I miss win2k personally. the UI was decent, and I was able to install enough oss on it that it felt like I could do most of the things I did with linux, but with good font rendering. there were also, to my surprise, a couple of apps (winmerge and proxomitron) that felt like they should totally have been linux apps, but for which I have yet to see anything as good over on the linux side.
What were those applications about?