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Comment by torh | Hacker News Reader

My favorite was the blue in Windows 2000. Never cared much for the green in Windows 95/98. When installing Windows 98 later (because games) I would try to set up the same blue. Instead of getting it correct, I guessed, and ended up with #336699 which was easy to remember and "close enough". I see now that it's closer to Haiku (almost perfect, #336698) than Windows 2000.

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Same. The lighter gray 2000 uses compared to 9x is also much more pleasant.

It might sound ridiculous but using 9x with the default theme felt a bit depressing. It conjures images of being stuck in a building with that awful fluorescent overhead lighting on a day where it’s dark and dreary outside.

2000 on the other hand is about as refreshing as a gray 3D beveled OS theme can look, on par with Mac OS platinum and maybe slightly edged out by the bright colorful sunny tab titlebars of BeOS.

Windows 2000 is the epitome of Windows UI to me, probably because my first PC had Me which borrowed the desktop from it. As i kid I didn't even notice it was different from the 98 machines at school, but when i set up 98SE for retro gaming as an adult I couldn't shake this "something isn't quite how i remember" feeling.

Then i set up 2000 as a server for the retro machines and everything clicked. Kind of amazing how many control panels in Windows 10 and 11 are essentially unchanged from 2000

I agree, the color was great, and also in general Windows 2000 was very good. I used both the desktop and server versions for years. After that Windows XP made me switch to Linux. Since then I've only really used Debian and Mac OS.

I recently tried installing Windows 11 on a PC to run some games. The contrast with Windows 2000 is crazy, what a mess. Even just the control panel has three different UI frameworks mixed in one application. The whole thing is slow on a modern CPU with 64gb ram.

How did they get from Windows 2000 which arguably may have been ahead of Linux in terms of kernel and at least on par if not better than Mac OS in terms of UX to todays version of Windows 11?

It’s a long, desperate and complicated tale as the Windows team, frightened by their own shadows, attempted to head off any and all possible competition. From web views to tablet interfaces and every other mistake you can see the legacy of it in windows 11. The tablet/touch screen panic also affected Linux as well but at least most of the worst of that has been fixed.

When I get jobs to work on older systems I get a visceral sick feeling whenever the server version of windows with the touch screen interface comes up in RDP. Hideous and useless.

Win2k was easily the best thing they ever did. Every version of server since then has pushed admins to linux

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