> Could you remember any substantial UI improvements between Win 95 and Win 11

Yes I can. Most OSes these days have a OS level fuzzy searching functionality. This has been my preferred way of launching applications on Windows (Win key), Linux (Win key) and MacOS (CMD+Spc).

I press a hotkey, type the first few characters of the program I'm trying to go to, and press enter. This is also common in text editors and even some web apps. Improves the UX of discovering commands, as compared to endlessly nested menus like the 90s.

There's loads of other things that have improved but this one is just so basic that I couldn't live without it.

Let's not live with rose tinted glasses. Yes, there's backsliding in terms of UX but don't ignore the improvements.

I also tend to use Win key search for launching programs. I would be interested to see if an OS could focus that use case as a primary means of UI. If it did become central to usage, I’d love to see a commonality emerge across terminal centric and GUI OS styles.

I'm not living with rose tinted glasses, I mentioned search and UAC in my original message. This is not enough to warrant criticism of Win 95 clones. I bet you could add search to Serenity without changing the look and it would still be called a Win 95 clone.

It's gone downhill. Scrollbars that only appear half the times you need them, buttons that aren't buttons, not-buttons that are in fact buttons, instead of curated menus Evince has three places you can click and hope to find the function you want in one of them, it's just a mess.

Win 95 had the basic UX down, and Tiger made it look very pretty, but it didn't need any more fixing.

I think this is due to the operating system being replaced by a combination of (1) the web browser; and (2) Steam. Nobody cares what the OS itself is doing, because they aren't using it.

Windows 95 brought us those god-awful cascading menus that would disappear the second you missed a hover target by a single pixel. I for one am glad those died out.

I don't understand how anyone could say that mess was good.

What are you talking about, cascading menus that disappear are still with us, they moved to the web!

i'd go as far as to say there have been zero improvements, substantial or minor.

i mean, thank god windows now has three distinct and clashing UI styles in different parts of the OS, i don't know how we ever managed to live with just one.

The window snapping/tiling feature is nice, but not nearly good enough to replace i3wm.

A few things that pop up for me:

1. Tabs in browser and other applications.

2. Font rendering, hinting, anti-aliasing and subpixel rendering. Together with high-resolution screens for more people.

3. Better multi-threading for applications. Back in the day, one application crashes and everything is stuck. Improvements here are part of user experience, though not directly UI.

4. Less crashing and vague errors in my experience, much more refined software (if you pick your choices right).

5. Smooth audio and video, together with much better support for codecs out of the box.

6. Better plug-and-play, no internal isa cards anymore, external all usb or similar.

7. Many more options for free software and gratis software, but choices for commercial still exist.

8. App stores which makes discovery and installation easier for users.

That many things have turned for the worse, does not mean there are no things that turned better.

You are right, but most of what you mentioned is not UI and its UX.