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Comment by dantondwa | Hacker News Reader

Seeing the beautiful, uncluttered, elegant simplicity of those screenshots makes me quite nostalgic. The lack of bullshit and the aesthetic coherence of that UI is really something I miss. The last decade has been disastrous for Windows, experience-wise. Wish we could have the Windows 7 experience with the core and security improvements of Windows 10!

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> Seeing the beautiful, uncluttered, elegant simplicity of those screenshots makes me quite nostalgic

You're nostalgic for a time that never existed. While I agree that Windows 7 was more coherent than Windows Vista and Windows XP, every single Windows release has had its associated "bullshit" (as you put it):

* Windows 98: Advertising on the desktop (Active Channels)

* Windows XP: "Fischer-Price" default UI skin and chunky, toy-like iconography.

* Windows Vista: The whole OS release was maligned - and this site collected it all: https://web.archive.org/web/20110515033457/http://www.aerota...

* Windows 7: (Okay, I'll admit I can't immediately think of any major power-user criticism of Windows 7)

* Windows 8: Start Screen, terrible store apps, the DWM cannot be disabled, etc.

* Windows 10: Criticism of telemetry and data-collection, and how there's still some leftovers from Windows 3.11 or Windows 95 (I forget) lying around:

> every single Windows release

I don't see NT 4 on that list!

NT 4, 2000, and 7 were all fairly low-bullshit, i think.

You also haven't listed Me, which probably needs a whole comment to itself.

I'd say 7 was one of the best Windows, but even that had a lot of UI inconsistency and clutter. Still, better than most. Not as cohesive as my MATE desktop.

When I first got Windows 7, I was annoyed by it placing libraries and homegroups in Windows Explorer's sidebar. Though Windows 10 is worse, with 3D Objects, the OS shilling OneDrive, Edge, mandatory Microsoft accounts, etc.

People joke about the year of linux on the desktop, but it remains the best place to create an environment you like. XFCE is a good starting point if you're an old school windows fan.

What's a good X11 or Wayland environment if I want a lightweight low-latency environment with Super+Number app launching and Super+arrow or drag snapping/tiling? Xfce with Docklike is X11-based, and gets me everything except for window snapping/tiling (when I try configuring the keyboard shortcuts, it doesn't work).

Openbox is super configurable, and I've definitely done similar things to what you just descrubed.

Last time I tried swapping out xfwm with openbox it was pretty easy.

Although the screenshots are indeed uncluttered, they're definitely not simple. There are many clickable items, unnecessarily large windows with wasted empty space, icons that are hard to read unless you have experience with them redundant information, rarely used bars and text fields...

Windows UI became just too busy starting with xp. The last sober windows UI was windows 2000.

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