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Comment by kitsunesoba | Hacker News Reader

Windows 7 also had the best customization/theming, followed by XP. Both 7 and XP had some amazing looking community-made .msstyle themes but 7's theme engine allowed for things like full transparency while XP was limited to 1-bit transparency. This was nice in that it offered UI looks that were more modern than the classic theme yet more understated than the gaudy Luna/Aero.

Then Windows 8 came along and decided flat squares were the only option anybody could use, removing theme transparency support altogether.

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And Win7 Aero looked so good stock I never felt the need to go hunting for themes.

Then the abomination that is Windows 8 came along and took an enormous and terribly corrosive dump on the the party. Windows has been a conundrum to me ever since. It just doesn't feel right anymore like it used to with 2k, XP, and Win7.

I'm a bit sad about the decline, having spent many thousands of hours completely plugged in to Windows.. Every wish, only a click or keystroke away.

R.I.P. FCKGW-RHQQ2-YXRKT-8TG6W-2B7Q8

(for the youngn's: this is the everlasting devils0wn pirate cd key for Windows XP serial number. How awesome would it be if it also worked for a future version of Windows?)

> How awesome would it be if it also worked for a future version of Windows?

Definitely would be awesome if it becomes the placeholder KMS client key (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/get-started...)

Damn that key even looks familiar

Ahh the memories. Thanks for bringing that back.

This truly has me nostalgic for the days of breaking my computer trying to replace the theme, system icons, explorer shell, etc with untested crap to make it look cooler.

Check out https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/ (SFW despite the name). Sort by top all time for some movie-like interfaces.

I've reached the stage where I want my computer to just work, but it's still a fascinating place to check out from time to time.

https://github.com/cairoshell/cairoshell

I wonder what is the rational of removing features like allow for customization.

Designers in constant need of change, otherwise their jon would be useless.

Technical debt, requiring someone to maintain it.

But then they notice they cant build a dark mode and end up reinventing it all poorly. I've come to the conclusion that 99% of the time "technical debt" particularly in old stable code that hasn't been touched in years is translation for "Its complex and I don't understand it". Particularly when asked to add what seems like a trivial feature.

SOS as always, the new guy knows better than the old one, but by time time all the edge cases get reimplmented it consumes 100x the ram and runs 1/10 as fast and is just as unmaintainable, if not worse because now its written with 20 layers of OO or functional abstractions in some interpreted language that is a giant mess. Which is why when the next new guy joins its all "garbage code".

Sometimes KISS is best, and it should generally be a requirement that before your allowed to throw the code away you have to refactor it a couple of times.

As I understand it some of the code in Windows goes back all the way to win98. Lots of people retired or left the company since then.

It's not like they can just throw this stuff away anyway. The theming support is everywhere throughout the API, and since Microsoft is a backwards compatibility company, they can't just change APIs incompatibly because that inevitably breaks existing software.

FWIW there are still some awesome themes out there on Gumroad. It’s just much less done because the ux is reasonable versus XP.

Yeah I've been using tabbed folders in Explorer for a decade, and some theming overrides to make that more slick.

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