alt Hacker Newswin2k was peak for me. lean, functional, just a pinch of glitter here and there (short fade-ins). it was on par with the amazing stability brought by nt5 kernel.
i kinda miss xp at a cultural level since it was a bit the end of that computing culture cycle (after that apple started to dominate and ubuiquitous computing influenced desktop ui)
"after that apple started to dominate"
When did Apple dominate? I'm not trying to hate on Apple here, but there's this weird belief that Apple have had a lead in personal computer OS market share at some point in the last few decades, and it isn't really true since about 1984.
You can argue that they should dominate, but that doesn't seem to have happened.