10 ms·

What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000

235 points by npongratz 3mo ago

mysterydip 3mo ago
For me: everything! I clicked so well with it, everything made sense and was responsive.
marginalia_nu 3mo ago
Design language, like any language is metaphorical. The thing that makes these skeumorphic designs work so well is that it kinda forces a consistent metaphor, and consistency above all else is huge for UX. The fact that it's based on things we've seen in real life is also helps, as it means we can reason about the UI with the same faculties we've spent our entire life training.
- bromuro 3mo ago
  Like the floppy disk for “save”? Or the old school phone receiver for “call”?
  - reaperducer 3mo ago
    There's nothing wrong with either of those. No different than "windows" or "desktops" or "files." When was the last time you actually saw a file folder? Or a document separated by sheets with "tabs." 95% of computer users have never seen an ethernet cable, but they're still the symbol for networking. 99% of car drivers have never seen brake calipers, but they're part of the icon when my car's parking brake is on.
    - ranger_danger 3mo ago
      > When was the last time you actually saw a file folder? Or a document separated by sheets with "tabs." Every day because normal functioning adults still need to keep paper records of things.
  - lonelyasacloud 3mo ago
    For icons and some aspects of functionality why not as a starting place? Where it falls down is when designers force too many of the paradigms of the RL original onto a platform that doesn't suit it [0]. [0] See for example the Mac OS X Address Book app https://www.betalogue.com/2012/01/15/abook6-dumb/ https://www.betalogue.com/2012/01/15/abook6-dumb/.
- petilon 3mo ago
  Why are designers not understanding this these days? I think one reason is that flat UI is super easy. Skeuomorphic is extremely hard to get right, and if you don't get it right it looks super tacky. Most people who have the word "designer" in their job title don't have the artistic skills needed to pull it off. This is why most designers are opposed to skeuomorphic. Somewhere in between is the right approach. The NeXTSTEP UI from the late 1980s is what we need to return to. It still looks beautiful today: https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/openstep42 https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/openstep42
  - vslira 3mo ago
    What’s the meaning of skeuomorphic design for a generation that has never worked with the original physical artifacts they’re based on, though?
    - Telaneo 3mo ago
      Consistency. Even if you've never held a telephone receiver, if it means 'call' in one place, it's very likely to mean the same thing in another. We could be using random hieroglyphs to the same ends, but people seem to always make their own (barring a few exceptions, like the hamburger menu). It's probably a better idea to use something with some grounding in reality rather than make your own from nothing, since doing that is hard, even for actual designers.
      - al_borland 3mo ago
        It also takes a long time for those purely digital ideas to filter out into the mainstream and get a shared name. For many years I would hear people same, “click the thing in the upper left corner”, “click those 3 lines up there”, or something similar. The term hamburger menu is starting to filter out there to the point where I feel comfortable using it. Even the term, hamburger menu, is a skeuomorphic name for a digital control. No one knows what to call those 3 lines, but everyone knows what a hamburger is. I’ve even seen some sites use a literal hamburger icon. It also took a long time to standardize on the hamburger menu. Many also tried to use an ellipsis for a long time. Some still do. Sometimes those dots are vertical… is that a thin hamburger or a vertical ellipsis? I heard one person trying to make the term “tots” happen for this style of menu… tatter tots to go with the hamburger. Contrast that to a “gear” menu for settings. They see a cog or a gear and everyone knows what that is without training, even if they aren’t a mechanic.
- xg15 3mo ago
  You still need some design experience and "taste" though. I've seen some B2B apps which used the Windows look-and-feel and looked absolutely awful: Actions wildly scattered through buttons, menus and context menus, panels and tabs nested several layers deep until the UI started to look like a canyon formation - and no icons or color at all, because I suppose those would have been "unprofessional" - so everything was in dull gray. (I think it's worth realizing how colorful the stock Windows dialogs and applications actually are through the use of icons, even despite all widgets being gray.) I still believe the Windows 2000-era UI toolkit is one of the best, because at least it gives you straightforward pathways to build a good-looking and usable UI - but you still have to want to do it.
bluedino 3mo ago
Was this peak Windows UI? I would say so, but the Active Dekstop stuff wasn't the right move. Fisher-price came next, with Windows XP. At least you could easily switch back to classic. And then Windows 8, we won't even talk about that.
- petilon 3mo ago
  The title bar of windows in Windows XP was Fisher-Price. But I thought the rest was OK.
  - hnlmorg 3mo ago
    I hated XP themes too I felt the taskbar was the ugliest part of the themes
- cake-rusk 3mo ago
  Windows Vista / 7 was peak UI for me.
- Dwedit 3mo ago
  I think Windows XP looks very nice if you install the Royale theme. It's a shiny and glassy version of the default XP style.
- Telaneo 3mo ago
  > I would say so, but the Active Dekstop stuff wasn't the right move. Even so, you could completely ignore it if you wanted to!
- madaxe_again 3mo ago
  Almost. The NT5 RCs, which became windows 2000, were better IMO - not massive differences but it hadn’t been slobbered upon by marketing yet.
- rib3ye 3mo ago
  Maybe more importantly, Win2k was the first windows version actually WORKED in a predictable way after years of unstable post-Win3.1 (Win95 and onward) production releases.
alberth 3mo ago
It was clear, clean and understandable. Buttons looked like buttons. Windows (which have frames), looked like windows. And there was no distracting design elements.
- usrnm 3mo ago
  I remember those times and there were a lot if windows that did not look like windows and buttons that did not look like buttons. Not in the apps provided by the OS itself, but in third-party software. It was the time of wild experiments, especially in software created by enthusiasts. We just tend to forget this stuff
  - minkeymaniac 3mo ago
    And crazy themes I had the matrix one with the "dodge this" sound instead of a ping... good times
  - Telaneo 3mo ago
    It's not like the world was perfect before; it's just that it's gotten even worse. The lack of consistency has spread, to the point there barely is any.
    - ConceptJunkie 3mo ago
      Application developers often had a lot of crazy (and bad) ideas, but at least Windows itself was consistent. But then those crazy, bad ideas started affecting Microsoft, and then you could make the Windows Media Player look like eyeballs. "Skinning" apps was a good idea in theory, but in practice, it never offered anything better than the default of Windows 2000 and earlier eras. Now you can't change anything in the Windows UI except a few colors.
mig39 3mo ago
The article praises the UI, but isn't Windows 2000 using the Windows 95/98 UI with a different kernel?
- flanked-evergl 3mo ago
  > I liked the UIs of the entire era from 3.0 to 2000, really. I'm mostly using Windows 2000 as an example here because it runs so well in QEMU/KVM and that allows me to easily take screenshots.
- minkeymaniac 3mo ago
  The different kernel for 95/98 was NT 4... Windows 2000 was unified, same UI for Consumer and Server
  - daveoc64 3mo ago
    There is no version of Windows 2000 for consumers. Windows Me was the nearest consumer release (2000 came out in 1999, Me in 2000), and did share most of the same UI, but was based on Windows 98. Windows XP was the first version of Windows to ship with the same codebase for both consumer and business.
    - minkeymaniac 3mo ago
      Windows 2000 Professional was the non server edition no? That's the one I was running AFAIK. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_2000#Editions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_2000#Editions But you might be right by meaning consumer is non business user.. I also ran ME for about 2 weeks lol
- petilon 3mo ago
  Hold on, don't give cred it to Windows 95. The beveled 3D look was the invention of NeXT. Windows 95 copied everything from them. https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/openstep42 https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/openstep42
  - deleted 3mo ago
delta_p_delta_x 3mo ago
The loss of the theme menu and 'Windows classic' from Windows 8 onwards is dearly missed. But Windows classic hasn't gone away. If you run a 32-bit executable on Windows 10 or 11 under Windows XP compatibility mode, and set 'reduced colour mode', Windows Classic comes back. I have also noticed that when Adobe Acrobat crashes (heh) it momentarily flashes Windows classic on the title bars. It's all still there. Bring it back, Microsoft. And put HiDPI and all your other modern technologies like D3D12 and borderless full-screen on it. I want to write old-school Win32 applications that fly.
al_borland 3mo ago
> Since that button down there is called "Start", it implies that you can probably do something with it, maybe start programs? Click and you'll see the Start Menu: Over time it seems like a lot of designs stop feeling the need to lead the user in this way. There is an assumption that by now everyone knows what the menu in the bottom left corner does, and we are no longer in the phase of trying to teach the population to use a computer for the first time. I feel like this is the wrong approach. Every day there are new young people using a computer for the first time. Wouldn’t it be nice if all these conventions that evolved over the past 50 years could be intuitively discovered, instead of needing explanations from someone who already understands them? Of course, as the world becomes more digital, many skeuomorphic designs become more abstract to those same young users. The floppy disk, the traditional telephone, even the file folder.
- ranger_danger 3mo ago
  > There is an assumption that by now everyone knows what the menu in the bottom left corner does, and we are no longer in the phase of trying to teach the population to use a computer for the first time Strong disagree, because: > Every day there are new young people using a computer for the first time I can assure you these people have no idea what the start button is or does... it doesn't help that it no longer even says "Start" for the last ~20 years.
  - al_borland 3mo ago
    We do agree. I said the first thing you quoted was the wrong approach, because of the second thing you quoted. Having it say “start”, like it used to, would help solve that.
    - ranger_danger 3mo ago
      Ok but, were you around during that time? I remember it not helping much at all to tell people what to do. When Windows 95 first came out, they had to have a giant arrow pointing to the Start menu with an explanation of what that would do: https://a.imagem.app/Ge6OCZ.jpeg https://a.imagem.app/Ge6OCZ.jpeg Then they had a scrolling animation with an arrow and some text ("Click the Start button to begin") that slid in from the right side of the taskbar and pointed right at the Start button.
the_other 3mo ago
I agree that we had much better patterns back then. The software industry in general worked towards sharing visual paradigms, making use of system designs of their host playforms, facilitated discovery etc etc. All that was good and the recent trends moving us away from that consistency and discoverability are a detrement being steamrolled over by agents… But I don’t agree that it “looked nice”. I hated Windows 95 and 2000’s “style”. They looked like engineers had made them. They looked stiff and unfriendly, eith too much border and outline. Real life has no outlines. I was in my late teens when 2000 came out. My friends and I jumped on it and felt it was the Os we had been waiting for. But even then I thought it looked like shit. The affordances were great. I agree that details like button depress and consistent scrollbars are valuable. But I genuinely prefer things a bit rounder, a bit flatter, less grey, or late Aqua-style flat-with-shiny-affordances. I agree that backgrounds should be flat (or very subtly textured so they recede but arn’t “boring; again, late-00s Mac OS nailed this for me). What I’d really like to see is something new that takes the consistency of NT/2000 and Mac OSX prior to Lion, mixed with the novel affordances of BeOS/Haiku (docking windows, small title handles), and puts it through Apple’s “zing” (but not too far - transparency is highly overrated).
- clark_dent 3mo ago
  Computer UIs needed borders and outlines because there are no brain-intuitive visual cues: no depth parallax, no shading, nothing shifts as you move your head, and until relatively recently they had poor contrast and brightness variability compared to the real world. It was also a compromise for interface device limitations. We didn't have 4000 DPI mice with scroll wheels and 26 configurable buttons; you were lucky to have a 1024x768 resolution; and 16 bit color was for people shelling out $$$. Obvious borders and some padding between elements were a necessity to click what you intended to click.
  - ConceptJunkie 3mo ago
    > Obvious borders and some padding between elements were a necessity to click what you intended to click. That never changed.
  - 3mo ago
xg15 3mo ago
> Me: "I don't like smartphone UIs. Everything is flat, nothing indicates where you can touch or not. I have to randomly try everything on the screen." Response by non-tech person: "Well, yeah, of course you have to try everything? How else would this work?" I think this goes deeper than many tech people realize. From what I understood from talking with "nontechnical"(*) friends, relatives, etc, for a good potion of them, computers had always been "unpredictable magic". They got by through memorizing some very strict and rigid interaction sequences - "click this icon, then click that menu, then click that button, etc" and prayed nothing unexpected would happen. They were too scared and/or uninterested in computers to even try and find any rules or consistency in it. I feel as if those nontechnical people "won" now. Now all UIs feel as inconsistent and unpredictable even for "techies" as any computer interaction felt to those people back then. (* repeated from another thread: "nontechnical" in the "not fluent with PC use" sense, which is actually quite arrogant - they can have very high technical skill in other areas obviously)
- EGreg 3mo ago
  It started with iOS 7 and Jony Ive Steve Jobs was right. Then when he died (after removing Scott Forstall), Jony Ive got to do his hardware minimalism in software too. And everything Steve Jobs favored was suddenly derided as “skeumorphism”. It’s like what USSR did with Stalin under Khrustchev. I still remember when Chrome app just had a big white area where you’re supposed to enter the url and you had no idea unless you randomly happened to click there. And if the website background was white, too? Oh too bad LMAO. Minimalistic! Chrome had no… chrome.
  - falcor84 3mo ago
    I don't remember when I first encountered it (maybe before ios7), but their cardinal sin for me was my struggling for 10 minutes to make the calculator app go into scientific mode, seeing absolutely no setting for that, before eventually discovering from a friend that you have to physically rotate the phone to landscape orientation to get the additional buttons.
    - 3mo ago
deleted 3mo ago
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Zak 3mo ago
I agree with the author's wish for visual cues when something is clickable, scrollable, etc.... This, on the other hand: > Imitating real objects is good, too -- I don't have a single one of Android's "sliders" anywhere in my house, for example, so why don't you make this a checkbox, because writing down a check mark on paper is something that I actually do: feels like an idea from a time when many people were encountering UIs on screens for the very first time as adults. I think the slider would be recognized as a toggle in its usual context of a settings screen by most people who have seen a settings screen before, but not that specific design for a toggle.
- delta_p_delta_x 3mo ago
  There is a specific UI guideline for something that can be enabled or not: it's called a tick box. The on-off switch thing is a distinctly iOS invention [1]. The funny thing is that OS X (now macOS) mostly held off using those 'switches' too, until fairly recently. [1]: https://freeimage.host/i/CxYBW6G https://freeimage.host/i/CxYBW6G
  - Zak 3mo ago
    Whose specific UI guideline are you talking about? Android's recommends the switch component for setting toggles: https://m3.material.io/components/switch/overview https://m3.material.io/components/switch/overview
  - zozbot234 3mo ago
    The switch widget is for settings where flipping the switch takes immediate effect, unlike a checkbox where you have to press some "OK", "Submit" or "Apply" button. In Windows 2000/Office UIs, this would've been shown as a button that could visibly switch between "pressed" and "not pressed" states, just like a push-down switch, but that was rarely used. The modern labeled switch design is a lot more intuitive than that.
    - nottorp 3mo ago
      > The modern labeled switch design is a lot more intuitive than that. In a lot of the modern switches I meet with the colour choice makes it totally unclear which is on and which is off. Ok, if it's a cookie acceptance dialog it makes sense to do dark patterns, but I've seen it in legit apps too.
xg15 3mo ago
Maybe relevant: http://windows93.net/ http://windows93.net/
groan 3mo ago
I liked every version of Windows that I’ve used, back to 3.1 all the way up to 11. Nowadays I mostly use 10/11 at home and at work. A new Windows upgrade was always a magical treat for me, the old slow HDD speeds building up anticipation during the installation phase, making me excited to finally use it. Growing up with computers unfortunately demystifies many things, but such is the price of poignance.
- Anamon 3mo ago
  I felt the same way up until around Vista. The launch of Windows 95 was probably the pinnacle for me. XP already started having a sour taste with the whole activatin thing, and Vista and 7 weren't really exciting anymore. My reaction to a new version went from curiosity and excitement about what new things might be in it, to dreading finding out about all the things they removed or made worse this time. I went from wanting to try out the new versions soonish, to trying to stay on the previous one for as long as reasonably possible. And I don't think it's just a nostalgia or age thing, it's about very concrete things for me (dwindling customiation options and growing usage restrictions being the main ones).
bipson 3mo ago
Yeah, Win 2000 is still my favorite Windows version, UX wise. Clean, concise, no surprises, dependable.
cubefox 3mo ago
When Windows XP came out, computer magazines wrote articles on how to switch the more modern, colorful UI back to the old, grey, drab, boring UI of Windows 95/98/2000. I was young at the time and this seemed absurd to me. Why would you willingly use a UI that looks like wearing an old grey tie for a dusty office job in a depressing concrete building?
- ahartmetz 3mo ago
  I was youngish at the time and thought Windows XP looked like clown vomit. There is a German saying "Grün und blau schmückt die Sau" ~"green and blue grace the pig" - and XP was green and blue and shiny like hard candy.
  - thesdev 3mo ago
    Windows XP was the first OS I ever used and still I switched to the classic UI because it looked just better in my opinion.
  - ConceptJunkie 3mo ago
    Yeah, it was butt-ugly. The default Windows UI didn't actually look better until Windows 7, but I used the "Classic" look as long as it was supported. I skipped Windows 8/8.1 entirely, and while Windows 10 was reasonable in terms of how it worked, it was also butt-ugly, but now you couldn't do much of anything to customize it.
    - ahartmetz 3mo ago
      Windows 8 was stupid with the tablet-optimized UI, but I thought it was OK aesthetically, and Windows 10 more so. Even Windows 11 is "pretty" if you don't click the wrong thing and get a legacy dialog from 1...∞ versions back. I use Linux by the way... but not all Windowses look ugly IMO.
- dogleash 3mo ago
  Some people like brutalist architecture. I think is so ugly that I'm half tempted to chatgpt fact check this comment. It very well could have been a deliberate conspiracy to lie to the public and say it looks good to make some austerity go down easier.
nycticorax 3mo ago
Andreas Kling has said that one of his inspirations for SerenityOS was the Windows 2000 UI (https://corecursive.com/serenity-os-with-andreas-kling/ https://corecursive.com/serenity-os-with-andreas-kling/). I found his general goal for SerenityOS ("Roughly speaking, the goal is a marriage between the aesthetic of late-1990s productivity software and the power-user accessibility of late-2000s *nix.") to be strangely validating ('Wait... So it's not just me?!'). And so of course I decided to try out the KDE desktop, which I had always kinda dismissed as being a bit too much of a niche within a niche. And it's great. It really is wonderful to use an OS that is designed from the ground up for serious technical users. And the ubiquity of web apps nowadays makes Linux a far more practical choice than it was back in the day.
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
- forestingfisher 3mo ago
  I love SerenityOS so much, I wish someone ported it as a DE to the Linux kernel so I could daily it
  - nosioptar 3mo ago
    The Chicago95 theme for xfce gets you something similarish.
- Narishma 3mo ago
  Even KDE has started to fall into the modern UI trappings. For example the taskbar somewhat recently became rounded and detached from the screen edges making it more annoying to reach the start button or the clock widget. But at least you can still configure it to how it used to be.
  - wpm 3mo ago
    KDE is chock full of too-flat interfaces and hieroglyphs as icons, all the sins are on fully display there. Its saving grace is that it is completely customizable for the most part, though any GTK apps will probably ignore everything.
chriswarbo 3mo ago
> In Windows 95, those toolbar icons were still actual buttons. In Windows 2000, they are recognizable as a button when activated, but in their default state they're not and you have to hover over them: This is something I've struggled with as toolkits change and old widget themes stop working. There are still some decent themes out there (e.g. Skulpture for Qt has been my default for many years), and with a little patching they can be dragged into working on the latest toolkit versions. Yet I can't seem to avoid this "you have to hover over to see that it's actually a button" behaviour. Very annoying!
weitzj 3mo ago
I still use this background Color on my Mac or Linux.
nticompass 3mo ago
> Hiding filename extensions was one of the capital sins in computer history Amen. The first thing I do on any (Windows) OS installation is make sure file extensions are shown. I guess Microsoft did that for "simplicity", but it also made for easy "virus.jpg.vbs" files.
- cstdr 3mo ago
  A puppy.jpg.vbs file would be shown as "puppy" with "VBScript" in the type column. The full name may be worse though. "puppy.gpj.vbs‬"‭ (which is actually "puppy\u202Egpj.vbs\u202C") looks like an image extension, but is a script (as the type column also shows). Edit: Looks like HN removes those directional override characters. When present, the text looks like "puppy.sbv.jpg"
theodric 3mo ago
I agree with these points, but I will still be disagreeable and take a more nuanced position: Windows NT 5.0 Interim Developer Release build 1796 (and some preceding builds) were peak Windows UI, because they had all the points in the article, plus a "show desktop" button in the lower right corner that you could blindly throw your mouse at-- a feature relegated to a Quick Launch action from the subsequent build, and only restored in Windows 7. Check it out: https://dn721308.ca.archive.org/0/items/usa_1796.1_winNT50.wks_beta2/Windows2000-5.0.1796-FirstBoot.png https://dn721308.ca.archive.org/0/items/usa_1796.1_winNT50.w...
IronWolve 3mo ago
I really liked when XP came out, and you could have both the clean 2000 look with advanced font rendering like cleartype. That was the perfect combo for desktop use. I had my xp running a blackbox 4win and coLinux/cygwin, then moved onto vmware/virtualbox with windows vm and linux desktop, now I'm doing win11+wsl2 and loving it for cuda/ai/building projects.
gk-- 3mo ago
win2k is the goat. fast, clear, no bullshit. sadly rdp and cleartype dragged me away and i've regretted it ever since.
- netsharc 3mo ago
  On Windows 7 it was still possible to have the Win 2000-esque UI. I think it was an option between the classic UI or the fancy UI with gradient buttons and translucency and slowness.
  - ConceptJunkie 3mo ago
    I don't understand why they couldn't have kept that option. The Windows UI is currently the least customizable I've ever seen and I started using Windows with 2.1.
    - netsharc 3mo ago
      Somehow they seemingly had to rewrite everything in React or Javascript (citation needed...), but then they ran out of time and budget to reimplement all the functionality. For a long time some settings on Windows 10 could be found partially on old style control panel windows, and partially the flat look "minimalist webpage" settings app...
liendolucas 3mo ago
For me Windows 2000 Professional is the best OS that Microsoft ever released. At the time I used it was really polished, stable and fast. One recurring question that I keep asking myself is why UIs have to constantly change for the worse? What would happen if vendors kept using the same UI for decades? Would people hate or love having a one well thought UI?
- Telaneo 3mo ago
  > One recurring question that I keep asking myself is why UIs have to constantly change for the worse? So the designers have something to do and so the CEOs have something easy to think of when they need to 'shake things up'. That's all I can think of. I can't think of any that actually benefit the user (barring your original UI being absolute garbage, to the point anything else is an improvement, but even then, the original UI should still be available in some capacity). > What would happen if vendors kept using the same UI for decades? Would people hate or love having a one well thought UI? They hate having to re-learn UIs every 5-10 years (per OS/application/website!), so I don't think you've got much to lose trying to maintain a single good UI. And in the few cases where the UI basically hasn't changed in a long time (XFCE, VLC, probably more), they fucking love it.
  - Terr_ 3mo ago
    To offer another possibility, with a cynical motive: 1. We have an established user-base. 2. Our product and our competitors' products have a similar interface, so we might lose our lead if people start switching. 3. If we abruptly change our UI, they will have no choice but to learn the new one, either because they're too-invested or because they aren't the ones making purchasing decisions and it is mandated by an employer. 4. Once accustomed, the difference we created becomes a barrier to keep our customers captive and away from the competition's products.
Lammy 3mo ago
RE: Start Menu, the article does not mention or show the obnoxious “Personalized Menus” feature which is the one and only ‘must disable’ when I use Win2k. It triggers after some number of days and hides infrequently-used programs from the Programs submenu as a workaround for the menu growing large and unwieldy when many programs are installed, but IMO I think it's even worse than what it claims to fix.
- ConceptJunkie 3mo ago
  In the 90s and early 2000s, Microsoft had a lot of good UI, but their defaults were always really poorly chosen.
smcg 3mo ago
When are we going to start designing UIs based on scientific HCI instead of marketing BS? Or has that gone the way of the dodo?
- Telaneo 3mo ago
  When was the last time someone published a proper article that involved HCI that got even the slightest bit of attention? It's been dead for a long time as far as I can tell (last time it was alive was probably back when Win2K was relevant!).
- ConceptJunkie 3mo ago
  That era ended 20+ years ago. Sorry, pal. Microsoft has been flailing since Windows 2000 to "improve" the UI, often with one bad idea after another: let's make Windows apps look like webpages, let's make Windows apps look like phones, let's remove all the graphics elements that let you distinguish one window or element from another, let's put 5 times more whitespace into every screen than is needed... Yes, I can see where the Windows 2000 "Classic" UI was considered bland, but it was also the functional and consistent UI Microsoft ever made. Most changes since have been a step backwards.
- linguae 3mo ago
  Unfortunately marketing helps sell OS upgrades and new PCs, and one way to market a new OS is to advertise its “new and improved” UI. OS UI used to be more utilitarian and rooted in HCI principles, notably the classic Mac OS and Windows 95/98/NT/2000. Ironically Apple got the ball rolling with fashionable UI when it released Aqua in early Mac OS X, though Aqua was well-executed, having style while still being rooted in HCI principles. Unfortunately the industry took the wrong lesson; competitors responded to Aqua’s style without providing UIs of substance. Sadly even Apple has slipped once Steve Jobs passed away; its UIs have increasingly become more style over substance. Apple has long abandoned the days of Bill Atkinson, Larry Tesler, Bruce Tognazzini, and Don Norman, and unfortunately Jony Ive was less effective when Steve Jobs was no longer around to provide critical feedback. macOS 26 is one of the biggest UI regressions in the entire history of the Mac, though thankfully it’s not unusable and it appears that macOS 27 will be a big improvement thanks to user and reviewer feedback.
ConceptJunkie 3mo ago
Windows 2000 was the peak of Windows UI. While features and functionality has improved in many ways, everything UI change since then has been a step backward. Microsoft (and IBM and others) did a ton of good HCI research in the 70s and 80s, and used that research to make better UI for their operating systems. But sometime around the mid-90s when high-color displays started becoming the norm, UI experts started gradually being replaced by art-school types, and now it seems very little consideration is given to actual UI functionality, and the driver is entirely some bizarre sense of style from people who don't know anything about Human Computer Interaction, but seem to think no more deeply than "less is more". These UI elements had reasons to look and act the way they did. This communicated information to the user (even if the user didn't realize it), and made software much more predictable and discoverable, and ultimately, more intuitive.
- xg15 3mo ago
  This is one part of it, but not the whole thing I believe. The other thing that happened is that "UX research" paradoxically became more data-driven and "scientific", with live telemetry that monitors how UIs are practically used becoming standard. We're able to run "experiments" and directly compare the user interactions from two different variants of the same UI. So in theory, with all that data, we should be making more usable and intuitive UIs than ever. And we are in a way, just not in a user-empowering way. UI design is evaluated by target metrics, and those metrics are firmly in service of the companies' interests, not the users'. Hence so much focus on "engagement" and on making certain flows and activities as frictionless as possible - at the cost of consistency and all the rest of activities that a user might be more interested in than the company... Basically, UX design as a field is alive and well, maybe more so than it ever was - it's "just" not in service of the user anymore...
MisterTea 3mo ago
This is why I run XFCE with the Chicago95 theme. Sure, it's Windows 95 but the 2000 UI wasn't a big divergence from memory. It's familiar and gets out of the way. https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95 https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95
- zozbot234 3mo ago
  The Chicago95 theme is great, but https://github.com/B00merang-Project/Windows-Classic https://github.com/B00merang-Project/Windows-Classic (and many other repositories under the same GitHub user) is a nice addition: it has styling for other DEs and a theme for GTK 4. The GTK 4 theme doesn't remove the excess padding unfortunately, but at least it has a proper 3D beveled look which actually works great with the "responsive", mobile-ready apps.
n4r9 3mo ago
> While we're at it: Hiding filename extensions was one of the capital sins in computer history, if you ask me So true! Does anyone know why this happened?
- Telaneo 3mo ago
  It's been the default since Windows 95, and I suspect it's because it was just noise to the average and upcoming computer user (ignoring the fact that coolsong.mp3.exe would soon become a problem, since that probably hadn't happened yet). MacOS functionally did the same, so MS probably wanted to seem equally 'sleek'. The fact that it continued to be the default past Windows 98/ME/2000, when problems caused by it were widespread, baffles me though. I can't find a source to find an exact reason though, and given it's been a thing since 95, there might not been one out there.
  - n4r9 3mo ago
    Huh, I could swear the Windows XP we had when I was a kid showed file extensions by default.
    - Telaneo 3mo ago
      It might have varied across versions (maybe Home Edition still hid them, while Professional didn't?). But given the number of guides and people complaining about it online even in the XP days, it must have been a default in some capacity on XP. It was still a default on some Windows 10 installations I've made, so it's still around (can't confirm 11, since I haven't installed that for myself).
autoexec 3mo ago
One of the things I miss being able to do in windows is arbitrarily drag around and arrange icons in a folder the same way you can on the desktop. Sorting files into piles of icons before selecting a pile and dragging and dropping it into a folder was a nice way to get them originated. I think windows 7 might have killed that off.
- john-aj 3mo ago
  Isn't it still an option that you can enable in the context menu?
  - autoexec 3mo ago
    Just at the desktop, but not in actual folders. There were registry changes that allowed it in some versions of windows 10 https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/14856-enable-disable-auto-arrange-folders-windows-10-a.html https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/14856-enable-disable-aut...
wayeq 3mo ago
"Remember the good old days of Windows 2k's UI?" is not something I thought I'd ever say.
- readthenotes1 3mo ago
  It's not wrong tho
sigzero 3mo ago
It was clean and consistent (pretty much).
cadamsdotcom 3mo ago
The problem is, once you reach the peak, there’s nowhere to go.
donkeylazy456 3mo ago
i like 9x/2k but prefer 8.1 more. unless they removed start menu from it. it looks modern, simple and works snappy. 7 feels like reforged Vista to me.
jmmv 3mo ago
> It's a little bit sluggish, isn't it? And takes quite a bit of time to boot, right? It's certainly usable, though, not worse than your average website these days. I intend to use this setup for next Advent of Code. > > But here's the kicker: This is Windows 2000 SP4 running on a Pentium 133 with 64 MB of RAM and a spinning harddisk Heh, gotta reference https://jmmv.dev/2023/06/fast-machines-slow-machines.html https://jmmv.dev/2023/06/fast-machines-slow-machines.html (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43972004 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43972004) from a few years ago. There is a video in there of Windows 2000 running on a K7-600 from 1999 and it indeed flies.
bronlund 3mo ago
Having nice and Windows in the same sentence is just unnatural.

235 points by npongratz 3mo ago

For me: everything! I clicked so well with it, everything made sense and was responsive.

Design language, like any language is metaphorical. The thing that makes these skeumorphic designs work so well is that it kinda forces a consistent metaphor, and consistency above all else is huge for UX. The fact that it's based on things we've seen in real life is also helps, as it means we can reason about the UI with the same faculties we've spent our entire life training.

bromuro 3mo ago
Like the floppy disk for “save”? Or the old school phone receiver for “call”?
- reaperducer 3mo ago
  There's nothing wrong with either of those. No different than "windows" or "desktops" or "files." When was the last time you actually saw a file folder? Or a document separated by sheets with "tabs." 95% of computer users have never seen an ethernet cable, but they're still the symbol for networking. 99% of car drivers have never seen brake calipers, but they're part of the icon when my car's parking brake is on.
  - ranger_danger 3mo ago
    > When was the last time you actually saw a file folder? Or a document separated by sheets with "tabs." Every day because normal functioning adults still need to keep paper records of things.
- lonelyasacloud 3mo ago
  For icons and some aspects of functionality why not as a starting place? Where it falls down is when designers force too many of the paradigms of the RL original onto a platform that doesn't suit it [0]. [0] See for example the Mac OS X Address Book app https://www.betalogue.com/2012/01/15/abook6-dumb/ https://www.betalogue.com/2012/01/15/abook6-dumb/.
petilon 3mo ago
Why are designers not understanding this these days? I think one reason is that flat UI is super easy. Skeuomorphic is extremely hard to get right, and if you don't get it right it looks super tacky. Most people who have the word "designer" in their job title don't have the artistic skills needed to pull it off. This is why most designers are opposed to skeuomorphic. Somewhere in between is the right approach. The NeXTSTEP UI from the late 1980s is what we need to return to. It still looks beautiful today: https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/openstep42 https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/openstep42
- vslira 3mo ago
  What’s the meaning of skeuomorphic design for a generation that has never worked with the original physical artifacts they’re based on, though?
  - Telaneo 3mo ago
    Consistency. Even if you've never held a telephone receiver, if it means 'call' in one place, it's very likely to mean the same thing in another. We could be using random hieroglyphs to the same ends, but people seem to always make their own (barring a few exceptions, like the hamburger menu). It's probably a better idea to use something with some grounding in reality rather than make your own from nothing, since doing that is hard, even for actual designers.
    - al_borland 3mo ago
      It also takes a long time for those purely digital ideas to filter out into the mainstream and get a shared name. For many years I would hear people same, “click the thing in the upper left corner”, “click those 3 lines up there”, or something similar. The term hamburger menu is starting to filter out there to the point where I feel comfortable using it. Even the term, hamburger menu, is a skeuomorphic name for a digital control. No one knows what to call those 3 lines, but everyone knows what a hamburger is. I’ve even seen some sites use a literal hamburger icon. It also took a long time to standardize on the hamburger menu. Many also tried to use an ellipsis for a long time. Some still do. Sometimes those dots are vertical… is that a thin hamburger or a vertical ellipsis? I heard one person trying to make the term “tots” happen for this style of menu… tatter tots to go with the hamburger. Contrast that to a “gear” menu for settings. They see a cog or a gear and everyone knows what that is without training, even if they aren’t a mechanic.
xg15 3mo ago
You still need some design experience and "taste" though. I've seen some B2B apps which used the Windows look-and-feel and looked absolutely awful: Actions wildly scattered through buttons, menus and context menus, panels and tabs nested several layers deep until the UI started to look like a canyon formation - and no icons or color at all, because I suppose those would have been "unprofessional" - so everything was in dull gray. (I think it's worth realizing how colorful the stock Windows dialogs and applications actually are through the use of icons, even despite all widgets being gray.) I still believe the Windows 2000-era UI toolkit is one of the best, because at least it gives you straightforward pathways to build a good-looking and usable UI - but you still have to want to do it.

bluedino 3mo ago

Was this peak Windows UI? I would say so, but the Active Dekstop stuff wasn't the right move. Fisher-price came next, with Windows XP. At least you could easily switch back to classic. And then Windows 8, we won't even talk about that.

petilon 3mo ago
The title bar of windows in Windows XP was Fisher-Price. But I thought the rest was OK.
- hnlmorg 3mo ago
  I hated XP themes too I felt the taskbar was the ugliest part of the themes
cake-rusk 3mo ago
Windows Vista / 7 was peak UI for me.
Dwedit 3mo ago
I think Windows XP looks very nice if you install the Royale theme. It's a shiny and glassy version of the default XP style.
Telaneo 3mo ago
> I would say so, but the Active Dekstop stuff wasn't the right move. Even so, you could completely ignore it if you wanted to!
madaxe_again 3mo ago
Almost. The NT5 RCs, which became windows 2000, were better IMO - not massive differences but it hadn’t been slobbered upon by marketing yet.
rib3ye 3mo ago
Maybe more importantly, Win2k was the first windows version actually WORKED in a predictable way after years of unstable post-Win3.1 (Win95 and onward) production releases.

alberth 3mo ago

It was clear, clean and understandable. Buttons looked like buttons. Windows (which have frames), looked like windows. And there was no distracting design elements.

usrnm 3mo ago
I remember those times and there were a lot if windows that did not look like windows and buttons that did not look like buttons. Not in the apps provided by the OS itself, but in third-party software. It was the time of wild experiments, especially in software created by enthusiasts. We just tend to forget this stuff
- minkeymaniac 3mo ago
  And crazy themes I had the matrix one with the "dodge this" sound instead of a ping... good times
- Telaneo 3mo ago
  It's not like the world was perfect before; it's just that it's gotten even worse. The lack of consistency has spread, to the point there barely is any.
  - ConceptJunkie 3mo ago
    Application developers often had a lot of crazy (and bad) ideas, but at least Windows itself was consistent. But then those crazy, bad ideas started affecting Microsoft, and then you could make the Windows Media Player look like eyeballs. "Skinning" apps was a good idea in theory, but in practice, it never offered anything better than the default of Windows 2000 and earlier eras. Now you can't change anything in the Windows UI except a few colors.

mig39 3mo ago

The article praises the UI, but isn't Windows 2000 using the Windows 95/98 UI with a different kernel?

flanked-evergl 3mo ago
> I liked the UIs of the entire era from 3.0 to 2000, really. I'm mostly using Windows 2000 as an example here because it runs so well in QEMU/KVM and that allows me to easily take screenshots.
minkeymaniac 3mo ago
The different kernel for 95/98 was NT 4... Windows 2000 was unified, same UI for Consumer and Server
- daveoc64 3mo ago
  There is no version of Windows 2000 for consumers. Windows Me was the nearest consumer release (2000 came out in 1999, Me in 2000), and did share most of the same UI, but was based on Windows 98. Windows XP was the first version of Windows to ship with the same codebase for both consumer and business.
  - minkeymaniac 3mo ago
    Windows 2000 Professional was the non server edition no? That's the one I was running AFAIK. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_2000#Editions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_2000#Editions But you might be right by meaning consumer is non business user.. I also ran ME for about 2 weeks lol
petilon 3mo ago
Hold on, don't give cred it to Windows 95. The beveled 3D look was the invention of NeXT. Windows 95 copied everything from them. https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/openstep42 https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/openstep42
- deleted 3mo ago

delta_p_delta_x 3mo ago

The loss of the theme menu and 'Windows classic' from Windows 8 onwards is dearly missed. But Windows classic hasn't gone away. If you run a 32-bit executable on Windows 10 or 11 under Windows XP compatibility mode, and set 'reduced colour mode', Windows Classic comes back. I have also noticed that when Adobe Acrobat crashes (heh) it momentarily flashes Windows classic on the title bars. It's all still there. Bring it back, Microsoft. And put HiDPI and all your other modern technologies like D3D12 and borderless full-screen on it. I want to write old-school Win32 applications that fly.

al_borland 3mo ago

> Since that button down there is called "Start", it implies that you can probably do something with it, maybe start programs? Click and you'll see the Start Menu: Over time it seems like a lot of designs stop feeling the need to lead the user in this way. There is an assumption that by now everyone knows what the menu in the bottom left corner does, and we are no longer in the phase of trying to teach the population to use a computer for the first time. I feel like this is the wrong approach. Every day there are new young people using a computer for the first time. Wouldn’t it be nice if all these conventions that evolved over the past 50 years could be intuitively discovered, instead of needing explanations from someone who already understands them? Of course, as the world becomes more digital, many skeuomorphic designs become more abstract to those same young users. The floppy disk, the traditional telephone, even the file folder.

ranger_danger 3mo ago
> There is an assumption that by now everyone knows what the menu in the bottom left corner does, and we are no longer in the phase of trying to teach the population to use a computer for the first time Strong disagree, because: > Every day there are new young people using a computer for the first time I can assure you these people have no idea what the start button is or does... it doesn't help that it no longer even says "Start" for the last ~20 years.
- al_borland 3mo ago
  We do agree. I said the first thing you quoted was the wrong approach, because of the second thing you quoted. Having it say “start”, like it used to, would help solve that.
  - ranger_danger 3mo ago
    Ok but, were you around during that time? I remember it not helping much at all to tell people what to do. When Windows 95 first came out, they had to have a giant arrow pointing to the Start menu with an explanation of what that would do: https://a.imagem.app/Ge6OCZ.jpeg https://a.imagem.app/Ge6OCZ.jpeg Then they had a scrolling animation with an arrow and some text ("Click the Start button to begin") that slid in from the right side of the taskbar and pointed right at the Start button.

the_other 3mo ago

I agree that we had much better patterns back then. The software industry in general worked towards sharing visual paradigms, making use of system designs of their host playforms, facilitated discovery etc etc. All that was good and the recent trends moving us away from that consistency and discoverability are a detrement being steamrolled over by agents… But I don’t agree that it “looked nice”. I hated Windows 95 and 2000’s “style”. They looked like engineers had made them. They looked stiff and unfriendly, eith too much border and outline. Real life has no outlines. I was in my late teens when 2000 came out. My friends and I jumped on it and felt it was the Os we had been waiting for. But even then I thought it looked like shit. The affordances were great. I agree that details like button depress and consistent scrollbars are valuable. But I genuinely prefer things a bit rounder, a bit flatter, less grey, or late Aqua-style flat-with-shiny-affordances. I agree that backgrounds should be flat (or very subtly textured so they recede but arn’t “boring; again, late-00s Mac OS nailed this for me). What I’d really like to see is something new that takes the consistency of NT/2000 and Mac OSX prior to Lion, mixed with the novel affordances of BeOS/Haiku (docking windows, small title handles), and puts it through Apple’s “zing” (but not too far - transparency is highly overrated).

clark_dent 3mo ago
Computer UIs needed borders and outlines because there are no brain-intuitive visual cues: no depth parallax, no shading, nothing shifts as you move your head, and until relatively recently they had poor contrast and brightness variability compared to the real world. It was also a compromise for interface device limitations. We didn't have 4000 DPI mice with scroll wheels and 26 configurable buttons; you were lucky to have a 1024x768 resolution; and 16 bit color was for people shelling out $$$. Obvious borders and some padding between elements were a necessity to click what you intended to click.
- ConceptJunkie 3mo ago
  > Obvious borders and some padding between elements were a necessity to click what you intended to click. That never changed.
- 3mo ago

xg15 3mo ago

> Me: "I don't like smartphone UIs. Everything is flat, nothing indicates where you can touch or not. I have to randomly try everything on the screen." Response by non-tech person: "Well, yeah, of course you have to try everything? How else would this work?" I think this goes deeper than many tech people realize. From what I understood from talking with "nontechnical"(*) friends, relatives, etc, for a good potion of them, computers had always been "unpredictable magic". They got by through memorizing some very strict and rigid interaction sequences - "click this icon, then click that menu, then click that button, etc" and prayed nothing unexpected would happen. They were too scared and/or uninterested in computers to even try and find any rules or consistency in it. I feel as if those nontechnical people "won" now. Now all UIs feel as inconsistent and unpredictable even for "techies" as any computer interaction felt to those people back then. (* repeated from another thread: "nontechnical" in the "not fluent with PC use" sense, which is actually quite arrogant - they can have very high technical skill in other areas obviously)

EGreg 3mo ago
It started with iOS 7 and Jony Ive Steve Jobs was right. Then when he died (after removing Scott Forstall), Jony Ive got to do his hardware minimalism in software too. And everything Steve Jobs favored was suddenly derided as “skeumorphism”. It’s like what USSR did with Stalin under Khrustchev. I still remember when Chrome app just had a big white area where you’re supposed to enter the url and you had no idea unless you randomly happened to click there. And if the website background was white, too? Oh too bad LMAO. Minimalistic! Chrome had no… chrome.
- falcor84 3mo ago
  I don't remember when I first encountered it (maybe before ios7), but their cardinal sin for me was my struggling for 10 minutes to make the calculator app go into scientific mode, seeing absolutely no setting for that, before eventually discovering from a friend that you have to physically rotate the phone to landscape orientation to get the additional buttons.
  - 3mo ago

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Zak 3mo ago

I agree with the author's wish for visual cues when something is clickable, scrollable, etc.... This, on the other hand: > Imitating real objects is good, too -- I don't have a single one of Android's "sliders" anywhere in my house, for example, so why don't you make this a checkbox, because writing down a check mark on paper is something that I actually do: feels like an idea from a time when many people were encountering UIs on screens for the very first time as adults. I think the slider would be recognized as a toggle in its usual context of a settings screen by most people who have seen a settings screen before, but not that specific design for a toggle.

delta_p_delta_x 3mo ago
There is a specific UI guideline for something that can be enabled or not: it's called a tick box. The on-off switch thing is a distinctly iOS invention [1]. The funny thing is that OS X (now macOS) mostly held off using those 'switches' too, until fairly recently. [1]: https://freeimage.host/i/CxYBW6G https://freeimage.host/i/CxYBW6G
- Zak 3mo ago
  Whose specific UI guideline are you talking about? Android's recommends the switch component for setting toggles: https://m3.material.io/components/switch/overview https://m3.material.io/components/switch/overview
- zozbot234 3mo ago
  The switch widget is for settings where flipping the switch takes immediate effect, unlike a checkbox where you have to press some "OK", "Submit" or "Apply" button. In Windows 2000/Office UIs, this would've been shown as a button that could visibly switch between "pressed" and "not pressed" states, just like a push-down switch, but that was rarely used. The modern labeled switch design is a lot more intuitive than that.
  - nottorp 3mo ago
    > The modern labeled switch design is a lot more intuitive than that. In a lot of the modern switches I meet with the colour choice makes it totally unclear which is on and which is off. Ok, if it's a cookie acceptance dialog it makes sense to do dark patterns, but I've seen it in legit apps too.

xg15 3mo ago

Maybe relevant: http://windows93.net/ http://windows93.net/

groan 3mo ago

I liked every version of Windows that I’ve used, back to 3.1 all the way up to 11. Nowadays I mostly use 10/11 at home and at work. A new Windows upgrade was always a magical treat for me, the old slow HDD speeds building up anticipation during the installation phase, making me excited to finally use it. Growing up with computers unfortunately demystifies many things, but such is the price of poignance.

Anamon 3mo ago
I felt the same way up until around Vista. The launch of Windows 95 was probably the pinnacle for me. XP already started having a sour taste with the whole activatin thing, and Vista and 7 weren't really exciting anymore. My reaction to a new version went from curiosity and excitement about what new things might be in it, to dreading finding out about all the things they removed or made worse this time. I went from wanting to try out the new versions soonish, to trying to stay on the previous one for as long as reasonably possible. And I don't think it's just a nostalgia or age thing, it's about very concrete things for me (dwindling customiation options and growing usage restrictions being the main ones).

bipson 3mo ago

Yeah, Win 2000 is still my favorite Windows version, UX wise. Clean, concise, no surprises, dependable.

cubefox 3mo ago

When Windows XP came out, computer magazines wrote articles on how to switch the more modern, colorful UI back to the old, grey, drab, boring UI of Windows 95/98/2000. I was young at the time and this seemed absurd to me. Why would you willingly use a UI that looks like wearing an old grey tie for a dusty office job in a depressing concrete building?

ahartmetz 3mo ago
I was youngish at the time and thought Windows XP looked like clown vomit. There is a German saying "Grün und blau schmückt die Sau" ~"green and blue grace the pig" - and XP was green and blue and shiny like hard candy.
- thesdev 3mo ago
  Windows XP was the first OS I ever used and still I switched to the classic UI because it looked just better in my opinion.
- ConceptJunkie 3mo ago
  Yeah, it was butt-ugly. The default Windows UI didn't actually look better until Windows 7, but I used the "Classic" look as long as it was supported. I skipped Windows 8/8.1 entirely, and while Windows 10 was reasonable in terms of how it worked, it was also butt-ugly, but now you couldn't do much of anything to customize it.
  - ahartmetz 3mo ago
    Windows 8 was stupid with the tablet-optimized UI, but I thought it was OK aesthetically, and Windows 10 more so. Even Windows 11 is "pretty" if you don't click the wrong thing and get a legacy dialog from 1...∞ versions back. I use Linux by the way... but not all Windowses look ugly IMO.
dogleash 3mo ago
Some people like brutalist architecture. I think is so ugly that I'm half tempted to chatgpt fact check this comment. It very well could have been a deliberate conspiracy to lie to the public and say it looks good to make some austerity go down easier.

nycticorax 3mo ago

Andreas Kling has said that one of his inspirations for SerenityOS was the Windows 2000 UI (https://corecursive.com/serenity-os-with-andreas-kling/ https://corecursive.com/serenity-os-with-andreas-kling/). I found his general goal for SerenityOS ("Roughly speaking, the goal is a marriage between the aesthetic of late-1990s productivity software and the power-user accessibility of late-2000s *nix.") to be strangely validating ('Wait... So it's not just me?!'). And so of course I decided to try out the KDE desktop, which I had always kinda dismissed as being a bit too much of a niche within a niche. And it's great. It really is wonderful to use an OS that is designed from the ground up for serious technical users. And the ubiquity of web apps nowadays makes Linux a far more practical choice than it was back in the day.

deleted 3mo ago
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forestingfisher 3mo ago
I love SerenityOS so much, I wish someone ported it as a DE to the Linux kernel so I could daily it
- nosioptar 3mo ago
  The Chicago95 theme for xfce gets you something similarish.
Narishma 3mo ago
Even KDE has started to fall into the modern UI trappings. For example the taskbar somewhat recently became rounded and detached from the screen edges making it more annoying to reach the start button or the clock widget. But at least you can still configure it to how it used to be.
- wpm 3mo ago
  KDE is chock full of too-flat interfaces and hieroglyphs as icons, all the sins are on fully display there. Its saving grace is that it is completely customizable for the most part, though any GTK apps will probably ignore everything.

chriswarbo 3mo ago

> In Windows 95, those toolbar icons were still actual buttons. In Windows 2000, they are recognizable as a button when activated, but in their default state they're not and you have to hover over them: This is something I've struggled with as toolkits change and old widget themes stop working. There are still some decent themes out there (e.g. Skulpture for Qt has been my default for many years), and with a little patching they can be dragged into working on the latest toolkit versions. Yet I can't seem to avoid this "you have to hover over to see that it's actually a button" behaviour. Very annoying!

weitzj 3mo ago

I still use this background Color on my Mac or Linux.

nticompass 3mo ago

> Hiding filename extensions was one of the capital sins in computer history Amen. The first thing I do on any (Windows) OS installation is make sure file extensions are shown. I guess Microsoft did that for "simplicity", but it also made for easy "virus.jpg.vbs" files.

cstdr 3mo ago
A puppy.jpg.vbs file would be shown as "puppy" with "VBScript" in the type column. The full name may be worse though. "puppy.gpj.vbs‬"‭ (which is actually "puppy\u202Egpj.vbs\u202C") looks like an image extension, but is a script (as the type column also shows). Edit: Looks like HN removes those directional override characters. When present, the text looks like "puppy.sbv.jpg"

theodric 3mo ago

I agree with these points, but I will still be disagreeable and take a more nuanced position: Windows NT 5.0 Interim Developer Release build 1796 (and some preceding builds) were peak Windows UI, because they had all the points in the article, plus a "show desktop" button in the lower right corner that you could blindly throw your mouse at-- a feature relegated to a Quick Launch action from the subsequent build, and only restored in Windows 7. Check it out: https://dn721308.ca.archive.org/0/items/usa_1796.1_winNT50.wks_beta2/Windows2000-5.0.1796-FirstBoot.png https://dn721308.ca.archive.org/0/items/usa_1796.1_winNT50.w...

IronWolve 3mo ago

I really liked when XP came out, and you could have both the clean 2000 look with advanced font rendering like cleartype. That was the perfect combo for desktop use. I had my xp running a blackbox 4win and coLinux/cygwin, then moved onto vmware/virtualbox with windows vm and linux desktop, now I'm doing win11+wsl2 and loving it for cuda/ai/building projects.

gk-- 3mo ago

win2k is the goat. fast, clear, no bullshit. sadly rdp and cleartype dragged me away and i've regretted it ever since.

netsharc 3mo ago
On Windows 7 it was still possible to have the Win 2000-esque UI. I think it was an option between the classic UI or the fancy UI with gradient buttons and translucency and slowness.
- ConceptJunkie 3mo ago
  I don't understand why they couldn't have kept that option. The Windows UI is currently the least customizable I've ever seen and I started using Windows with 2.1.
  - netsharc 3mo ago
    Somehow they seemingly had to rewrite everything in React or Javascript (citation needed...), but then they ran out of time and budget to reimplement all the functionality. For a long time some settings on Windows 10 could be found partially on old style control panel windows, and partially the flat look "minimalist webpage" settings app...

liendolucas 3mo ago

For me Windows 2000 Professional is the best OS that Microsoft ever released. At the time I used it was really polished, stable and fast. One recurring question that I keep asking myself is why UIs have to constantly change for the worse? What would happen if vendors kept using the same UI for decades? Would people hate or love having a one well thought UI?

Telaneo 3mo ago
> One recurring question that I keep asking myself is why UIs have to constantly change for the worse? So the designers have something to do and so the CEOs have something easy to think of when they need to 'shake things up'. That's all I can think of. I can't think of any that actually benefit the user (barring your original UI being absolute garbage, to the point anything else is an improvement, but even then, the original UI should still be available in some capacity). > What would happen if vendors kept using the same UI for decades? Would people hate or love having a one well thought UI? They hate having to re-learn UIs every 5-10 years (per OS/application/website!), so I don't think you've got much to lose trying to maintain a single good UI. And in the few cases where the UI basically hasn't changed in a long time (XFCE, VLC, probably more), they fucking love it.
- Terr_ 3mo ago
  To offer another possibility, with a cynical motive: 1. We have an established user-base. 2. Our product and our competitors' products have a similar interface, so we might lose our lead if people start switching. 3. If we abruptly change our UI, they will have no choice but to learn the new one, either because they're too-invested or because they aren't the ones making purchasing decisions and it is mandated by an employer. 4. Once accustomed, the difference we created becomes a barrier to keep our customers captive and away from the competition's products.

Lammy 3mo ago

RE: Start Menu, the article does not mention or show the obnoxious “Personalized Menus” feature which is the one and only ‘must disable’ when I use Win2k. It triggers after some number of days and hides infrequently-used programs from the Programs submenu as a workaround for the menu growing large and unwieldy when many programs are installed, but IMO I think it's even worse than what it claims to fix.

ConceptJunkie 3mo ago
In the 90s and early 2000s, Microsoft had a lot of good UI, but their defaults were always really poorly chosen.

smcg 3mo ago

When are we going to start designing UIs based on scientific HCI instead of marketing BS? Or has that gone the way of the dodo?

Telaneo 3mo ago
When was the last time someone published a proper article that involved HCI that got even the slightest bit of attention? It's been dead for a long time as far as I can tell (last time it was alive was probably back when Win2K was relevant!).
ConceptJunkie 3mo ago
That era ended 20+ years ago. Sorry, pal. Microsoft has been flailing since Windows 2000 to "improve" the UI, often with one bad idea after another: let's make Windows apps look like webpages, let's make Windows apps look like phones, let's remove all the graphics elements that let you distinguish one window or element from another, let's put 5 times more whitespace into every screen than is needed... Yes, I can see where the Windows 2000 "Classic" UI was considered bland, but it was also the functional and consistent UI Microsoft ever made. Most changes since have been a step backwards.
linguae 3mo ago
Unfortunately marketing helps sell OS upgrades and new PCs, and one way to market a new OS is to advertise its “new and improved” UI. OS UI used to be more utilitarian and rooted in HCI principles, notably the classic Mac OS and Windows 95/98/NT/2000. Ironically Apple got the ball rolling with fashionable UI when it released Aqua in early Mac OS X, though Aqua was well-executed, having style while still being rooted in HCI principles. Unfortunately the industry took the wrong lesson; competitors responded to Aqua’s style without providing UIs of substance. Sadly even Apple has slipped once Steve Jobs passed away; its UIs have increasingly become more style over substance. Apple has long abandoned the days of Bill Atkinson, Larry Tesler, Bruce Tognazzini, and Don Norman, and unfortunately Jony Ive was less effective when Steve Jobs was no longer around to provide critical feedback. macOS 26 is one of the biggest UI regressions in the entire history of the Mac, though thankfully it’s not unusable and it appears that macOS 27 will be a big improvement thanks to user and reviewer feedback.

ConceptJunkie 3mo ago

Windows 2000 was the peak of Windows UI. While features and functionality has improved in many ways, everything UI change since then has been a step backward. Microsoft (and IBM and others) did a ton of good HCI research in the 70s and 80s, and used that research to make better UI for their operating systems. But sometime around the mid-90s when high-color displays started becoming the norm, UI experts started gradually being replaced by art-school types, and now it seems very little consideration is given to actual UI functionality, and the driver is entirely some bizarre sense of style from people who don't know anything about Human Computer Interaction, but seem to think no more deeply than "less is more". These UI elements had reasons to look and act the way they did. This communicated information to the user (even if the user didn't realize it), and made software much more predictable and discoverable, and ultimately, more intuitive.

xg15 3mo ago
This is one part of it, but not the whole thing I believe. The other thing that happened is that "UX research" paradoxically became more data-driven and "scientific", with live telemetry that monitors how UIs are practically used becoming standard. We're able to run "experiments" and directly compare the user interactions from two different variants of the same UI. So in theory, with all that data, we should be making more usable and intuitive UIs than ever. And we are in a way, just not in a user-empowering way. UI design is evaluated by target metrics, and those metrics are firmly in service of the companies' interests, not the users'. Hence so much focus on "engagement" and on making certain flows and activities as frictionless as possible - at the cost of consistency and all the rest of activities that a user might be more interested in than the company... Basically, UX design as a field is alive and well, maybe more so than it ever was - it's "just" not in service of the user anymore...

MisterTea 3mo ago

This is why I run XFCE with the Chicago95 theme. Sure, it's Windows 95 but the 2000 UI wasn't a big divergence from memory. It's familiar and gets out of the way. https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95 https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95

zozbot234 3mo ago
The Chicago95 theme is great, but https://github.com/B00merang-Project/Windows-Classic https://github.com/B00merang-Project/Windows-Classic (and many other repositories under the same GitHub user) is a nice addition: it has styling for other DEs and a theme for GTK 4. The GTK 4 theme doesn't remove the excess padding unfortunately, but at least it has a proper 3D beveled look which actually works great with the "responsive", mobile-ready apps.

n4r9 3mo ago

> While we're at it: Hiding filename extensions was one of the capital sins in computer history, if you ask me So true! Does anyone know why this happened?

Telaneo 3mo ago
It's been the default since Windows 95, and I suspect it's because it was just noise to the average and upcoming computer user (ignoring the fact that coolsong.mp3.exe would soon become a problem, since that probably hadn't happened yet). MacOS functionally did the same, so MS probably wanted to seem equally 'sleek'. The fact that it continued to be the default past Windows 98/ME/2000, when problems caused by it were widespread, baffles me though. I can't find a source to find an exact reason though, and given it's been a thing since 95, there might not been one out there.
- n4r9 3mo ago
  Huh, I could swear the Windows XP we had when I was a kid showed file extensions by default.
  - Telaneo 3mo ago
    It might have varied across versions (maybe Home Edition still hid them, while Professional didn't?). But given the number of guides and people complaining about it online even in the XP days, it must have been a default in some capacity on XP. It was still a default on some Windows 10 installations I've made, so it's still around (can't confirm 11, since I haven't installed that for myself).

autoexec 3mo ago

One of the things I miss being able to do in windows is arbitrarily drag around and arrange icons in a folder the same way you can on the desktop. Sorting files into piles of icons before selecting a pile and dragging and dropping it into a folder was a nice way to get them originated. I think windows 7 might have killed that off.

john-aj 3mo ago
Isn't it still an option that you can enable in the context menu?
- autoexec 3mo ago
  Just at the desktop, but not in actual folders. There were registry changes that allowed it in some versions of windows 10 https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/14856-enable-disable-auto-arrange-folders-windows-10-a.html https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/14856-enable-disable-aut...

wayeq 3mo ago

"Remember the good old days of Windows 2k's UI?" is not something I thought I'd ever say.

readthenotes1 3mo ago
It's not wrong tho

sigzero 3mo ago

It was clean and consistent (pretty much).

cadamsdotcom 3mo ago

The problem is, once you reach the peak, there’s nowhere to go.

donkeylazy456 3mo ago

i like 9x/2k but prefer 8.1 more. unless they removed start menu from it. it looks modern, simple and works snappy. 7 feels like reforged Vista to me.

jmmv 3mo ago

> It's a little bit sluggish, isn't it? And takes quite a bit of time to boot, right? It's certainly usable, though, not worse than your average website these days. I intend to use this setup for next Advent of Code. > > But here's the kicker: This is Windows 2000 SP4 running on a Pentium 133 with 64 MB of RAM and a spinning harddisk Heh, gotta reference https://jmmv.dev/2023/06/fast-machines-slow-machines.html https://jmmv.dev/2023/06/fast-machines-slow-machines.html (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43972004 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43972004) from a few years ago. There is a video in there of Windows 2000 running on a K7-600 from 1999 and it indeed flies.

bronlund 3mo ago

Having nice and Windows in the same sentence is just unnatural.