>>And by nice design I mean beautiful to look at, not merely "designed to get work done" in the industrial design sense.
Yes, so.....win98/win2000 interface. I don't have any idea why you'd look at the attrocity that is win 11 and say it's "beautiful". It's not. It's mostly just empty coloured boxes that don't have any inherent meaning.
It depends on what parts we're looking at I guess, but I think flat looks good these days, I don't mind the rounded corners, I like the use of the palette in Win11 compared to Win10 (And definitely compared to Win98/2000 etc. which used too much contrast).
A lot of this is simply because the newer designs are based on large screens while Win98/2000 was hampered by the requirement to being readable at 800x600 and 256 colors.
Using gradients, negative space and was a luxury not afforded in 2000 but it does help.
In fact Windows 2000 use different color pallete than 9x as it does not try to fit into the 16 color RGBI CGA palette. The difference is subtle, but significant.
I honestly hate how it looks and I think it is fucking ugly.
Yet I still defaulted to switching back to it (back when that was simple, don't think it's an option in win 10 anymore) just because the new one was so anti-functional. It was that bad.
I wouldn't be surprised if many users did once they knew that it was even an option.
Peak of "traditional" while still looking decent was honestly XFCE for me. Since then I went full geek and set up i3 tiling manager with basically workspace/screen per app, as I realized near-everything I do is just "running 2 full screen apps on 2 screens" so I optimized for that.
Windows 95, being designed for 256 colors, looks really fine. Ok, Mac's System 7 it's prettier, without any doubt, but as I said the Amiga OS 1/2.x versions are far worse.
Windows 95 it's boring in the sense of being tied to a corporation based style, with cubicles.
Yes, so.....win98/win2000 interface. I don't have any idea why you'd look at the attrocity that is win 11 and say it's "beautiful". It's not. It's mostly just empty coloured boxes that don't have any inherent meaning.