As with many things, I think from a pure UI perspective every Windows/Office release made things worse. Win95 was pretty solid, even improved on a few things that they took from the state of art at that time (Nextstep, Classic Mac, OS/2). The Taskbar being a good example.
I'm still not sure that the move from actual buttons on a button bar to just a flat series of icons was right, and many such changes happened after that (culminating in the horror of the ribbon bar).
The big items Win2K/XP brought to the market was stability outside of the NT niche (I really enjoyed NT4). On the UI level, the downgrade continued, especially with that ugly blue standard theme and the bisque semi-rounded UI elements.
But boy, would I like to see some "distro"-fication of that. And I'm not talking about just using different themes or "shell" replacements, but about putting the core parts to good use. It could be amazing to what some dedicated minds could do with COM, OLE, VCL and VBS. A much more modular environment, similar to what OpenDoc promised and didn't keep. (And maybe add some Amiga stuff)
Not that my hopes are very high in that regard, as Linux and the BSDs didn't manage to do that either, despite having most of the technology and even doing some half-hearted attempts (CORBA was a part of early GNOME)…
A Windows shop these days isn't that much different from any other enterprisey shop. Cloud, VM language, web UIs with enough whitespace to hide Moby Dick. Not that many of the smaller shops around that did custom desktop apps for small businesses.
Oh, and as a final note: If you like the aestheticof 90s-ish Win, check out Serenity OS[1]. It's pretty awesome what they put together. A not slavishly POSIX-ish system with a Win95-like UI. Even the starts of a remarkably capable browser…
I'm sure this is still an unpopular opinion, but I've come around to the idea of the ribbon bar. Toolbars as they were pre-Office-2007 usually only contained duplicates of entries that were already in the menu. The menus are difficult to discover things in and limited to only showing text (at least in the "classic" sense like Office 03 used). Ribbon bars take the discoverability of a toolbar and make it use only as much space as a menu would. It's a solid compromise IMO.
> I'm still not sure that the move from actual buttons on a button bar to just a flat series of icons was right, and many such changes happened after that (culminating in the horror of the ribbon bar).
To be fair, they've left the classic mode in. Right click the taskbar, then click 'taskbar settings', scroll to the bottom and there's a dropdown for 'combine taskbar buttons'. Change it to 'Never' for the classic mode. (This is also present in Windows 7/8)
I prefer the new mode, less mouse movement required and looks tidier personally but it's nice the option is still there.
I meant the regular toolbars underneath the menus (in MFC it was CToolbar, I think), that in Win95 were a set of regular icon buttons, including a beveled edge.
Within a few Office and OS versions, that changed to first dropping the beveled edge, as we might realize that icons under the menu are buttons, and there would be less visual noise, then large buttons with icons + text, and finally getting into an incestous relationship with the menu and becoming ribbons.
(Although, I do the old-fashioned taskbar settings, too.)
> Not that my hopes are very high in that regard, as Linux and the BSDs didn't manage to do that either, despite having most of the technology and even doing some half-hearted attempts (CORBA was a part of early GNOME)…
D-BUS has taken up that role, but it doesn't get as much as COM/UWP, which many still don't realize that since XP the large majority of new Windows APIs are only available via COM, with a possible additional .NET wrapper on top.
DBUS would probably be closer to DCOM or even the Amiga's ARexx ports. Granted, with that plus XEmbed, you could get a lot of the benefits without an explicit object model/component system, but I haven't seen that done a lot in action. Linux users mostly go for 70s shell/pipes to cobble together parts. Better than nothing, but man, such wasted opportunities (and even something that doesn't require Lisp/Smalltalk/Oberon systems where everything is the PL anyway).
There's more GUI scripting done on Macs and Windows. Whole cottage industry automating Excel, for example…
I feel you, back when I look to some setups I hardly see any difference to my former self organising xterms in groups of four on a X Windows IBM terminal connected to a DG/UX server, in 1994.
Linux/BSD have the tooling, yet it is ChromeOS and Android that reap the benefits of such component based APIs.
Note that I was only talking about the uniformity of the UI here. Stability-wise, every DOS Windows was pretty bad.
Win98SE's toolbar were those big mozilla-ish ones, right, with both text and icon and no button border? Other than that, I can't remember anything distinguishing about the 98 UI. Were gradient in the window bars introduced with 98 or SE?
It's a real shame that Microsoft has seen fit to try to hide the ability to use the classic theme in Windows 8/10. There are ways to enable it again, but they tend to break on every update...
The classic Windows 2000 theme has just the perfect balance of looking good, being totally usable, and not being overtly flashy.
Maybe I'm a minority here, but I already used an alternative color scheme with beige backgrounds and dark red title bars (I think it was called "Brick") on Windows 95 because the various shades of grey looked too dreary for my taste. So I was happy to see that Windows XP kept the beige background and never looked back. Plus, under Windows XP an application that popped up with the "classic" styling was a red flag indicating that the developers didn't know how (or didn't care) to include a manifest file/resource to activate the "XP-style" controls...
The classic theme doesn't use DWM sadly (at least it didn't in Windows 7, I assume it still true in 10). So it doesn't just change appearance but also how it performs: DWM offloads compositing from the CPU to the GPU.
The issue is, at least when I tried it in Windows 7, without DWM you don't get Vsync. That means any video or game you play will have horrible screen tearing. I used to have a script to switch to Aero temporarily when I got fed up with it enough.
I use computers for 10-20 hours each day. I've come up with some pretty bold opinions based on actually wanting to improve efficiency of using computers. Someone else's ideas of aesthetics almost always conflicts with efficiently using the computer.
You presented it as a fact, not an opinion, thus my original answer.
FWIW, as a general rule, I disagree: say you get to use two pieces of software with the same functionality, shortcuts et. al. for similar amounts of time, the first having 0 regard towards UI/UX, and the second having spent some time thinking about how it presents information and overall legibility. I'd be more than extremely surprised if most users couldn't possibly end up being more efficient using the second.
However, sure, making things pretty for the sake of it tends to impede on usability.
> FWIW, as a general rule, I disagree: say you get to use two pieces of software with the same functionality, shortcuts et. al. for similar amounts of time, the first having 0 regard towards UI/UX, and the second having spent some time thinking about how it presents information and overall legibility. I'd be more than extremely surprised if most users couldn't possibly end up being more efficient using the second.
The Windows 95 through 2000 UI, I think, expresses the second idea perfectly. Rather than being clunky like older versions, they had thought put into how the layout and presentation looked. Granted, some of its qualities stemmed from needing to be renderable on a 386 in reasonable time, it still achieved something both visually appealing and productive.
In contrast, whatever fad comes around to make buttons look like Play-Doh or glass or flat elements with no distinguishing features... they take away from it quite a lot.
The classic theme is simple enough that it doesn't need GPU assistance (besides the usual 2D acceleration); and you get a noticeable decrease in latency from it:
With the Redmond or Chicago95 theme for GTK, those apps also look in place in case you need them.
For truly a low resource usage desktop I look at LXQt. Same base lib as KDE, namely Qt, which is apparently a lot lighter on the resources than GTK. Not sure if it is ready yet these days.
Just looking at it I'm struck by how difficult it is to get the small details right. I don't even know exactly what's wrong but the spacing at the top and bottom of the title bar text is visibly wrong, and the menu bar is too high?
I don't say it to be needlessly negative, it just amazes me how difficult this stuff can be. And I don't think I could actually use this, it would drive me insane for reasons I can't really justify.
For trying to reverse engineer a look, what has been done with this theme is amazing! I use it in a VM and on a laptop. Between higher resolution/PPI screens than CRTs that displayed this old Windows look, and familiarity with XFCE, the spacing doesn't look weird to me.
For me, fonts are more important (and easier!) to get right than being pixel perfect, so I grabbed the real fonts from a Vista install DVD, and used those.
Part of it appears to be that the font descender may have been used for alignment/padding, rather than the baseline. Agree though, when something is so burned into your psyche, tiny differences create a really aggravating uncanny valley effect.
Ditto with the 2.4x/2.6x kernels on Linux/ FreeBSD 4.x and KDE3 on top, with the first release of X.org. I am more like a Fluxbox + ROX guy, but if I had
to choose a DE, KDE3 was rock solid and featureful, and
you could disable Artsd just fine, dmix and OSS4 on earch respective systems worked well otherwise.
I wouldn't mind being back in a Windows env/shop with ReactOS.