I've lived through every evolution of Windows from 3.1 up to 11 and Millenium/2000 still remains my favourite and I will always consider it the most 'get-shit-done' UI that Microsoft has ever built. Up until W10 removed the feature, I used to turn off the Themes service so that I could get the classic UI back.

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.

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irishcoffee 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Wait a sec. Windows 2000 was probably their best operating system. Windows ME was absolutely their worst. They were so different I’m not sure the entire company wasn’t swapped into the set of Severance (tv show) or something of that ilk.

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ch_123 2 hours ago | parent [-]

They were developed by completely different teams.

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.

	▲	lachiflippi 22 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Vista was fine from the get-go if you had enough (>=4GB) RAM, which OEMs mostly didn't bother shipping. My ME machine would reliably BSOD when I opened / closed the CD tray.
	▲	drooopy 20 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Vista was an absolute dumpster fire but in no way compares to the awfulness of ME.