking about the OS, including an awful lot of updates it's had since 2013, not all software I run on it. Updates added such things as support for the later versions of TLS, several years ago. Although Google and Mozilla have dropped official W7 support from Chrome and Firefox, there are forks that add it back, which is why I'm running up-to-date browsers.
If we were talking about even older browsers though... 20 years ago, because of the insecure way browsers generally worked, everybody used third-party antivirus or e.g. Norton Internet Security, which seemed to cause as many problems as it solved. But browsers (and OSes) haven't been so open for years - we don't have quite that class of problems anymore, where just visiting a site was enough to get the browser to download and run all sorts of nasties. I don't remember quite when it was that we'd left the most dangerous period behind, when the security of browsers and OSes had been considerably hardened, but it was before 2013. Windows 7 was, and is, much safer on the network than XP, by design.
> It particularly used to really piss me off that when I was partway through working on something and had several applications open, with data loaded, that if I tried to leave it like that overnight so I'd be able to continue immediately the next morning, chances are Windows would decide to update and reboot, closing everything.
Whenever I use a recent(ish) Windows (rarely :-), it's annoyances like this that make for a poor UX. Again & again.
When you put a computer to sleep/hibernate, you expect it to come out of sleep in a similar state as before. When you select "shut down", you expect that. Not "installing update 1..20, then shut down".
It keeps amazing me that within Microsoft, after having done so many OSes used by millions, some eggheads think that breaking user expectations is a good design decision. It is not.
And even then “Shut down” didn’t actually shut down when there were updates. It was “install updates and reboot”
I work with Windows 11 and don't see any major issue whatsoever. But note that 16GB RAM is "just" enough to run it smoothly. 32GB is better for serious (e.g development) work. I have run it even on Intel 4200U/4200M CPUs fine (CPU is from year 2014). I agree that new Outlook is buggy and not fully functional - that's why I still use old native MS Outlook.
It's possible half of my problems are because I don't have admin rights, and the other half is because the machine is too weak.
Why do modern OSes need so much power and RAM anyway? I used to produce documents on an Amstrad PPC640. 640 stood for 640k of RAM (no hard disk). It was fine.
I understand the above makes me sound like an old fart (or fool), and we have moved on from DOS. But what does Windows 11 do that Windows 7 couldn't?
I honestly think this is a difficult and fascinating question. This is like the dark energy of software cosmology. Why is the natural state to get larger and more complex for un-proportionate pleasure of use?
Largely, I think, because devs are given too powerful computers. It's easier for companies to "fix" or preemptively had off performance bugs by giving developers high-end computers than to spend extra development time truly fixing them.
Because they’re a bunch of perverts and want to know every button you clicked.
> Why do modern OSes need so much power and RAM anyway?
Because code writers are lazy and prefer to use 20 levels of abstraction or a 5MB library for a simple function.
Windows 11 can run many more different UI toolkits, all jumbled together. It has more graphical effects in there. It has so much telemetry and Microsoft Defender will never-ever give up and will inspect everything, all the time.
My main issue with Windows 11 (and where I use it I do see quite a lot of issues) is that apparently it won't run on my personal PC at home - and no way am I going to buy a new PC just to run Windows 11. So installed Linux Mint and I'm perfectly happy!
> In addition to forced reboots which are annoying as hell
Not to defend Microslop here, but your workplace should disable this via Group Policies. Sounds a like badly or unmanaged work environment.
Obviously you shouldn't have to pay your works to constantly fight against and disable microslop's bullshit all the time, just so your other employees can actually get work done.
How large is the company you work at? I'm guessing large. What is the general sentiment across layers in the company? My guess is everybody hates it (all layers)?
It's a client of mine; the IT department is extremely small (fewer than 5) but the company has maybe 500 employees total? Since I work there, I've not heard anyone complain specifically about their computer or the Windows version. Most people don't care / don't know better, they just use what they're given.
I daily drive Windows 11 (with WSL) and with some tweaks it feels okay: the O&O ShutUp10++ utility (or any number of similar ones, as long as you trust them), some group policy, maybe Everything if you want fast search, LibreOffice instead of MS office and just some Settings changes. It sucks if you don't have the permissions to change that stuff and are stuck with the bad defaults.
In some ways it's a bit like having to customize a Mac to feel comfy (AutoRaise, Rectangle, DiscreteScroll, ...), except in Apple's case it's because they believe that they know better what my computing experience should be like, and in Microsoft's, it's some enshittification and pushing me towards features that I don't really want or need.
At the same time, games work (even the shitty rootkit anti-cheat), lovely software is all there like Notepad++, MobaXTerm, SourceTree (though GitKraken is really good if you want to pay for it), SteelSeries Sonar (the only experience of managing audio devices that wasn't unnecessarily messy or complex, tbh even VoiceMeeter has weird UI/UX), oh and FreeFileSync and ofc all of my dev tools and other software. It's just passable in most categories.
I still believe that something like Linux Mint would give me the best desktop computing experience, cause it almost never is actively hostile to me as a user - all of the instances of it sucking and being broken are either growing pains, ecosystem fragmentation, insufficient development effort (given that there isn't a multi-billion dollar org behind it, or at least not really the DEs or most userland software, or that the drivers don't always get as much love from vendors), or circumstances outside of their control (e.g. the anti-cheat situation with games), rather than a conscious choice on the part of the developers.
> insufficient development effort
I've used Win/Mac both very extensively as daily drivers, but since 2021 using exclusively Ubuntu LTS. In practice I don´t notice any lesser quality, or drivers not being good. I basically have no complaints. I'd say my Ubuntu 22 LTS is a lot less buggy than the megacorp stuff I used to use.
Outlook should be illegal. My biggest pet peeve is that its search doesn't work properly and it misses showing emails. I cannot count how many times I had relative crying calling me that someone is deleting her emails. The emails were there, just incredibly hard to find. Oh and the "Focused" mode that has zero sense.
I don't know how businesses operate using this garbage.
I once got abuse from an Income Tax official for claiming that an email with the details they requested had been sent to them, as the official opened Outlook and searched for it in front of me and couldn't find it! Had to convince the guy to try multiple different keywords before it luckily emerged in the search results.
Just to offer a counter point - I'm at Windows 11 Enterprise at work(as a game developer) and it just works. We don't have any copilot stuff because it has been disabled by corporate policy. I don't see any ads. The system is mega stable, for search I just use Everything, I don't have any issues with Explorer really, other than the stupid change of copy/paste into icons, which I've undone with one powershell command. I think as a C++ dev it's a great environment to work in.
That basically means resetting the annoyance back to win7 level. And yeah, it’s a great OS if you can do that. Just like linux is great if your hardware is supported or macOS was great before catalina.
Michael MJD published a video about it yesterday:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLecpASQacM
Can we have something similar for macOS (to turn the UI to Mac OS 9)?
I would even take any Leopard/Lion.
I just want my brightness/volume indicator back in the middle of my screen without fluffy graphics.... :( I dont know why it isnt even a power-user option....
Will this get LTSC's security updates? I can seriously try this out as a daily driver if yes
can something like this happen for linux, I would love to see a linux desktop environment like windows 7
for windows 8 on linux, there's this: https://github.com/er-bharat/Win8DE
There aren’t any 1:1 recreations as far as I know, just themes of varying levels of quality.
It’s a missed opportunity in my opinion, “here’s an accurate Win2K/XP/7 replica desktop that you get to keep forever” is a strong pitch for Linux for a lot of potential users.
It has massive nostalgia appeal but is also practical because it signals to users that they won’t need to learn any new UI bits or behaviors and that they’ll be comfortable right away. It removes a lot of the spookiness of switching that comes with even the most Windows-like DEs like KDE.
Yea I wonder about the same thing too. I understand what other people suggest when mentioning to use KDE skins but I for one would love to see an accurate replica if possible.
I'd rather have KDE on windows 10. Or, better, the whole lot of tiny UX improvements kde has (all the visual/audio controls, the system settings that make sense and are not buried withing 4-5 menus, things like that)
https://gitgud.io/aeroshell/atp/aerothemeplasma
There's a lot of them. Just search for Frutiger Aero on GitHub.
There is a huge pletora of themes for KDE and Gnome to imitate OSX, Windows 95/98, XP, Vista/7, etc...
> can something like this happen for linux
For win9x/win2k style this is really neat:
https://codeberg.org/Sliver_X/Redmond97-SE
This can create both incompatibilities and use more resources than Windows 7 itself.
It's just a skin. Of course it uses more resources than windows 7.
Windows 11 itself uses more resources than Windows 7 ;)
actually Windows 7 has a special mode that turns off all aero entirely
I cannot remember what it is called
but makes it look almost like XP and the UI is very fast and crisp
it's under
Windows 10 cannot do that, it cannot turn off visual system entirely