[0] this is definitely true for Windows. All subsequent versions of Windows have had worse UX.
Windows 7, which was Vista's equivalent to SP2 also has some fans. Heck, I'd even personally argue that Windows ME has some niceties not seen in subsequent releases, particularly when combined with Active Desktop (which I'm pretty sure did not survive the transition to XP).
I wonder if/when some subset of users will prefer a more controlled window layout engine, one which always opens windows into their own "space" on the screen. To that end, I don't actually mind how iPad does its window layout, I just wish iPad had all the features and openness of macOS to install your own drivers, background apps and virtual devices/mixing. A simpler UI can actually be a good thing, but you shouldn't lose functionality when making things simpler. A simpler UI doesn't necessarily mean less complex operating system...
SP2 was fantastic. For me personally, Windows XP means XP SP2. Anything before that wasn’t worth using.
That is because Microsoft had its own versioning system:
- RC was alpha quality.
- Releases were betas.
and then starting with SP2 one can talk about a released product. NT had 6 SPs, 2000 had 4, XP had 2. Even in Windows 11 they fixed things (taskbar) after release.
This really tells a not so nice story about engineering and quality at Microsoft.
I use XFCE btw
No offense, but I cannot possibly trust your judgement when you use a DE that, by default, is the classic example of no window borders for the mouse to grab onto.
Also I use i3 so my windows are tiled most of the time.
Anything else is a work around poor UX.
The fact that decades later it is still an issue is really disappointing.
I don't "agree to disagree", they offer a function that's unusable.
It would be the equivalent of MacOS breaking the ability to double click on an app.
But it's okay because you could use Spotlight.
That's great and all, but if everything else allows double clicking and MacOS allowed double clicking but only on the absolute centre pixel, we would all consider it broken.
On newer bikes if the starter fails or the battery dies you need to unceremoniously push the bike to speed, jump on and put it on first.
AFAIK quite a lot of 21st-century motorbikes still have that. (Some of them probably still only have that.)
Like Windows, from at least 3.1 (ca 1987?) to at least mid-life of Windows 7 (ca 2012-14?). The item under discussion, window border width, used to be settable from 0 up to... Pretty much all of your screen. (But from some update somewhere halfway through W7, it defaulted to at least one pixel however hard you tried to set it to zero.)
In a world without borders, there would be no problem of Gates.
I do not remember how I have configured it, perhaps the window border width is determined by the window theme (I use Chicago95), but I have also been using XFCE for many years and I have decent-sized window borders on my 4k monitors and my mouse theme (Hackneyed 48x48) has extremely obvious mouse cursor shape changes whenever you touch the window borders, so they are easy to grab.
The default theme that XFCE ships with has a 1px grabbing area set. So it's not that the cursor doesn't change, it's just you have to be very precise.
There are "fixes" where people hack the theme to increase the size of some transparent images to force a larger grabble area or telling people that they are holding it wrong.
That’s more of a truth universally acknowledged. XP was goofy then, it’s goofy now, and it was goofy at every instant between.
It's what the general public needs that us nerds can least relate to.
The best-looking Windows UI, IMO, was Vista.
Well, are you sure which of those groups you belong to? At least as far as Windows is concerned? Because:
> It would have been much better if they had had selectable themes.
It did. One click in the right place in the Control Panel and it looked like W95/NT4/W2K. (So did Windows 7, and therefore I must assume Vista, too. [Skipped that one myself.])
But, hey, brand-new users and children couldn't be expected to find that, right?
Plus, W2K was ugly too, just in a different way.
Then why spend time commenting -- ERRONEOUSLY -- on them now?
> Plus, W2K was ugly too, just in a different way.
Über den Geschmack streiten sich selbst die Götter vergebens.
Anyway, point stands:
> > It would have been much better if they had had selectable themes.
> It did.
Only if you didn't/don't know how to use it. Like, for instance, where to click to make it look like W95/NT4/W2K.
You are describing tiling window manager users.
Yeah, most people apparently never noticed the Control Panel setting in XP where you could with one click activate the W95/NT4/W2K interface in stead of the "Fisher-Price" one. Worked in Vista and Windows 7 too, but there they started to remove ever more of the detailed UI customisation settings from the Control Panel. (For a while, you could change them by editing the Registry, but towards the end of W7's lifetime, at least some of those didn't take effect any more.)
Firefox currently has about 20x20 pixels next to the tabs to grab and move the window, and "always show scrollbars" is off by default. This would be reasonable on a phone, but not on any kind of machine with a mouse.
I'm not really defending firefox UI to strongly here, I use it every day as my browser of choice and I find the defaults wonky but at least customizable.
FF has a great compromise setting, keeps the menu bar hidden by default but it appears when you press (the CUA standard keys) [Alt] or [F10]. (At least on Windows, that is.)
WTF are you on about?!? There still is!
Source: Just clicked on the top-left icons on a few programs in Windows 10. Not guideline-defying shit like Microsoft Office / Outlook / Edge / Teams, of course, but programs that follow the Windows developer guidelines display the standard menu just like they've always done: Restore, Move, Size, Minimize, Maximize, Close (usually also displaying the shortcut key, [Alt-F4]). Notepad++ does, WinSCP does, 7-Zip does, PuTTY does, SAS client software does, Teradata client software does... Seems most built-in Windows utilities do, too: File Explorer does, Task Manager does, Command Prompt does, Notepad does, Paint does, Snipping Tool does...
[Edit:] And even in Word / Excel / Edge / Outlook / Teams, at least that menu appears up in the top-left corner when you press the age-old shortcut [Alt]-[Space], even though there is no icon for it. (That was what the W3.x icon was supposed to depict, BTW: The space bar, not a hyphen or minus sign.) [/Edit]
Seems you have to go out of your way to build a Windows app that doesn't have a system menu up in the top-left corner. (Start building a Windows application in most IDEs I've used, and unless you change the default settings it sure gets one automatically.) So why do you spout such drivel, when you obviously have no idea what you're talking about?
It is interesting that modern UIs keep removing agency from the user. There is very little space in the system that feels mine because I am the sole owner of it. On Windows 3.1 I managed everything in the program groups. It was not too convenient (compared to that Dashboard shell or Mac), but still, if the system added a group now and then, I could always take it apart and rearrange to my liking.
Now the Start menu is completely taken over. The ability to manually arrange things in a folder is taken away. The folders that should be rightfully mine (such as Documents) are constantly invaded by every program that feels entitled to put things there. As a result “we do not go there anymore.” The only places that are left for me to manage are: the area to the right of the start menu and the desktop. But I do not like the start menu and do not like cluttering the desktop, so the only place I still govern is a tiny custom toolbar I added to the taskbar.
Which brings this conversation full circle.
The Windows 10 Start Menu scrollbar is unclickably skinny.
It is supposed to expand when you stop your workflow to undertake the Hover-Your-Pointer-Tip-Over-The-Miniscule-Scrollbar Ordeal. If you win, the scrollbar will typically expand to something less difficult. But expansion doesn't happen so reliably that it has your full trust.
All you had to was set shell=progman.exe in (I think) win.ini. Or maybe in the other .ini but it was possible.
Hence why it was worse.
Yup. Until some point midway through its lifetime, when they started disabling (at least some) detailed UI settings even via the Registry.
Just the other day i was trying to do sone simple file search in Mint and oh god the GUI search function is completely useless. I had to jump around installing 3 "file search" programs, none of them really worked and at the end I settled with some console bash magic. ... its 2023 people.
Don't give them ideas, they'd find some way to ruin it.
Interestingly though, I don't have the same impression when looking at the old Apple OSes. To me, Mac OS 9 looks old, but not ugly.
For me, I grew up on Amiga Workbench 2.0 and MS-DOS, so Windows NT/2000 felt like a good evolution from it's User Interface. Very functional, for sure.
100% agree on Classic MacOS. As outdated as the tech was, it was beautiful because it was elegant without being distracting.
C:\Windows\System32\control.exe
C:\Windows\SysWOW64\control.exe
That said, doing so would basically require creating everything from the ground up, because merely theming some existing toolkit and window manager to look like XP is not at all the point. And frankly, there HAVE been SOME useful UI/UX improvements in the past couple decades, like, FTA, minimaps. But can you imagine a much more conservative desktop, with highly integrated apps, based on the "good old days" of desktop design with just a touch of modern elements when they improve on things?
... Truth told, the closest thing in existence is probably SerenityOS... but it really would be more practical if there was a Linux desktop for this. Every so often I fantasize about how I might start such a project. It's been like that forever now.
I also tried LXDE and LXQt as well. I actually thought LXQt might be the one for me, but it was a bit buggy and lacked a lot of much-needed maintenance.
Also, although I'm glad Linux developers don't always make a habit of just simply throwing out ideas and code that works fine, it does bother me how antiquated some things have gotten. DBus is the best desktop IPC option on Linux, and that's not really a great thing in my opinion. Likewise, it sucks that most file archivers still work by popening some command and parsing its output, occasionally breaking on edge cases, usually having limited support for the kinds of advanced functionality you'd get in Windows archive tools. I do understand that making actually-good applications takes time, but over the course of the past couple decades it doesn't feel like much progress has been made here. I mean hell, speaking of archive tools... FreeBSD has been working on libarchive for ages and it'll likely be integrated with fucking Windows before it's integrated with common Linux desktops, which will probably mostly farm out to CLI tools like unar and zip directly. This is the same approach, with the same exact problems, that I remember being used as far back as when I started using Linux, in programs like Xfe.
Needless to say... my feelings are complicated.
XFCE with Chicago95 already exists (and so does Q4OS with XPQ4) as proof of concept that the window manager and toolbar side can be replicated.
The problem is that important pieces of software are not relying on any toolkit directly, but implementing their own version, so even if you support qt, gtk2 and gtk3+ applications with 3 different themes, there will be software running under electron or implementing their own client side decorations and breaking all the rules.
I think the easiest way to start would be to simply collect and maintain existing themes with a unified look and make a distro based on Ubuntu LTS or even RHEL to avoid breaking changes at maximum. This distro would have pre-selected software that behaves well with the selected themes, and need to have at absolute minimum a working browser with extensions following that theme.
If implementing from the bottom up, then something similar to helloSystem could also be a way, but I do not see it working in practice due to the time it would take.
It's does not seem well known but it looks and works very closely to old Windows.
I have a side project plan to take this, combine it with a decent laptop, pre install libreoffice and a browser and sell it as "Stable OS" with a long term "no-change" policy to anyone who just needs a basic computer where not everything changes at the whim of someone looking for a item on their resume.
Vista eliminated the Fisher Priceness of XP but added a whole bunch of glowing and reflective stuff, which Windows 7 toned down dramatically.
I don’t remember if Win 7 still allowed you to have the classic start menu, but I do believe I was ok with what it did have.
I stopped using windows after Using Win10 for a short time, but ClassicShell was always maintained and worked flawlessly... oh, dev stopped in 2017. oh well.
the source was released and there is a fork that has recent changes https://github.com/Open-Shell/Open-Shell-Menu
It's Windows 8 that wrecked things, by making the two-way correspondence between the start menu and a folder of icons basically void.
But also, generally, the difference is that Windows 95 still feels like a "workstation" computer, designed for maximum readability and clarity, while staying in the background and not drawing any attention to itself.
With Windows 98, the OS begins trying to look pretty, which means having more elements and style choices which take attention away from the work.
And I think this is exactly what many people's complaints are in this thread: an interface that is faulty out of the box that needs to be "tuned" in order to change it from an entertainer back into a workstation.
I haven't played with Windows 98 and Windows 2000 in a while, but I remember all sorts of "improvements" over Windows 95, such as sliding menus, "shiny" icons that draw attention to themselves, "shiny" gradient title bars, and so on.
The article complained about things which were not configurable or not easily configurable. So did many comments.
Judicious animation has well studied benefits. I do not see how Windows 98's icons were more attention grabbing. Gradient title bars help locate the buttons in my experience.
I do not use Windows 98 as my daily driver, and I can't give you precise examples.
But I know that many areas of the OS, such as parts of the Control Panel, like the Display control panel require, load into memory, and include IE modules.
> I do not see how Windows 98's icons were more attention grabbing. Gradient title bars help locate the buttons in my experience.
I hope you are aware that these are subjective.
Nothing. Those are just touch ups of the Win95 UI. Smoother color gradients from using more colors and smoother animation.
XP was the next big change. Never liked it. Felt like I was dragging around bitmaps. It’s “heavily” for no reason - no usability improvement nor does it even look that good.
Edit: Oh right I forgot about Active Desktop and MS’s attempt to turn Windows Explorer into Internet Explorer. Not a fan of it but at least it didn’t impair usability that much. Visually it still use the same “language”.
All this crap to the left in Explorer windows that takes up space for no good reason. Active Desktop. Uglier icons that are inconsistent with the many older Win 95-style icons that remain everywhere in the OS. It's not that bad on the whole, and you can reverse most of it, but it's a bloating and bastardization of the (unironically) finely honed aesthetic of Win95.
Windows 98's icons look very similar to Windows 95's. Windows 2000's look better and more consistent to me.
Muahaha... Heh. Please don't say stuff stuff like that, kid.
Because if you are "old", then... What are many of the rest of us, antique?
From Windows 95 to Windows 7, the UI fundamentally stayed the same, with a few details here and there, including, scroll bars, window title bars and borders.
Essentially, what changed is just cosmetic and mostly as a result of better hardware. Earlier versions of Windows were designed for 256 color displays, Windows XP fully embraced 24-bit color, and Windows 7 was designed with GPUs in mind. That's how we got from pixel art to shading to semi-transparency.
And I must admit I liked Windows 7 because it was both functional and pretty. A nice, modern for the time skin on top of tried and tested UI core concepts.
Windows 8 broke everything as an attempt to unify the desktop and mobile experience, and we haven't recovered since then. In fact, I think mobile killed desktop usability. We are in a conundrum that we didn't find a way to resolve: desktop and mobile are fundamentally different platforms, so they would need different UI paradigms, but there is an overlap functionality as many apps are present on both platforms, so it would be nice to provide the same experience on both.
To that, add the fact that the web is often third or a fourth option (mobile and desktop web), and the ability to use native controls in web browsers is rather poor, so people make their own, but then, you want the website to look like the desktop app. Same kind of problem.
E.g. booting up 2000 by itself it absolutely sucks. I mean, it looks great... but you can't tile windows, you can't resize the command prompt dynamically, you don't have DPI support, a lot of the little victories like pinning and grouping aren't there, the way it draws often causes ghost trails, virtual desktops aren't a thing, a surprising number of things were modal when they didn't need to be. It has great parts but the problem isn't newer versions threw them all away with no improvement it's that not every change was an improvement.
Mac is all secret handshakes, nothing discoverable, terrible af keyboard-primary work. Windows was very good at letting you stay on the keyboard.
In the spirit of scroll bar discussion, the standard of Ctrl-Home, Crtl-End, Shift-Ctrl-Home and Shift-Ctrl-End are so good. No such "begin of doc" and "end of doc" on a Mac except if an app wills it.
That doesn't mean that XP was perfect. There are still faults with it.
But if fixing those faults means iterating on it more, then I'm happy with not.
Things can be imperfect and still better than everything else.
Does that make sense?
Incidentally, I still use it in Windows 10. Probably more out of habit than anything else.
I use it because it rocks more than anything else :)
But yeah.