For me, search integrated into the start menu was a major quality of life improvement. Particularly the ability to hit the Windows key and type the name of an application. Strictly speaking, this was introduced in Vista, but I feel like Windows 7 added a lot of useful polish to the Windows Vista style of UI.

I otherwise agree that the older Win 2k era UI was pretty much an ideal UI. The whole "frutiger aero" look did not age well.

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.

Nah, its not rose tinted glasses. Win2000/Win2003 were amazing. I still run Win2003 because it just workz. GUI is great, it snappy, I have all the tools to tinker here and there.. Leaked SRC code helps tiny bit ;)

Win7 wasnt that bad, you still could set classic GUI. If they only kept it like this and plow money to improve kernel...

I agree. I rode Server 2003, then after that Server 2008 (which kept most of the 2000-era gui, though the start menu got more vista-shaped) for my Windows development desktop machine for as long as I could. By the time Server 2008 reached end-of-support, I didn't need a Windows development box anymore, and my only contact with Windows has been sporadic, but feels like a distinct downgrade. I've had VMs of each major desktop version for odd small tasks, and have been grateful not to need to spend a lot of time using them.

"Peak Windows GUI" and "Peak GUI" are two separate things.

For "Peak Windows GUI", MW10 and MW11 both score high in my opinion, but the changes in Start Menu behaviour in MW11 and the horrible "Show more options" sub-menu in the MW11 right-click context menu are confusing. So I'll give MW10 the advantage for consistency and less insult to the principle of Least Surprise.

For Peak GUI, I would say there's a tie. An Android device with Desktop Mode is just hard to beat for multi-context usability. Early OS X looked great and had mature GUI ideas. And my daily Linux box with the Sway tiling window manager is the right combination of mouse gestures and keyboard power.

Agree, that 2000/Millennium aesthetic was absolutely peak design and usability.

Out of curiosity, are there any good comparisons in-detail between Windows 2000 and present-day Linux?

I do have the same feeling that Windows 2000 was in many regards the best UI (tied with 7 maybe), but after switching to Linux I'm wondering if this is maybe more rose-colored glasses than I thought.

KDE or XFCE seem to mimic the Windows 2000 design in many ways, but they are still far away from feeling as snappy or as well-thought out than Windows 2000 did. They also paradoxically feel more "gray" than I remember Windows, even though the "grayness" of Windows from that era is sort of famous.

So I'd like to know if this is really just nostalgia/muscle memory or if there are really specific things that KDE does worse than Windows did.

Same here, Windows 2000 is peak UI, I never liked the Frutiger Aero aesthetics. My only criticism is that it was, in a sense, too successful and elements like the taskbar and start menu got ossified and the design stagnated. Apple's F3 show all windows, F4 spotlight is far better. Windows didn't even get multiple desktops until Windows 10.

I guess I like the design language but I wouldn't be prepared to give back the usability of modern UIs.

Y’all forgetting that Windows XP (and up to 7) had the classic boxy theme. It was just a menu toggle away in Display Properties. The difference was the Windows icon in the Start menu.

Looks like this mod supports the "classic" theme too.

That was the thing I missed most in Windows 10. With the previous versions of Windows (I think up to 7?) you could still switch back to classic theme.

I used to start with 2000 server (so I could RDP) and then install something like Aston Shell to make it customizable and beautiful.

I miss the days when windows was a platform you could extend and customize.

Booting win2k with under 10 processes running at startup and ~50MB RAM consumed was glorious. Updated Warp on a child's computer last evening and 7GB consumed at boot with W11 reminded me of win2k days and how much they are missed...

Yes for me too. Windows 2000 was clean and efficient. With not too much bling.

Yeah I agree too. I never understood the love for the win7 aesthetic!

7 was the peak though cus it actually worked flawlessly.. In my experience earlier versions of windows were kinda janky and unstable.

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