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> until roughly SP2 came out, which basically was an entirely new OS released as a service pack

SP2 was fantastic. For me personally, Windows XP means XP SP2. Anything before that wasn’t worth using.

Yes. XP == SP2 :)

> 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.

SP2 was largely about security issues. Before then XP was riddled with vulnerabilities.

XP had 3 service packs not 2!

The only thing I remember is that I would never install SP2 because of EULA. I don't remember the specifics though. Around that time I started mostly using Linux anyway.

> Everything old is new again? I remember when people were deriding Windows XP for being "Fisher-Price" in appearance and preferring to run Windows 2000 because it was more stable

That’s more of a truth universally acknowledged. XP was goofy then, it’s goofy now, and it was goofy at every instant between.

Yes but in hindsight endearingly so. And the UX itself was still really good. The start menu in particular was an actual improvement over the old one, as were the clickable login screen icons.

The usability was very good. The appearance was goofy and Fisher-Price-like. The two things are mostly orthogonal.

I wouldn't say orthogonal. Making something inviting, approachable and feel like a safe place to experiment/explore for a novice is a critical and overlooked part of usability. The childlike choices of "bright primary colours" and "no sharp edges" is one way to attempt that.

It's what the general public needs that us nerds can least relate to.

It might have been good for brand-new users and children, but not all computer users are like that. It would have been much better if they had had selectable themes.

The best-looking Windows UI, IMO, was Vista.

> It might have been good for brand-new users and children, but not all computer users are like that.

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?

I was a Linux user back then (and still am). I didn't spend enough time with XP to bother learning intricacies like that.

Plus, W2K was ugly too, just in a different way.

> I was a Linux user back then (and still am). I didn't spend enough time with XP to bother learning intricacies like that.

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.

You could switch the theme (at least in SP2) to look basically like 2000, which is what I always did. You could actually do that in 7 too.

It may have looked goofy, but it was usable. I'll take ugly/goofy and usable over pretty and hard-to-use every single time.

You shouldn't need to make that trade off though. There is no rule that says a usable interface has to be ugly.

You didn't need to. Select the W95/NT4/W2K theme in the "Appearance" Control Panel, and done.

> XP was goofy then, it’s goofy now, and it was goofy at every instant between.

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.

>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.

You are describing tiling window manager users.

Ya know one of the first things I do on an XP install is to go in and disable as much of UI faffing about as I can. It takes a couple of clicks, but once you disable themes in XP you get something that looks quite a lot like Windows 2000.

I did it because my computer was a POS. But then it turns out I have a minimalism kink, so I've been doing that ever since.

I use XFCE btw

Yep I got into the habit of doing that because I run XP in a virtual machine for legacy junk. I actually had opportunity to run classic MacOS recently and realize that I largely prefer the 10.x UI especially once they started toning down the decorations. Classic MacOS got a lot of things right that are missing in current operating systems, but man is it ugly.

> 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.

Alt + click-and-drag solves that problem.

Also I use i3 so my windows are tiled most of the time.

Having boarders that are bigger than 1px would solve that problem.

Anything else is a work around poor UX.

The fact that decades later it is still an issue is really disappointing.

Agree to disagree I guess. I don't need a window border when I can drag/resize the window from anywhere in that window.

I do need window borders. A good interface would allow enough configuration that we both could have what we want.

Agreed.

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.

For me it's more like being disappointed that there's no way to start the engine in my car with a hand crank, instead of using the key.

Some older (pre 21st century ) motorcycles have a kick starter in addition to the electric one, and it does actually come in handy.

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.

> Some older (pre 21st century ) motorcycles have a kick starter in addition to the electric one, and it does actually come in handy.

AFAIK quite a lot of 21st-century motorbikes still have that. (Some of them probably still only have that.)

> A good interface would allow enough configuration that we both could have what we want.

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.)

>Having boarders that are bigger than 1px would solve that problem.

In a world without borders, there would be no problem of Gates.

This must depend on how you configure it.

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.

It is defined by the theme.

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.

On many Linux DEs you have “Alt-drag” and “Alt-resize”. It is absolutely amazing, and luckily there are hacks to get that on Windows too.

> I remember when people were deriding Windows XP for being "Fisher-Price" in appearance and preferring to run Windows 2000 because it was more stable

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.)