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Comment by mrweasel | Hacker News Reader

That's a matter of taste, but for many it was the Windows they used first and/or spend the most time on and there's a lot of love for that reason alone. I never used XP all that much, but I always changed the theme to the Windows 2000 look. I really didn't like the default, it looked unprofessional and clunky in my eyes. Upon release XP was also pretty universally mocked as a Fisher Price-like UI.

To me Windows 95/NT 4 is still the gold standard in Windows UI. It's certainly not the prettiest, that would be Windows 2000, but it was easy to use, easy to navigate and efficient with space.

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Of course that's a matter of taste but Luna interface/theme made whole XP being more appealing to ordinary people - especially with these task-oriented elements. On the other hand, "classic" widgets had that strong bare-bone technical and functional look that made whole system scarier to some degree.

I had tons of "Visual Styles" back then and in the last XP days I opted for grayish Royal or Royale. It's such shame that MS has abandoned Watercolor theme - that was a middle ground: interface was updated and yet, still similar to classic design. And it was even in some elements flat before that style become a dominant. Luckily we're slowly moving away from that and I won't be missing it.

win2k was peak for me. lean, functional, just a pinch of glitter here and there (short fade-ins). it was on par with the amazing stability brought by nt5 kernel.

i kinda miss xp at a cultural level since it was a bit the end of that computing culture cycle (after that apple started to dominate and ubuiquitous computing influenced desktop ui)

"after that apple started to dominate"

When did Apple dominate? I'm not trying to hate on Apple here, but there's this weird belief that Apple have had a lead in personal computer OS market share at some point in the last few decades, and it isn't really true since about 1984.

You can argue that they should dominate, but that doesn't seem to have happened.

Maybe they mean culturally.

The mac os x and iphone era dictated UI and UX for a while. I wasn't clear that I wasn't talking about market share.

I remember Apple products being the realm of graphics designers, videographers, and other art professionals back in the XP days. I thought they went mainstream later, as Windows Vista coincided with the iPhone release.

The first Windows I used was 98, and I sure didn't miss the blocky grey menus nor the pixelated icons. Maybe it was Fisher Price-ish but the new rounded buttons and borders were way more appealing to me.

Took me years to like Windows XP. Hated the new start menu. I always kept installing Windows 2000 (or ME, probably because it could use Windows 98 drivers but look like Windows 2000).

I eventually got used to it and ended up liking it.

It was at this moment I realized that people are talking about liking the non-classic-look XP. I always immediately put things in classic look, no grouped windows, etc.

IIRC correctly, XP’s stability greatly increased after Service Pack 2 was published.

XP Service Pack 2 was in essence a different OS.

I always ran it with the 2000 style theme. That said XP offered me nothing over 2000 so 2000 is what I ran on my main machine since it used less ram but did all the same things, often a bit faster.

For awhile I ran XP 64-bit though, that did do one thing 2000 couldn't do.

The "Windows Classic" look on XP is exceptionally ugly, because those 3D-rendered icons just do not belong on a Windows 2000-style grey background for menus or buttons. (I have recently had to test both these OSes in VMs…)

That is true, it looked completely off, as if no one really bothered to tests it and make it look nice. It got rid of the horrible window decoration of the default theme, but the start menu looked terrible.

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