NB: "old Windows was far better at these things than ... any current Linux DE", where "these things" is explicitly the breadth of desktop UI user settings, and to a slightly lesser degree, applications respecting them. Not saying it is, or ever was, better at anything else.
As a Linux enthusiast I agree. Microsoft built windows for utility, and did a lot of research to determine what worked. It took all the best ideas from other UI toolkits and refined them.
It's absurd that making a scrolling list of ~5000 items is a performance problem for modern applications when it's completely solved in Windows 95.