I think Windows 95/2000 and the contemporary MacOS (including the then future MacOS X) have the best UI in everything I used in my 30+ years of tech life.

I sincerely hope that one day we could go back to that road. If you want that achieved, please support me to join Apple/Microsoft to become the UI boss, fire all flat-design people and hire a small team to implement the older UI, then give a few passionate talks on EDX and conferences so people who supported flat UI magically support the older UI. They always follow whoever the lead is like headless flies.

LOL.

▲

VerifiedReports 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yep. I always cite XP as being Windows's peak, but I forgot that it shipped with their insulting Fisher-Price motif enabled by default. Step 1 was to switch the UI to "classic" (essentially Windows 95) mode, and all was well.

Windows 95 is a great case study because with that release, Microsoft did more for GUIs than Apple did through the entire decade of the '90s... and beyond.

All of it is now out the window (pun invited). It's a race to the bottom between Microsoft and Apple, with Microsoft having a HUGE head-start. But Apple has really stepped up to the plate with Tahoe, crippling it with big enough UI blunders to keep them in the enshittification game.

▲

cosmic_cheese 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I really liked XP (and 7) because for me, having a capable theming engine built in that didn't take a ton of extra resources or cause instability (unlike Stardock's WindowBlinds) was a real value add. There were some absolutely gorgeous third party XP/Vista/7 themes on sites like DeviantArt that worked extremely well within the limits of the engine, had a unique look and feel, and were just as usable as the "classic" theme.

When MS gutted the theming engine with the release of Windows 8 (flat rectangles only) I was devastated.

▲

DaiPlusPlus 3 hours ago | parent [-]

The engine itself isn’t gutted - it’s full of functionality that was never lost. MS just (correctly) reasoned that transparency effects in the UI - introduced in Vista simply to show-off the capabilities of the DWM compositor - ultimately detract from a good UI.

▲

cosmic_cheese 2 hours ago | parent [-]

From what I remember it lost the ability to render rounded window corners, because while Windows 8 msstyle themes existed they all had the hideous boxed corners that clashed hard with many looks.

I don’t agree that transparency is always a detractor. Judicious use can be a net positive, but it doesn’t work for all themes and there should be an option to turn it off. Personally I didn’t find the W7 variation of Aero to be bad at all.

▲

DaiPlusPlus an hour ago | parent [-]

> From what I remember it lost the ability to render rounded window corners,

...I'm guessing you haven't used Windows 11?

--------

By "rounded corners" are you referring to rounded-off corners in the nonclient area (such that the hWnd's rect is not clipped at all)? If so, then no: those would be rendered using a 9-grid[1] and have always been supported.

If you're referring to how so many fan/community-made msstyles for Windows 10 retain the sharp corners, I understand that's not a limitation of DWM or msstyles, just more that you need to do a lot of legwork when defining nontrivial corners in an msstyles theme; it can be done (there are plenty of examples online, e.g. look for Windows XP's style ported to Windows 10), it's just that most people don't go that far.

-----

[1] In msstyles, the 9-grid defines how a rectangular bitmap is stretched/scaled/tiled to fill a larger area; it's very similar to how CSS image borders are defined with `border-image-slice`.

	▲	cosmic_cheese a minute ago \| parent [-]
		I’m speaking specially about Windows 8/8.1. Obviously 11 and the new Fluent design language it brought don’t suffer the same issue. Whatever the case, rounded corners on the titlebars and window chrome were common in XP/Vista/7 custom msstyles but were nowhere to be seen for 8/8.1 custom msstyles. It was one of the most frustrating aspects of that era of Windows for me.

▲

pndy 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

XP in early betas released had that slightly upgraded 9x interface called Watercolor [1] and if they'd keep it, surely majority would pick it up over plastic Luna.

Early experiments with totally new theme were rather unpleasant [2] and Watercolor was abandoned in favor of more familiar 9x looking theme as an option. W11 still comes with that old 9x widgets look - slightly flattened because of that trend but it's still there buried beneath for compatibility reasons. And I'm pretty sure they won't escape with that like Apple did with Aqua away from Platinum.

[1] - https://betawiki.net/wiki/Watercolor

[2] - https://betawiki.net/wiki/Windows_XP_build_2416#Gallery

▲

imiric 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

After nearly 30 years of tech life myself, I've come to the realization that the best UIs are not graphical. They can have graphical elements mostly for visualization purposes, but all of them should be as minimal and unobtrusive as possible. Any interactivity should be primarily keyboard-driven, and mouse input should be optional.

Forcing users to click on graphical elements presents many challenges: what constitutes an "element"; what are its boundaries; when is it active, inactive, disabled, etc.; if it has icons, what do they mean; are interactive elements visually distinguishable from non-interactive elements; and so on.

A good example of bad UI that drives me mad today on Windows 11 is something as simple as resizing windows. Since the modern trend is to have rounded corners on everything, it's not clear where the "grab" area for resizing a window exists anymore. It seems to exist outside of the physical boundary of the window, and the actual activation point is barely a few pixels wide. Apparently this is an issue on macOS as well[1].

Like you, I do have a soft spot for the Windows 2000 GUI in particular, and consider it the pinnacle of Microsoft's designs, but it still feels outdated and inneficient by modern standards. The reason for this is because it follows the visual trends of the era, and it can't accomodate some of the UX improvements newer GUIs have (universal search, tiled/snappable windows, workspaces, etc.).

So, my point is that eschewing graphics as much as possible, and relying on keyboard input to perform operations, gets rid of the graphical ambiguities, minimizes the amount of trend following making the UI feel timeless, and makes the user feel more in command of their experience, making them more efficient and quicker.

This UI doesn't have to be some inaccessible CLI or TUI, although that's certainly an option for power users, but it should generally only serve to enable the user to do their work as easily as possible, and get out of the way the rest of the time. Unfortunately, most modern OSs have teams of designers and developers that need to justify their salary, and a UI that is invisible and rarely changes won't get anyone promoted. But it's certainly possible for power users to build out this UI themselves using some common and popular software. It takes a bit of work, but the benefits far outweigh the time and effort investment.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46579864

	▲	Telaneo 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> Forcing users to click on graphical elements presents many challenges: what constitutes an "element"; what are its boundaries; when is it active, inactive, disabled, etc.; if it has icons, what do they mean; are interactive elements visually distinguishable from non-interactive elements; and so on. There are standards and common conventions for a lot of this in the Windows 9X/2000 design language, and even in basic HTML. These challenges could have been solved (for values of) by using them consistently, and I think we might have been there for a little while, at least within the Windows bubble. The fact that we threw all of those out the window with new and worse design, then did that again a few more times just to make sure all the users learned to never bother actually learning the UI, since it will just change on them anyway, doesn't entail that this is an unsolvable problem (well, it might be now, but I doubt it was back in 1995). > Like you, I do have a soft spot for the Windows 2000 GUI in particular, and consider it the pinnacle of Microsoft's designs, but it still feels outdated and inneficient by modern standards. The reason for this is because it follows the visual trends of the era, and it can't accomodate some of the UX improvements newer GUIs have (universal search, tiled/snappable windows, workspaces, etc.). I fail to see why any of these features couldn't be implemented within the design constraints of the Windows 9X/2000 design language. There are certainly technical constrains, but I can't see any design constrains. They were never implemented at the time, and those features didn't become relevant until we'd gone through several rounds of different designs, so we never had the opportunity to see how it would work out.
	▲	3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		[deleted]