I am coming to the opinion that Windows XP was the maximum usable interface, and we should have stopped there [0]. But then, I might just be old and telling the kids to get off my lawn.
[0] this is definitely true for Windows. All subsequent versions of Windows have had worse UX.
Everything old is new again? I remember when people were deriding Windows XP for being "Fisher-Price" in appearance and preferring to run Windows 2000 because it was more stable (until roughly SP2 came out, which basically was an entirely new OS released as a service pack).
Windows 7, which was Vista's equivalent to SP2 also has some fans. Heck, I'd even personally argue that Windows ME has some niceties not seen in subsequent releases, particularly when combined with Active Desktop (which I'm pretty sure did not survive the transition to XP).
I wonder if/when some subset of users will prefer a more controlled window layout engine, one which always opens windows into their own "space" on the screen. To that end, I don't actually mind how iPad does its window layout, I just wish iPad had all the features and openness of macOS to install your own drivers, background apps and virtual devices/mixing. A simpler UI can actually be a good thing, but you shouldn't lose functionality when making things simpler. A simpler UI doesn't necessarily mean less complex operating system...
> For me personally, Windows XP means XP SP2. Anything before that wasn’t worth using.
That is because Microsoft had its own versioning system:
- RC was alpha quality.
- Releases were betas.
and then starting with SP2 one can talk about a released product.
NT had 6 SPs, 2000 had 4, XP had 2. Even in Windows 11 they fixed things (taskbar) after release.
This really tells a not so nice story about engineering and quality at Microsoft.
The only thing I remember is that I would never install SP2 because of EULA. I don't remember the specifics though. Around that time I started mostly using Linux anyway.
> Everything old is new again? I remember when people were deriding Windows XP for being "Fisher-Price" in appearance and preferring to run Windows 2000 because it was more stable
That’s more of a truth universally acknowledged. XP was goofy then, it’s goofy now, and it was goofy at every instant between.
Yes but in hindsight endearingly so. And the UX itself was still really good. The start menu in particular was an actual improvement over the old one, as were the clickable login screen icons.
I wouldn't say orthogonal. Making something inviting, approachable and feel like a safe place to experiment/explore for a novice is a critical and overlooked part of usability. The childlike choices of "bright primary colours" and "no sharp edges" is one way to attempt that.
It's what the general public needs that us nerds can least relate to.
It might have been good for brand-new users and children, but not all computer users are like that. It would have been much better if they had had selectable themes.
> It might have been good for brand-new users and children, but not all computer users are like that.
Well, are you sure which of those groups you belong to? At least as far as Windows is concerned? Because:
> It would have been much better if they had had selectable themes.
It did. One click in the right place in the Control Panel and it looked like W95/NT4/W2K. (So did Windows 7, and therefore I must assume Vista, too. [Skipped that one myself.])
But, hey, brand-new users and children couldn't be expected to find that, right?
>I wonder if/when some subset of users will prefer a more controlled window layout engine, one which always opens windows into their own "space" on the screen.
Ya know one of the first things I do on an XP install is to go in and disable as much of UI faffing about as I can. It takes a couple of clicks, but once you disable themes in XP you get something that looks quite a lot like Windows 2000.
No offense, but I cannot possibly trust your judgement when you use a DE that, by default, is the classic example of no window borders for the mouse to grab onto.
I do not remember how I have configured it, perhaps the window border width is determined by the window theme (I use Chicago95), but I have also been using XFCE for many years and I have decent-sized window borders on my 4k monitors and my mouse theme (Hackneyed 48x48) has extremely obvious mouse cursor shape changes whenever you touch the window borders, so they are easy to grab.
The default theme that XFCE ships with has a 1px grabbing area set. So it's not that the cursor doesn't change, it's just you have to be very precise.
There are "fixes" where people hack the theme to increase the size of some transparent images to force a larger grabble area or telling people that they are holding it wrong.
> A good interface would allow enough configuration that we both could have what we want.
Like Windows, from at least 3.1 (ca 1987?) to at least mid-life of Windows 7 (ca 2012-14?). The item under discussion, window border width, used to be settable from 0 up to... Pretty much all of your screen. (But from some update somewhere halfway through W7, it defaulted to at least one pixel however hard you tried to set it to zero.)
I don't "agree to disagree", they offer a function that's unusable.
It would be the equivalent of MacOS breaking the ability to double click on an app.
But it's okay because you could use Spotlight.
That's great and all, but if everything else allows double clicking and MacOS allowed double clicking but only on the absolute centre pixel, we would all consider it broken.
Yep I got into the habit of doing that because I run XP in a virtual machine for legacy junk. I actually had opportunity to run classic MacOS recently and realize that I largely prefer the 10.x UI especially once they started toning down the decorations. Classic MacOS got a lot of things right that are missing in current operating systems, but man is it ugly.
> I remember when people were deriding Windows XP for being "Fisher-Price" in appearance and preferring to run Windows 2000 because it was more stable
Yeah, most people apparently never noticed the Control Panel setting in XP where you could with one click activate the W95/NT4/W2K interface in stead of the "Fisher-Price" one. Worked in Vista and Windows 7 too, but there they started to remove ever more of the detailed UI customisation settings from the Control Panel. (For a while, you could change them by editing the Registry, but towards the end of W7's lifetime, at least some of those didn't take effect any more.)
Windows 2000 was the last truly great Windows for me. It was the last Windows version that had a working "Find in File Contents" feature without having to install grepwin.
This is something that's always puzzled me - why is searching in Windows always so gosh darn slow? You'd think with an entire background service dedicated to file indexing, I'd be able to quickly find files in a directory tree with the word "foo" in their file name or contents, but even with a modern SSD it still takes at least a minute on any remotely populated directory.
File search in graphical Linux is terrible as well.
Just the other day i was trying to do sone simple file search in Mint and oh god the GUI search function is completely useless. I had to jump around installing 3 "file search" programs, none of them really worked and at the end I settled with some console bash magic. ... its 2023 people.
Microsoft should just buy Everything off Voidtools because they have perfected Windows search and it boggles my mind that Microsoft can't recreate that.
I was a fan of Google Desktop Search - that was actually able to find relevant content in my files, and it was fast. But Google killed it as soon as they decided to drive everyone into the cloud. Supposedly all major OSes have such an (indexed) search functionality integrated nowadays, but for some reason it doesn't really work, and I'm never motivated enough to find out how to fix it...
May be they are so busy figuring out how to upload our data to their servers and sneak in clauses in their terms and conditions to cover it ... that they forgot to build the actual functionality of showing search results to user.
Same with Google Talk (as in, was good, then killed by Google). This is their text chat and voice chat app before crapware like Hangouts. Not tried Duo or Meet.
Recursive agree to all the above, purely in terms of UI/UX.
Firefox currently has about 20x20 pixels next to the tabs to grab and move the window, and "always show scrollbars" is off by default. This would be reasonable on a phone, but not on any kind of machine with a mouse.
Can you not right click and enable menu bar to get the traditional menu (plus a title bar of sorts) back for this?
I'm not really defending firefox UI to strongly here, I use it every day as my browser of choice and I find the defaults wonky but at least customizable.
> Can you not right click and enable menu bar to get the traditional menu
FF has a great compromise setting, keeps the menu bar hidden by default but it appears when you press (the CUA standard keys) [Alt] or [F10]. (At least on Windows, that is.)
Especially with the Dashboard shell [1]. Was very convenient: compact, always at your fingertips, with extended virtual desktop, fully configurable and stable: you lay out things some way, they stay this way.
It is interesting that modern UIs keep removing agency from the user. There is very little space in the system that feels mine because I am the sole owner of it. On Windows 3.1 I managed everything in the program groups. It was not too convenient (compared to that Dashboard shell or Mac), but still, if the system added a group now and then, I could always take it apart and rearrange to my liking.
Now the Start menu is completely taken over. The ability to manually arrange things in a folder is taken away. The folders that should be rightfully mine (such as Documents) are constantly invaded by every program that feels entitled to put things there. As a result “we do not go there anymore.” The only places that are left for me to manage are: the area to the right of the start menu and the desktop. But I do not like the start menu and do not like cluttering the desktop, so the only place I still govern is a tiny custom toolbar I added to the taskbar.
The Windows 10 Start Menu scrollbar is unclickably skinny.
It is supposed to expand when you stop your workflow to undertake the Hover-Your-Pointer-Tip-Over-The-Miniscule-Scrollbar Ordeal. If you win, the scrollbar will typically expand to something less difficult. But expansion doesn't happen so reliably that it has your full trust.
> Fair, but after win3.1 there wasn't a menu up in that corner anymore.
WTF are you on about?!? There still is!
Source: Just clicked on the top-left icons on a few programs in Windows 10. Not guideline-defying shit like Microsoft Office / Outlook / Edge / Teams, of course, but programs that follow the Windows developer guidelines display the standard menu just like they've always done: Restore, Move, Size, Minimize, Maximize, Close (usually also displaying the shortcut key, [Alt-F4]). Notepad++ does, WinSCP does, 7-Zip does, PuTTY does, SAS client software does, Teradata client software does... Seems most built-in Windows utilities do, too: File Explorer does, Task Manager does, Command Prompt does, Notepad does, Paint does, Snipping Tool does...
[Edit:] And even in Word / Excel / Edge / Outlook / Teams, at least that menu appears up in the top-left corner when you press the age-old shortcut [Alt]-[Space], even though there is no icon for it. (That was what the W3.x icon was supposed to depict, BTW: The space bar, not a hyphen or minus sign.) [/Edit]
Seems you have to go out of your way to build a Windows app that doesn't have a system menu up in the top-left corner. (Start building a Windows application in most IDEs I've used, and unless you change the default settings it sure gets one automatically.) So why do you spout such drivel, when you obviously have no idea what you're talking about?
Still quite a bit of time between "after win3.1" and "over 5 years". Like, almost thirty years now where that exact icon has, OK, "been absent" -- but replaced with other icons in the exact same spot. Did you never, even by mistake, click on one of those in all those over twenty years? Wow, you must be a lot better than I at mouse control. And / or a lot less curious.
I won't argue against Windows 2000's usability. But I will say that to me, as someone who first started using computers in the XP era, any Windows earlier than Windows 7 looks so god damn ugly to me, and Windows 2000 even more so than XP.
Interestingly though, I don't have the same impression when looking at the old Apple OSes. To me, Mac OS 9 looks old, but not ugly.
To me, XP and Vista looked like a terrible attempt at replicating Mac OS X when that all wow'ed us - it's hard to imagine these days just how big of a deal the iMac and later on OS X were in terms of moving away from grey boxes everywhere (though sometimes too far, since Windows 7 really toned down and refined XP/Vista's UI).
For me, I grew up on Amiga Workbench 2.0 and MS-DOS, so Windows NT/2000 felt like a good evolution from it's User Interface. Very functional, for sure.
100% agree on Classic MacOS. As outdated as the tech was, it was beautiful because it was elegant without being distracting.
To the contrary, XP and Vista' soft, round buttons and edges always made me think of a Douglas-Adamsian dystopia. Win2000 was bare bones, square and functional.
I swear they actually are actively trying to make the "Control Panel" / system settings experience worse with each iteration for sure. 90% of 10 and 11's system settings feel like they just took the original Control Panel screen and hid it, exposed 2-3 of the least valuable options, and displayed them in a weird solid-colored screen. To me the only way to adjust most windows settings is to find the "Advanced settings" link in the solid-colored window that will bring up the original control panels.
I absolutely agree. For at least 10 years now, my dream has been to essentially recreate the Windows 2000/XP UX as a Linux desktop environment.
That said, doing so would basically require creating everything from the ground up, because merely theming some existing toolkit and window manager to look like XP is not at all the point. And frankly, there HAVE been SOME useful UI/UX improvements in the past couple decades, like, FTA, minimaps. But can you imagine a much more conservative desktop, with highly integrated apps, based on the "good old days" of desktop design with just a touch of modern elements when they improve on things?
... Truth told, the closest thing in existence is probably SerenityOS... but it really would be more practical if there was a Linux desktop for this. Every so often I fantasize about how I might start such a project. It's been like that forever now.
I believe the biggest obstacle is dealing with different toolkits, since gtk3 and later are constantly breaking theme compatibility with new versions, and nobody have the time to maintain good alternative themes in these conditions.
XFCE with Chicago95 already exists (and so does Q4OS with XPQ4) as proof of concept that the window manager and toolbar side can be replicated.
The problem is that important pieces of software are not relying on any toolkit directly, but implementing their own version, so even if you support qt, gtk2 and gtk3+ applications with 3 different themes, there will be software running under electron or implementing their own client side decorations and breaking all the rules.
I think the easiest way to start would be to simply collect and maintain existing themes with a unified look and make a distro based on Ubuntu LTS or even RHEL to avoid breaking changes at maximum. This distro would have pre-selected software that behaves well with the selected themes, and need to have at absolute minimum a working browser with extensions following that theme.
If implementing from the bottom up, then something similar to helloSystem could also be a way, but I do not see it working in practice due to the time it would take.
You can find well maintained applications for almost everything in either qt or gtk3. So you can select one toolkit to support. KDE might even accept your theme if you did enough work on it to make it work - and this is something that is feasible for one person. The hard part is those few exceptions, if you need one GTK3 app because KDE doesn't have a good alternative (or one qt app because GTK3 doesn't) then you have twice as much work and it is probably beyond what one person can do. Making that missing app for qt/gtk3 probably needs a large team and a few years and so is beyond you (unless you are rich and can afford to hire someone to fulfill your vision) - and there are many missing applications, not to mention existing ones which are just barely acceptable
It's does not seem well known but it looks and works very closely to old Windows.
I have a side project plan to take this, combine it with a decent laptop, pre install libreoffice and a browser and sell it as "Stable OS" with a long term "no-change" policy to anyone who just needs a basic computer where not everything changes at the whim of someone looking for a item on their resume.
I did like XFCE at one point, but it never really did quite nail the UX for me. A lot of the problem is more on GTK+2 than it was anything else. (Obligatory mention of no thumbnails in file dialog; I used to patch GTK by hand for this!) Now with newer versions of GTK, this problem has unfortunately gotten worse for me, and I don't really prefer XFCE very much. Worseyet, I've gotten used to wlroots giving me good support for things that never really worked well in X11, and XFCE's plan regarding X11 and Wayland going into the future is still somewhat unclear.
I also tried LXDE and LXQt as well. I actually thought LXQt might be the one for me, but it was a bit buggy and lacked a lot of much-needed maintenance.
Also, although I'm glad Linux developers don't always make a habit of just simply throwing out ideas and code that works fine, it does bother me how antiquated some things have gotten. DBus is the best desktop IPC option on Linux, and that's not really a great thing in my opinion. Likewise, it sucks that most file archivers still work by popening some command and parsing its output, occasionally breaking on edge cases, usually having limited support for the kinds of advanced functionality you'd get in Windows archive tools. I do understand that making actually-good applications takes time, but over the course of the past couple decades it doesn't feel like much progress has been made here. I mean hell, speaking of archive tools... FreeBSD has been working on libarchive for ages and it'll likely be integrated with fucking Windows before it's integrated with common Linux desktops, which will probably mostly farm out to CLI tools like unar and zip directly. This is the same approach, with the same exact problems, that I remember being used as far back as when I started using Linux, in programs like Xfe.
Of all the versions of the Windows UI, Win 7 was -- for me -- the best by far. Nothing else even comes close, and everything from Win 8 on has been substantially worse.
I stopped using windows after Using Win10 for a short time, but ClassicShell was always maintained and worked flawlessly... oh, dev stopped in 2017. oh well.
Win95 default was peak Windows UI for me. It had proper shading so you can see the window edges. Min/max/close buttons were high contrast and easy to see, and were big enough to easily click. Window titles were high contrast and clear. The UI was light and snappy unlike XP’s.
Nothing. Those are just touch ups of the Win95 UI. Smoother color gradients from using more colors and smoother animation.
XP was the next big change. Never liked it. Felt like I was dragging around bitmaps. It’s “heavily” for no reason - no usability improvement nor does it even look that good.
Edit: Oh right I forgot about Active Desktop and MS’s attempt to turn Windows Explorer into Internet Explorer. Not a fan of it but at least it didn’t impair usability that much. Visually it still use the same “language”.
Active Desktop and IE Windows Explorer, for one thing.
But also, generally, the difference is that Windows 95 still feels like a "workstation" computer, designed for maximum readability and clarity, while staying in the background and not drawing any attention to itself.
With Windows 98, the OS begins trying to look pretty, which means having more elements and style choices which take attention away from the work.
If I remember correctly turning off active desktop on 98 was almost a requirement if you wanted a ... I was going to say stable system but lets be real this was 98 the best you could hope for was a sort of stable system.
It can be turned off, but it can't be turned off. It's still there, lurking just around the corner, and still showing up in some dialogs.
And I think this is exactly what many people's complaints are in this thread: an interface that is faulty out of the box that needs to be "tuned" in order to change it from an entertainer back into a workstation.
I haven't played with Windows 98 and Windows 2000 in a while, but I remember all sorts of "improvements" over Windows 95, such as sliding menus, "shiny" icons that draw attention to themselves, "shiny" gradient title bars, and so on.
The article complained about things which were not configurable or not easily configurable. So did many comments.
Judicious animation has well studied benefits. I do not see how Windows 98's icons were more attention grabbing. Gradient title bars help locate the buttons in my experience.
I do not use Windows 98 as my daily driver, and I can't give you precise examples.
But I know that many areas of the OS, such as parts of the Control Panel, like the Display control panel require, load into memory, and include IE modules.
> I do not see how Windows 98's icons were more attention grabbing. Gradient title bars help locate the buttons in my experience.
All this crap to the left in Explorer windows that takes up space for no good reason. Active Desktop. Uglier icons that are inconsistent with the many older Win 95-style icons that remain everywhere in the OS. It's not that bad on the whole, and you can reverse most of it, but it's a bloating and bastardization of the (unironically) finely honed aesthetic of Win95.
The left area was used for information like file size, disk usage, and image preview. There have been better implementations. But Windows 98 could suit either preference.
Windows 98's icons look very similar to Windows 95's. Windows 2000's look better and more consistent to me.
I might be getting old, too. (Born 1987.) I have also come to regard Windows XP as the pinnacle of personal computing UI. Almost everything that followed, regardless of vendor, feels like a step in the wrong direction.
Same, and same. It was pretty optimal too, where i remember getting the number of BG tasks down to 15 and I knew what each every one did. I haven't been able to make that claim for an OS for many many years now.
From Windows 95 to Windows 7, the UI fundamentally stayed the same, with a few details here and there, including, scroll bars, window title bars and borders.
Essentially, what changed is just cosmetic and mostly as a result of better hardware. Earlier versions of Windows were designed for 256 color displays, Windows XP fully embraced 24-bit color, and Windows 7 was designed with GPUs in mind. That's how we got from pixel art to shading to semi-transparency.
And I must admit I liked Windows 7 because it was both functional and pretty. A nice, modern for the time skin on top of tried and tested UI core concepts.
Windows 8 broke everything as an attempt to unify the desktop and mobile experience, and we haven't recovered since then. In fact, I think mobile killed desktop usability. We are in a conundrum that we didn't find a way to resolve: desktop and mobile are fundamentally different platforms, so they would need different UI paradigms, but there is an overlap functionality as many apps are present on both platforms, so it would be nice to provide the same experience on both.
To that, add the fact that the web is often third or a fourth option (mobile and desktop web), and the ability to use native controls in web browsers is rather poor, so people make their own, but then, you want the website to look like the desktop app. Same kind of problem.
I'd love the windows 2000 style classic theme with the overall customizability improvements in XP with the UI feature sets of newer versions.
E.g. booting up 2000 by itself it absolutely sucks. I mean, it looks great... but you can't tile windows, you can't resize the command prompt dynamically, you don't have DPI support, a lot of the little victories like pinning and grouping aren't there, the way it draws often causes ghost trails, virtual desktops aren't a thing, a surprising number of things were modal when they didn't need to be. It has great parts but the problem isn't newer versions threw them all away with no improvement it's that not every change was an improvement.
Same time frame: GNUStep/Windowmaker on the Linux side of things, also something of a high water mark. It's really weird to me how much interfaces have degraded in the past two decades.
Mac is all secret handshakes, nothing discoverable, terrible af keyboard-primary work. Windows was very good at letting you stay on the keyboard.
In the spirit of scroll bar discussion, the standard of Ctrl-Home, Crtl-End, Shift-Ctrl-Home and Shift-Ctrl-End are so good. No such "begin of doc" and "end of doc" on a Mac except if an app wills it.
[0] this is definitely true for Windows. All subsequent versions of Windows have had worse UX.