I liked the non-standard, black Zune theme on XP. The default blue one is indeed timeless, but not in a positive sense, imho. It was a textbook case of the UI drawing attention to itself for the sake of it. When the dominating colour is so bright and jarring, how do you make the accents stand out?

https://skatter.com/files/2006/11/windowszunetheme.png That's the one.

Is it just me or was this Start menu much easier to navigate than the Win10 one?

Not just you, but I don't see how it's any easier. Most of the same stuff is on that start menu as is on as the Win10 version, they're just arranged slightly differently.

People like what they like, you don't have to justify why. I hate carrots. Why? Doesn't matter, it's still a valid choice, same as start menus.

this image brings a wistful tear to my eye

I liked the Royale theme that came with the media center edition

I liked the blue variant of this called "Royale"

I still use it in my XP partition.

I think that the blue gradient title bars came in with Windows 98. I remember marveling at how smooth the gradient was!

Before that, the Office 95 applications had a curiously black-to-dark-blue custom drawn title bar.

Then Windows 2000 introduced the subtle mouse pointer shadow, and translucent fade-on-click effect on menu items.

Agree with you about Tahoma being pixel perfect, at 8 point I think. Then came the marvels of ClearType!

You're right - the gradient was in Win98.

As far as translucency - Win2K introduced the new APIs that any app could use to make a window translucent. That was used for those fade-on-click effects, and also for tooltips. But after people figured out that you could do it on any top-level window, there was a brief craze where random apps added it as an option, sometimes for no reason at all other than showing off (like, why would a CD burning app need a translucent window?).

> I remember marveling at how smooth the gradient was!

Ironically, you used to be able to run KDE1 in 8 bits per pixel color mode (256-color palette - quite important for performance back then) and that did support titlebar gradients, unlike Win98 in the same hardware mode. That gradient was far from "smooth" of course, but like its Windows equivalent, it was still very helpful in making it easier to spot the titlebar at a glance.

I agree 100%.

IMHO it was the pinnacle of 2D UI design. Clickable areas were visually obvious, and there was no ambiguity about what happened and why.

And now we live in a world where fashion rules over function.

Windows 95's 3D look & feel was copied from NeXTSTEP. To me the pinnacle of 2D UI design was OS X from Steve Jobs' time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Tiger#/media/File:Tig...

I miss the brushed metal theme too, but Tiger never looked quite right. There is way too much white space in that finder window, especially compared to the way the dock packs them so close together. The icons on the side bar not matching the folder icons is also annoying, when the document icons already don’t match the application icons on the dock. There are three different symbols on the screen for music, and that doesn’t make visual sense.

Looking at NeXTSTEP screenshots, I would say that what got copied was the grey color palette used to make the widgets non-flat. But the actual widgets are rather different, that aside.

And didn't NeXTSTEP built on Motif in turn? Is Motif the granddaddy of "chiseled 2D", or was there something before it?

I’m right there with you I think but for me it’s Win2K3. Not hugely different but there were enough UI changes to make it feel like peak Windows design. Superficially they might look pretty similar but I think it’s worth mentioning as a distinct product instead of lumping them together.

Win2K3 was basically Win2K + XP icons, as I recall. I did the same thing in XP, always switching it to classic mode. Then later in Vista, and even in 7 for a while. Unfortunately it's gone in 8+...

"Windows Classic"-like widgets are also gone from GTK3 in Linux (whereas GTK2 still has its "Redmond" widget mode). Luckily the default 'Adwaita' theme is quite close in appearance, even more than what's now in Windows 8 or 10.

You can similarly get MATE really close to the classic windows UI using the Redmond theme.

I know about that being an option in Ubuntu MATE, at least. But AIUI that's about 'UI' as in the large-scale layout of the desktop environment, with the "Redmond" option giving you a 'traditional' taskbar and system notification tray. (You can definitely get the same thing going in Xfce, though it involves fiddling with the panels - and it's a default in Cinnamon and LXDE.) Widget style is its own thing, though.

The first thing I always do / did was switch to the "Windows Classic" theme.

I've been using "Classic Start" ever since it came out, and I wish there was a way to make Win10 feel more like 2000/XP/Win7 visually. Having a functioning start menu is good enough I guess.

Windows Whistler Beta circa 2000. Had the simplicity of W2K with a little flair and a new start button menu. Way better than all the noise you see today.

There were Visual Styles mimicking Whistler theme from betas dubbed as "Watercolor" [1], [2]

[1]: https://i.imgur.com/gpJbTLl.jpg

[2]: https://i.imgur.com/lpKrYe0.jpg

Majority of powerusers despised default Luna and often used Classic theme instead; Watercolor had a potential of being Classic v2 with its 9x simplicity and modern (as for those days) touch, sadly it wasn't included by default.

I loved that style and was so disappointed with what XP shipped with. I’d still take that style of any Win10 style.

Windows 98 also had a gradient in title bars if you ran your desktop at a high enough color depth, though the colors they used were less tasteful than Windows 2000.