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Comment by 293984j29384 | Hacker News Reader

It might just be nostalgia but I really liked the GUI for Windows XP. The Start Menu was a clean and intuitive interface to find things you've installed. Windows 10 seems to be a huge step backwards in terms of usability. I tend to use xfce or lxqt on all my Linux systems. These days, all the action is happening in the web browser and I want my operating system is just work.

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I liked WinXP -- possibly the last Windows I liked -- but if I remember correctly, the first thing power users did was de-XP-ify the GUI and switch it back to the classic, cleaner look :)

I used to do this up into Win7 days, avoiding the "Aero" theme. A shame they took that option out of 8 and later.

Classicshell.net is quite good for that

It doesn't make the window borders feel like the 90s, or get rid of dwm.exe.

Part of it was just resources. XP ran a lot faster and better without the theming. Another part of it was due to buggy graphic drivers. But once you started getting XP on much faster computers you tend to leave it on or turn it off out of habit.

True about the resources. But back in the day we also turned it off because of the "theme park" feel it had. It felt like the classic desktop with clown makeup.

Missed your reply.

I always liked the 'fisher-price' look.

Vista/7/10 do look much more professional, still miss the xp look.

My first install has been Classic Shell (now Open Shell) on every system since Windows 8 rolled out, thanks to their hard work Win 8/10 upgrades changed nothing about how I work. Only change I’ve made was when Win 10 multiple desktops came out I swapped from sysinternals desktops, using AutoHotKey to map them. I setup XFCE the same way so it feels pretty consistent.

I don’t mind Windows 10. Like every other new OS Microsoft has put out, they try to cover up all the basic tools with fancy GUI additions and apps.... that I promptly disable and go back to using plain old file explorer and notepad like I have been for decades now.

> using plain old file explorer

If you really like the plain (really) old stuff, winfile.exe is open-source and can be built for modern day Windows[1].

It has received quite a few patches and improvements, but it's still basically the same old tool.

[1] https://github.com/Microsoft/winfile

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