Classic 7 is a Windows 10 LTSC mod to look 1:1 to Windows 7
classic7.lol
classic7.lol
Windows XP's level of 'plug and play' for devices/drivers ushered in the modern OS feel from a usability standpoint, but from a 'get-shit-done' GUI and responsiveness standpoint Win 2000 (and up to Windows Server 2003 by extension) was all I ever wanted/needed.
These may be rose tinted glasses though, and I'd be interested to hear counterpoints.
I guess I like the design language but I wouldn't be prepared to give back the usability of modern UIs.
Both desktops tried to create someting shiny without being too close to Mac OS X.
TBH KDE has better themes like the Slick icon set and plain but contrasted widget and menu themes, kinda like the semi-flat theme from Office 2003 (was it the .Net theme?) or something like that, which was modern but not baroque and overloaded like Keramik or XP's silver theme with too many gradients.
That style would modernized would be several times than the unusable flat themes from today. Kinda like Zukitre for GTK2/3/4 under GNU/Linux and BSD desktops (ad QT5/6 being set to match the GTK3/4 themes under the settings).
Indeed, the term "Frutiger Aero" was not really used among geeks in this time; I had to look up Wikipedia to get its precise meaning:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frutiger_Aero
On the other hand, basically everybody who had an opinion about Windows's design used the official terms
- Windows XP: Luna; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_XP_visual_styles
- Windows Vista, 7: (Windows) Aero: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Aero and Liquid Glass (though the latter is an Apple term): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_Glass
- Windows 8, 8.1: Metro; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro_(design_language)
I believe that it has always supported multiple desktops since the introduction of the NT kernel. There just wasn't any UI provided in the OS for switching. I used a Microsoft PowerToy to switch between desktops, I think all the way back to NT 4.0.
Sure, yes, me too. And there were 3rd party add-ons like 9Desks:
https://www.hexagora.com/en_dw_9desks.asp
But the thing is that they were significantly crippled, because the OS didn't know about them. So there was no way to move a window from one vdesktop to another.
And for me, that is perhaps the principle use case. I start some app, realise it will take ages, so I move it aside to a vdesktop so it can keep working but doesn't get in my way.
Without that functionality then you need to plan ahead, and you simply cannot always do that. My go-to example made me about £150. A non-techie consultancy client of mine ran Office XP. He wanted the service pack. MS offered it on CD, as it was back when broadband internet was very new.
So when he got it, I went there and installed it for him.
Step 1: it's a CD. It's only about 25% full. Microsoft, in its infinite idiocy, makes step 1 of the installer to copy the compressed files to hard disk, and then decompress them.
IT IS ON A CD. Why ship them compressed at all? Because some idiot of a manager stuck the download version on a CD and didn't think to ship the decompressed files when on a medium with the space.
Second, once decompressed, it starts to install. A progress bar gets to the end... and then resets to the start again.
SEVEN TIMES.
You know the real reason progress bars disappeared, replaced by throbbers? Because of poorly-implemented crap like this: programmers found they were too much like hard work.
I sat there and watched the damned thing work for an hour and 45 minutes, and I charged my client for it, because that was my job and my living.
You do not always know if running a tool is going to take 2 minutes or 2 hours. You can't always pre-plan and think "this will take ages so I will start it on a secondary vdesktop where it will be out of the way, and I will flip screens and check occasionally."
You don't know. You can't know. And so you need the ability to move something out of the way.
Secondly, because these things were hacks, some programs insist on only running on the "real" primary display. Some will open there even if you're on a vdesktop when you run them. Sometimes you run it 2 or 3 times because you have no sign this is happening -- the OS can't flip you back because this is outside of OS control.
Yes it was there. Yes it worked in a minimal sense. No, it often was not much use at all.
Being used with fvwm, i tried to use them in Win 10. Boy, it was such a mess. Keyboard shortcuts were horrible, overview of where your windows were was horrible.
And I also completely agree with your point that everything else since then has felt like a poorly placed theme on top of something else.
As an aside - as someone who used ME back in the day, I feel like I honestly had more problems with Vista. ME was a downgrade from 98SE for sure, but I don't remember it being the same level of performance and reliability degradation that I saw going from XP to Vista pre-SP2.
My ME machine would reliably BSOD when I opened / closed the CD tray.
IIRC ME would just randomly crash explorer.exe with task bar disappearing but you could recover some of it. On Vista it was just overall sluggish and laggy visual experience.
Millennium _was_ Windows ME, millennium edition. Windows 2000 was completely different. :)
I did later run Windows 98 on my kids' machine for games, but I never tried, or wanted to try Windows ME.
Windows 2000 has the best look and feel for the GUI, but I do recall that I usually saw my first Explorer crash within an hour of a fresh install. Windows 7 was peak Windows because you could still get the "Classic" Windows 2000 theme, but with all the under-the-hood improvements. I've gotten used to the Windows 10/11 UI, but I've never liked it and just wish I could go back to the way it looked when Microsoft cared about usability, as opposed to trying to make everything look like a phone.
I otherwise agree that the older Win 2k era UI was pretty much an ideal UI. The whole "frutiger aero" look did not age well.
If I hit Winkey and type a string, it should not be the case that I get different results from doing that 6 times in a row because it depends whether some background task which changes the results finishes first.
Anyways, this has pitched me towards app "Everything"
I occasionally check whether after all these years MS has fixed the search... no, no surprise there.
I get that it depends on indexing service which may be buggy, etc... but I guess it is possible to prioritize/have alternate index for most important stuff like executables. This bugs me the most: there is a program, but I cannot find it. I must know to navigate my way within start menu or program files (for stuff like debugging/perf tools from Microsoft)
And given lots of comments there are on HN about Windows search, why no MS guy here silently sitting has escalated this "sentiment" to the correct ears? Oh please.
Btw, there's also fooyin which you may say is "modeled" after foobar2000 https://github.com/fooyin/fooyin - another piece I miss from Windows.
Next thing you'll be asking to make OneDrive even remotely predictable in its behavior (other than the predictability of "never doing what I expect or want").
So if I type "ABC" I see the right application. If I type "AB" I don't see it anymore. But if I do "A" then I see the right application. So you have to then always remember to do either "A" or "ABC", because doing "AB" shows a completely different result as the first hit.
Completely bonkers behavior, and shit like this convinced me that neither Microsoft nor Apple has actual UX professionals employed anymore, or they don't have sufficient power to actually influence how things are made.
If I type `f`, the first item on the list is Firefox, if I then type `fi`, it selects Figma instead. Keep typing, `fig`, now it has a Safari tab selected instead for figma.com. Pinnacle UX.
In a similar vein the browser search bar keeps remembering things you mistype once, and if your automatism is to type "n" and then press enter to go to "news.ycombinator.com" you will end up on the wrong page over and over again, because internally it keeps a counter and ranks higher depending on number of times you have "clicked" it.
Quite annoying UX with many search bar implementations and it makes me feel like the people who design these are not actual power users of their own software.
Start typing a word, see the thing you want, finish the word, it disappears.
And
Start typing, see what you want, stop typing and hit enter, but it changed to something else between when you saw it and when you hit enter.
One of the most annoying ones combined these two properties, so depending on various internal races, typing a four letter word would either open one program, the folder that program was installed in (!?), or attempt to Bing the common word
I've got another PC with the same setup running Windows 10 but they both show up in search results just fine.
I feel during XP times it was basic string matching, and sometimes I miss that. At one point on linux they also started matching on description text, but then application maintainers started to add keywords to their description text for their app to rank higher, which again made it worse to find whatever you are looking for.
THEY SAID THE THING!
Windows 11 is also a lot faster than 7 was on equivalent systems. Windows 7 would take minutes to boot.
Citation needed. I went from Win7 on a i5-2500k that booted in sub 15 seconds on a SATA SSD to Win10 on a 5600x that takes 45 seconds to a minute to boot an NVME drive.
Too bad it's been completely broken by Windows 10. It can't even find the names of software I have pinned to the start menu. One of the things I miss most from 7.
That was the thing I missed most in Windows 10. With the previous versions of Windows (I think up to 7?) you could still switch back to classic theme.
Win7 wasnt that bad, you still could set classic GUI. If they only kept it like this and plow money to improve kernel...
I do have the same feeling that Windows 2000 was in many regards the best UI (tied with 7 maybe), but after switching to Linux I'm wondering if this is maybe more rose-colored glasses than I thought.
KDE or XFCE seem to mimic the Windows 2000 design in many ways, but they are still far away from feeling as snappy or as well-thought out than Windows 2000 did. They also paradoxically feel more "gray" than I remember Windows, even though the "grayness" of Windows from that era is sort of famous.
So I'd like to know if this is really just nostalgia/muscle memory or if there are really specific things that KDE does worse than Windows did.
XFCE comes a bit closer to the old UX and cohesiveness, but is still a bit off. In saying that, Chicago95[1] for XFCE does a really great job of bringing that classic Win9X look to XFCE, so it's worth giving a shot. There's also a fork of it called MENT2K[2], which recreates the Win2K experience, also worth checking out.
The DEs I've seen being closest to recreating that classic experience have unfortunately been outside of Linux: ReactOS being the most obvious choice, and the other one being SerenityOS. Although not viable for daily driving yet, still fun to play around with in a VM.
Will definitely check out those themes and have a look at ReactOS (what I wanted to anyway but was procrastinating)
I haven't used XFCE, but you can attribute the lack of snappiness in KDE compared to early Windows to compositing and having more animations. There's not much you can do about compositing, it's kind of necessary on high resolution computers, but Wayland latency has been getting better and if you use a recent distro like Fedora it feels about the same as Windows 7 with compositing enabled. For animations, you can speed them up or disable them entirely using the "global animation speed" slider in the settings. For the grayness, you can re-enable colored window titlebars in the settings by going to "Colors & themes" -> "Colors" and then selecting "Breeze Classic". I don't know why they have them disabled by default.
I miss the days when windows was a platform you could extend and customize.
I also recall this 3D shell where your desktop was basically like an first-person shooter, where there would be a literal desk with files that you could click on, a media wall that would display your photos and so on. I forgot what it was called, but it was one of the coolest things ever. In reality it wasn't very practical, but it was still cool. I miss those days of crazy mods and customisation. Everything so locked up and dumbed down these days, in the name of "security".
We used to have highly optimized C code. Now the freakin' start menu is a progressive web app that runs react components because even Microsoft hates developing in WinUI. Madness.
Was it Task Gallery from Microsoft Research?
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/the-tas...
For "Peak Windows GUI", MW10 and MW11 both score high in my opinion, but the changes in Start Menu behaviour in MW11 and the horrible "Show more options" sub-menu in the MW11 right-click context menu are confusing. So I'll give MW10 the advantage for consistency and less insult to the principle of Least Surprise.
For Peak GUI, I would say there's a tie. An Android device with Desktop Mode is just hard to beat for multi-context usability. Early OS X looked great and had mature GUI ideas. And my daily Linux box with the Sway tiling window manager is the right combination of mouse gestures and keyboard power.
Fastest and lowest latency UI I have ever seen.
I think the best benefit of Windows 2000 was that the GUI was extremely coherent. Even in Windows 11 for some sub menu and options you sometimes have a Windows 2000 UI popping up out of nowhere.
I actually like the Win7 version of Aero, but the real unlock of these features is the third party themes it enables. There were some really nice 7 themes that hold up even now.
I'm so disappointed that all those years later, the Windows UI is literally less configurable than Windows 2.1, which is the earliest version I used. Yeah, I don't miss 16-color mode, but I definitely miss that you had so much flexibility to tweak the UI. Now you're just stuck with some art-school dropout's idea of "flat UI" (seeing as how Microsoft has thrown out most of the great HCI work they, IBM, and others did in the 1980s, in favor of lame aesthetics that are entirely orthogonal to usability) and there's almost nothing meaningful you can change about it.
I agree.
But it's all relative, and I did actually like how Win7 looked. Then "flat design" came along and not only did things get visually boring, nowadays, it's frequently very hard to tell fields from buttons from other controls, where you're supposed or allowed to click and where it's just decoration, etc.
It was a mercy on KDE Plasma: KDE has always been at best plain and homely, but at worst, retina-searingly fugly, IMHO. Flat design at least tamed that.
But on everything else, it's worse than what went before.
Win10 LTSC is now my version of choice. I rarely use Windows -- I mainly use macOS and Linux and am exploring BSD -- but when I need to, it's Win10. Win11 is worse than WinME and Vista put together.
If this can make Win10 look like Win7, I'm interested.
I'd be more interested if it brought back the performance of Win7. That OS was released into a world that still had HDD boot drives and had to pay attention to the details. I still run a Win7 machine that boots in under ten seconds.
Sadly no extension can bring either of those back and we are unlikely to see anything along those lines from MS ever again.
The repo is only 8 months old, which could be seen as good or bad.
(We don't actually know if this has anything to do with AI training.)
If you are a student or work at a supported educational institution: I think Windows 11 Education is to my knowledge basically identical to Windows 11 Enterprise (at least for Windows 10, this was the case). In these versions, you can use LTSC updates if you want.
(Can I post the link, to the open source repo? Is it against the rules? I mean MS owns github and has no problem hosting it)
Only way is usually to buy devices that have such a license included.
I hope it comes back
Every design refresh since then has been half finished and pushed out the door with too many bits of the old left.
I definitely prefer XP over 7. No automatic updates."
Win10/11’s problem isn’t auto updates, it’s the severely reduced user agency in the matter (and the quality of said updates, but that’s another story).
No. They are not bad. They are terrible. Forgot to test your SW or a state actor just discovered your backdoor ? Wait till i finish my work. Don't interrupt me, be more careful next time.
Absolute resistance to auto updates (without assuming the responsibility of manual maintenance) is how you end up with WannaCry…
If you think, "I should try this", Any reason why? I'm really curious to know
The 2d design of modern interfaces is terrible. Everything looks like a "Label". Scrollbars are terrible. Light gray on dark gray. And, worst of all, they need 3d acceleration to draw a bloody 2d label.
And, worst of all, they need 3d acceleration to draw a bloody 2d label
At home, while I have a Mac Mini 4, a MacBook Air, and several Linux boxes, I still use an old PC on Win7 as my primary machine. Is it insecure? Probably. But today "insecure" feels more like a feature than a limitation. No forced updates of anything => everything that works, keeps working indefinitely.
Why do modern OSes need so much power and RAM anyway? I used to produce documents on an Amstrad PPC640. 640 stood for 640k of RAM (no hard disk). It was fine.
I understand the above makes me sound like an old fart (or fool), and we have moved on from DOS. But what does Windows 11 do that Windows 7 couldn't?
Because code writers are lazy and prefer to use 20 levels of abstraction or a 5MB library for a simple function.
In some ways it's a bit like having to customize a Mac to feel comfy (AutoRaise, Rectangle, DiscreteScroll, ...), except in Apple's case it's because they believe that they know better what my computing experience should be like, and in Microsoft's, it's some enshittification and pushing me towards features that I don't really want or need.
At the same time, games work (even the shitty rootkit anti-cheat), lovely software is all there like Notepad++, MobaXTerm, SourceTree (though GitKraken is really good if you want to pay for it), SteelSeries Sonar (the only experience of managing audio devices that wasn't unnecessarily messy or complex, tbh even VoiceMeeter has weird UI/UX), oh and FreeFileSync and ofc all of my dev tools and other software. It's just passable in most categories.
I still believe that something like Linux Mint would give me the best desktop computing experience, cause it almost never is actively hostile to me as a user - all of the instances of it sucking and being broken are either growing pains, ecosystem fragmentation, insufficient development effort (given that there isn't a multi-billion dollar org behind it, or at least not really the DEs or most userland software, or that the drivers don't always get as much love from vendors), or circumstances outside of their control (e.g. the anti-cheat situation with games), rather than a conscious choice on the part of the developers.
I've used Win/Mac both very extensively as daily drivers, but since 2021 using exclusively Ubuntu LTS. In practice I don´t notice any lesser quality, or drivers not being good. I basically have no complaints. I'd say my Ubuntu 22 LTS is a lot less buggy than the megacorp stuff I used to use.
I don't know how businesses operate using this garbage.
So do I. I've had to deal with 10 and 11 at work and had the same sort of problems, so I've refused to "downgrade" this PC.
It particularly used to really piss me off that when I was partway through working on something and had several applications open, with data loaded, that if I tried to leave it like that overnight so I'd be able to continue immediately the next morning, chances are Windows would decide to update and reboot, closing everything.
I found several ways online to supposedly stop it from doing that, but nothing ever worked.
Although 7's UI is much better than the flat nonsense we get these days, I don't find the UI to be the biggest problem. If using Windows 11, I'd want to replace the underlying OS, not keep it and replace just the UI. So while this project looks interesting, to me it's not fixing the real problem.
Many of us know a huge proportion of news stories come from PR firms that just want to sell us something (it comes up on HN every now and then). In the mid-2000s or so, Microsoft had a particular problem selling Office - there was no reason to upgrade to the current version, because the older one already did everything you wanted. Until that time, established practice was to buy new software only if you wanted its new features; the vendor had to give you a good reason to pay for it. To some of us, the PR that immediately followed the stories of struggles to sell their newer versions - PR that suddenly exploded everywhere - was obvious and transparent. "You must upgrade because old software is insecure!" But it grew into the monster we have today. Some people literally panic if they discover an older piece of software.
Think of young people growing up with that being blasted at them constantly. It must have contributed to the has-to-be-new-and-shiny mindset of Javascript developers, where they're terrified to touch anything that hasn't been updated for a few months.
That long, sustained, and paradigm-shifting PR campaign has been a huge win for many software vendors, and for Microsoft in particular. (Of course, after that, and after a few failed attempts, they managed to get the subscription-based model to work for Office, which in that particular case, bypasses the mess left by their earlier selling strategy anyway.)
If we were talking about even older browsers though... 20 years ago, because of the insecure way browsers generally worked, everybody used third-party antivirus or e.g. Norton Internet Security, which seemed to cause as many problems as it solved. But browsers (and OSes) haven't been so open for years - we don't have quite that class of problems anymore, where just visiting a site was enough to get the browser to download and run all sorts of nasties. I don't remember quite when it was that we'd left the most dangerous period behind, when the security of browsers and OSes had been considerably hardened, but it was before 2013. Windows 7 was, and is, much safer on the network than XP, by design.
FWIW I'm running CachyOS and for the first time in my life have moved 95% away from Windows (still maintain a partition that I use every few weeks for a game that can't run on Proton). KDE 6.6 is a delight to use and everything "just works" for me, I don't have to worry about ungodly telemetry, and software fixes come in quickly.
Whenever I use a recent(ish) Windows (rarely :-), it's annoyances like this that make for a poor UX. Again & again.
When you put a computer to sleep/hibernate, you expect it to come out of sleep in a similar state as before. When you select "shut down", you expect that. Not "installing update 1..20, then shut down".
It keeps amazing me that within Microsoft, after having done so many OSes used by millions, some eggheads think that breaking user expectations is a good design decision. It is not.
Not to defend Microslop here, but your workplace should disable this via Group Policies. Sounds a like badly or unmanaged work environment.
Obviously you shouldn't have to pay your works to constantly fight against and disable microslop's bullshit all the time, just so your other employees can actually get work done.
for windows 8 on linux, there's this: https://github.com/er-bharat/Win8DE
For win9x/win2k style this is really neat:
It’s a missed opportunity in my opinion, “here’s an accurate Win2K/XP/7 replica desktop that you get to keep forever” is a strong pitch for Linux for a lot of potential users.
It has massive nostalgia appeal but is also practical because it signals to users that they won’t need to learn any new UI bits or behaviors and that they’ll be comfortable right away. It removes a lot of the spookiness of switching that comes with even the most Windows-like DEs like KDE.
Interestingly, I hear a lot of people talk about LTSC, but few talking about their positive experiences. Is this the "I'm moving to Canada," of operating systems?
The only time I had an issue was when a DAW installer required me to upgrade to 22H2. I grabbed the enablement package directly and used the DISM tool to install it.
I tried it last year, was impressed, and have now moved all my Windows partitions to it. I don't use it much (mainly Mac and Linux here) but it does all I need and more. I have not seen a single problem. Everything I've tried works fine, even installing the Windows Store and a Store app. (Which then complained my GPU was inadequate and barfed, but it ran.)
With a bit of OOShut10, Windhawk, OoAppBuster and a bit of security policy (gpedit.msc) is bearable.
I cannot remember what it is called
but makes it look almost like XP and the UI is very fast and crisp
it's under
System Properties -> Advanced -> Visual Effects -> Use visual styles on windows and buttons