Try spinning Windows 7 up in a VM sometime. Using it is such a wonderous experience. It's almost perfect. I miss it so much. To me, Windows 8/8.1/10/11 have all been massive downgrades to different extents.
It's fast, reliable and highly configurable.
I really really hate the stock Windows taskbar. The design? Whatever, I can live with that. But it constantly refuses to unhide, it drives me crazy.
Plus in Win 11, we lost the ability to put the taskbar vertically on the left or right side of the screen. When coding on a laptop, I want the max vertical screen space. Taskbar at the bottom means I see 10% less source code.
Boo Win11!
These days I'm inclined to agree with you. Windows 7 was the peak, newer versions have gone far downhill with trying to make me accidentally open Bing everywhere and automatically installing Candy Crush products that no one asked for.
When this computer dies, decent odds I replace it with a Steam Deck. Doubly so if they can stuff Thunderbolt into the next one and sell me a GPU dock with it.
But someone made the Bing metrics go up for a few years, so surely that's worth burning any customer goodwill to the ground.
We're talking about moving the whole taskbar to the left (or right) of the screen similar to how Ubuntu looks for example.
You used to be able to move the taskbar to any edge of the screen but that functionality was removed in Windows 11.
While the UIs look bad, the touch and pen UX together in windows 10 is fantastic
There was a time when we used to say the same about Windows Xp. And Windows 2000.
I wonder if each next generation of user prefers the new layouts each time?
I’m sure (or at least, I imagine) MS put a lot of resources into testing these UI overhauls.
Windows Vista wasn't terrible if you had a beefy machine and well-supported hardware. 7 was basically Vista but with newer machines and better hardware support. 8+ has been meh.
So as we differ this clearly in opinion: What makes you appreciate the windows UI more today?
When I search the start menu, it does the weirdest things, e.g searching notepad via bing instead of starting it, or preferring the uninstaller above the real program. So I learned that the start menu is basically broken for search, and became harder to use as a menu. I mostly abandoned it.
Meanwhile, the gui widgets, built in windows and control panels became much worse and dumbed down. It pretends to be a helpfull assistant, but behaves more like an arrogant drunk. I want to do some work on the machine, not be told about some experience it really wants to shove in my face.
Windows 8.1 complemented with StartIsBack (https://www.startisback.com/) was exactly what you're looking for.
Unfortunately Windows 8.1 is very soon to be EOL and Windows 10 is unrecoverable even with StartIsBack.
I'm not paying them shit though. For the gaming system I use, I'm running my own activation emulator and point the system there.