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:
The classic Windows 2000 theme has just the perfect balance of looking good, being totally usable, and not being overtly flashy.