Sometimes I wonder what kids will consider a 'button' since their first few years will be touch screens, magic corner trackpads, and no-show clickers in MightyMice.

Do TV remotes even have physical buttons any more?

Enable "high contrast mode" in macOS.. buttons look like buttons and some more things.. The normal mode is way too flat / low contrast.

I'll probably catch heat for this, but I think Windows 95 was the pinnacle of UI/UX design, and much of what we've done since have been regressions.

One convention we lost was that text fields have sunken white background and other areas of the UI are generally grey. UI now uses bright white in most places, eventually causing the world to invent dark mode.

It's really gone backward.

They not just waste space but at the same time break some of the UI. Recently it took me half a minute to drag a window into view on Mac OS because aside from a few pixels every single part of the window "title bar" was actually some button or widget. I wish mainstream operating systems implemented DWM's shortcuts for window dragging/resizing, those are amazing: holding the key and left mouse button makes the window draggable anywhere, and right mouse button instantly resizes the window so the bottom right corner is at the mouse cursor position.

And I hate auto-hiding, narrow scrollbars so much. Scrollbars have exactly two purposes: show the scroll progress and allow faster scrolling than with the wheel/gesture. Both are effectively prevented by it going invisible.

There was a time when I found the Windows 98 UI a bit "old", but honestly in the long run it aged better than almost everything that came after.

Haven’t tried either, but there’s https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95 and https://serenityos.org/

Aero was not simpler or cleaner. Ditto with KDE3 with Keramik. Usable and with clear widgets? Yes, but not simpler. Simpler, clean and usable were Mac OS 7-8, Windows 95-2k, or BeOS.

Also, lots of vaporwave confuses the 80's and 90's, often made from people which either they weren't there or they were too young.

To me the years from1996 and 2004 share lots of traits, (being Mac OSX almost the pinaccle of late 90's technologism and optimistic futurism), and early 90's were culturally almost an extension of the late 80's. Both in trends, music, movies... things began to change with Jurassic Park, Terminator 2, and so on.