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Comment by cosmic_cheese | Hacker News Reader

I have an old laptop that boots Windows 7 and in my opinion, it's peak Windows (having used everything from 98SE onward, including 2K). It feels modern in a way that older entries don't but doesn't have the annoying and user-hostile elements of newer entries. The visual style is slightly dated feeling but it wouldn't take a whole lot of work to fix that.

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It has the old settings menus right?

I think it was windows 8 or 10 that introduced the new menus which I found somehow both too simplistic and harder to navigate. And then sometimes you get lucky and figure out a way to open the old menus to do what you actually want.

I think Windows 7 was my favorite as well.

Yeah it still uses the old Control Panel system, which is far from perfect (it's really bad about "dialog tunnels" where some things are buried too many levels deep), but overall is more servicable for technical users.

Another thing that it has over XP is that it's better at providing a minimally usable environment post-install, with a better payload of default drivers. I don't miss booting into 256 color 640x480 and trying to get all the hardware in a functional state without a network connection like was a frequent occurrence with XP and older.

The new menus are really fun in 11, where it starts out new, and then when you want more info pretty much everything changes back (font/kerning/color) to the point of feeling you need to do a doubletake. Its something that if it happened online you'd swear you've been slip-streamed and shouldn't continue. Guess they dont have anyone who can move over the old items to the new look, go figure.

The old dialogs used to be extensible, in that getting random software like mouse drivers to just add a new tab to the mouse control panel was the way to do things. The new one is, as far as I know, not that. So there's a chance that they left random bits alone because they're afraid to break things.

Or that's merely the justification to push back against the designers…

I always try to reach to arrive at the old configuration before I even consider looking at the text, the newer version just wastes my time and the setting is never there or labelled wrong.

I could have stayed on Windows 7 for the rest of my life.

I use macOS now and basically hate it.

(but to be honest I have never used Windows 11 and barely used 10)

Give KDE Plasma a shot! You can even try it in QEMU with virgl for graphics acceleration without risking anything more than an hour or two of time setting it up.

https://github.com/knazarov/homebrew-qemu-virgl

Well I'm on macOS because I have a M1 laptop...

Also I use a lot of audio softwares and it's hard to run them on Linux, I would need to try how much those download managers (another rant worthy subject) and Windows VSTs can really run on Linux. But when I get a new PC I will.

I mean, virtualizing with good hardware acceleration and integration can kind of be the best of both worlds, right? You're not replacing macOS, you're supplementing it with FOSS software that you _may_ find more tolerable, and if not, just use the same software and workflow that you have been.

Windows 10 is great. It finally made me to switch to Linux with KDE. Couldn't be happier.

Early betas of Windows 8 had a refined Aero style that I still think looks great today. https://postimg.cc/dL3rxwvF

Yeah that's not bad looking at all. What happened to UI styling and the theming engine in 8 was a travesty. It was so ugly and because the theming engine had been gutted, the user couldn't even fix it with third party visual styles.

That's maybe 11's single saving grace: it course corrected and Fluent actually looks pretty good. If only the rest weren't awful.

Windows 11 is inoffensive where Windows 8 was ugly. But Windows 8's visual style was more functional. Windows had borders. Menus and dialogs had contrast and shadows. The focused window was obvious.

Eh, i prefer the round corners in 7. Those windows look like they'll cut and bleed your fingers if you touch their edges :-P

To be fair, you would cut yourself and bleed in betas.

Respectfully disagree. NT/Win2000 was the peak as it was before they added all the DRM/phone home junk. It ran fast, in fact diablo ran smoother on it than on the win 98 partition I had at the time. Granted some programs failed because they were doing things memory wise they should not been doing...

2K was amazing compared to 98, but 7 has a number of QoL and tech improvments that I'd have a hard time giving up, and it's easier to make 7 better behaved than to bring 2K into the modern era.

NT4-reboot-for-any-NIC-change was peak?

NT4 had a lot of issues. Good foundation, but not 'peak'.

I mean... I'll gladly reboot my computer for a network change if it means the rest of the OS isn't a piece of shit.

It did BSOD quite a bit from other-than-shit-manufacture-display-or-printer-drivers.

I hated how much 7 bloated the base installation size (10x or more) versus late versions of XP, but otherwise, yeah, it's by far the best desktop OS they've made.

(EDIT: Actually maybe it was Vista that introduced the inexplicable massive installation size bloat? My memory is fuzzy there)

Yep, Windows 7 is basically Vista SP3 + the new taskbar.

> The visual style is slightly dated feeling but it wouldn't take a whole lot of work to fix that.

This was fixed in 2010, about 15 years ago. And it's still the nicest looking UI of any desktop OS to this date:

https://www.deviantart.com/zainadeel/art/Shine-2-0-for-Windo...

It's what "liquid glass" wishes to be.

The Vista/7 era of visual styles had so many good entries. You could throw a dart at the VSStyles DeviantArt page blindfolded and hit something nice looking. Frankly it still severely outclasses the Linux theming scene.

W8 and W8.1 are atrocious out of the box but you can customize them to make it even better than W7. Swapping the start menu for something good and customizable like Stardock Start8 will completely change the experience and remove 95% of the problem people have with that OS.

I kinda mentioned it in another comment but I don't think I could make 8/8.1 work no matter how good it is unless the awful theme engine could be replaced wholesale with that of 7. It's just so hideous.

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