2 applications: StartAllBack and Winaero Tweaker are both lifesavers, as far as I'm concerned. Both allow you to customize the look and feel of different elements so you can run the latest Windows 11 but still preserve elements of the traditional UI's - classic Start Menu, analog clock (sounds quaint but it has a second hand and the calendar is much more responsive), different versions of Windows Explorer, etc.
Everyone seems to love the Windows 7 era but for me, Windows peaked GUI-wise with Windows 2000 and everything since then has felt like a poor 'skin' or misplaced 'theme' on top of something else.
Windows XP's level of 'plug and play' for devices/drivers ushered in the modern OS feel from a usability standpoint, but from a 'get-shit-done' GUI and responsiveness standpoint Win 2000 (and up to Windows Server 2003 by extension) was all I ever wanted/needed.
These may be rose tinted glasses though, and I'd be interested to hear counterpoints.
Nah, its not rose tinted glasses. Win2000/Win2003 were amazing. I still run Win2003 because it just workz. GUI is great, it snappy, I have all the tools to tinker here and there.. Leaked SRC code helps tiny bit ;)
Win7 wasnt that bad, you still could set classic GUI. If they only kept it like this and plow money to improve kernel...
For me, search integrated into the start menu was a major quality of life improvement. Particularly the ability to hit the Windows key and type the name of an application. Strictly speaking, this was introduced in Vista, but I feel like Windows 7 added a lot of useful polish to the Windows Vista style of UI.
I otherwise agree that the older Win 2k era UI was pretty much an ideal UI. The whole "frutiger aero" look did not age well.
I use the Win-key+[start typing] search all the time, but I also used it in the XP era. Only then it was a third-party app, with order of magnitude more customization and control. I actually have a worse experience now, but it's just above my tolerance threshold so I don't do anything about it.
The Start Menu integrated search would have been real nice if it worked properly, but unfortunately they decided on some kind of “search” algorithm that can't even do a substring match on items in the Start Menu. I have no clue what the thinking there was, but it drives me to not want to use it.
If I hit Winkey and type a string, it should not be the case that I get different results from doing that 6 times in a row because it depends whether some background task which changes the results finishes first.
Anyways, this has pitched me towards app "Everything"
I occasionally check whether after all these years MS has fixed the search... no, no surprise there.
I get that it depends on indexing service which may be buggy, etc... but I guess it is possible to prioritize/have alternate index for most important stuff like executables. This bugs me the most: there is a program, but I cannot find it. I must know to navigate my way within start menu or program files (for stuff like debugging/perf tools from Microsoft)
And given lots of comments there are on HN about Windows search, why no MS guy here silently sitting has escalated this "sentiment" to the correct ears? Oh please.
I've lived through every evolution of Windows from 3.1 up to 11 and Millenium/2000 still remains my favourite and I will always consider it the most 'get-shit-done' UI that Microsoft has ever built. Up until W10 removed the feature, I used to turn off the Themes service so that I could get the classic UI back.
And I also completely agree with your point that everything else since then has felt like a poorly placed theme on top of something else.
Wait a sec. Windows 2000 was probably their best operating system. Windows ME was absolutely their worst. They were so different I’m not sure the entire company wasn’t swapped into the set of Severance (tv show) or something of that ilk.
They were developed by completely different teams.
As an aside - as someone who used ME back in the day, I feel like I honestly had more problems with Vista. ME was a downgrade from 98SE for sure, but I don't remember it being the same level of performance and reliability degradation that I saw going from XP to Vista pre-SP2.
Same here, Windows 2000 is peak UI, I never liked the Frutiger Aero aesthetics. My only criticism is that it was, in a sense, too successful and elements like the taskbar and start menu got ossified and the design stagnated. Apple's F3 show all windows, F4 spotlight is far better. Windows didn't even get multiple desktops until Windows 10.
I guess I like the design language but I wouldn't be prepared to give back the usability of modern UIs.
Frutiger Aero was never called like that. It was just a non-copycat gloss theme cleraly inspired from OSX' Aqua design. Even KDE3 did that for some time (Everaldo/Crystal icons, Keramik...) were rounded, glossy designs were hip and transparencies with XRender were everywere.
Both desktops tried to create someting shiny without being too close to Mac OS X.
TBH KDE has better themes like the Slick icon set and plain but contrasted widget and menu themes, kinda like the semi-flat theme from Office 2003 (was it the .Net theme?) or something like that, which was modern but not baroque and overloaded like Keramik or XP's silver theme with too many gradients.
That style would modernized would be several times than the unusable flat themes from today. Kinda like Zukitre for GTK2/3/4 under GNU/Linux and BSD desktops (ad QT5/6 being set to match the GTK3/4 themes under the settings).
Booting win2k with under 10 processes running at startup and ~50MB RAM consumed was glorious. Updated Warp on a child's computer last evening and 7GB consumed at boot with W11 reminded me of win2k days and how much they are missed...
The Win7 UI was comfortable, and still configurable enough that I could make the tool work for me rather than having to work for the tool.
I'd be more interested if it brought back the performance of Win7. That OS was released into a world that still had HDD boot drives and had to pay attention to the details. I still run a Win7 machine that boots in under ten seconds.
Sadly no extension can bring either of those back and we are unlikely to see anything along those lines from MS ever again.
The 2d design of modern interfaces is terrible. Everything looks like a "Label". Scrollbars are terrible. Light gray on dark gray.
And, worst of all, they need 3d acceleration to draw a bloody 2d label.
Don't think it's really accurate to describe restoring an old theme to an OS as "stealing". It would be stealing if they made their own OS using the Win7 theme.
At work I am made to use Windows 11 and I hate it immensely. Everything's so slow. Nothing operates properly. In addition to forced reboots which are annoying as hell, it also reboots after some time on sleep, for no reason whatsoever. Copilot is everywhere and cannot be truly disabled without admin rights. While not strictly a Windows issue, Outlook is an incredible piece of garbage. It doesn't know if it's running and so can be launched more than once; the icon for new messages doesn't show when it should; search is still as broken as ever; the ribbon, which makes little sense in other Office apps, is absurd in Outlook; folders are useless and confusing; etc.
At home, while I have a Mac Mini 4, a MacBook Air, and several Linux boxes, I still use an old PC on Win7 as my primary machine. Is it insecure? Probably. But today "insecure" feels more like a feature than a limitation. No forced updates of anything => everything that works, keeps working indefinitely.
> In addition to forced reboots which are annoying as hell
Not to defend Microslop here, but your workplace should disable this via Group Policies. Sounds a like badly or unmanaged work environment.
Obviously you shouldn't have to pay your works to constantly fight against and disable microslop's bullshit all the time, just so your other employees can actually get work done.
> I still use an old PC on Win7 as my primary machine
So do I. I've had to deal with 10 and 11 at work and had the same sort of problems, so I've refused to "downgrade" this PC.
It particularly used to really piss me off that when I was partway through working on something and had several applications open, with data loaded, that if I tried to leave it like that overnight so I'd be able to continue immediately the next morning, chances are Windows would decide to update and reboot, closing everything.
I found several ways online to supposedly stop it from doing that, but nothing ever worked.
Although 7's UI is much better than the flat nonsense we get these days, I don't find the UI to be the biggest problem. If using Windows 11, I'd want to replace the underlying OS, not keep it and replace just the UI. So while this project looks interesting, to me it's not fixing the real problem.
Just thinking more about how we're told it's "insecure". It's unfortunate that so many tech people are so gullible when it comes to the industry's marketing around this.
Many of us know a huge proportion of news stories come from PR firms that just want to sell us something (it comes up on HN every now and then). In the mid-2000s or so, Microsoft had a particular problem selling Office - there was no reason to upgrade to the current version, because the older one already did everything you wanted. Until that time, established practice was to buy new software only if you wanted its new features; the vendor had to give you a good reason to pay for it. To some of us, the PR that immediately followed the stories of struggles to sell their newer versions - PR that suddenly exploded everywhere - was obvious and transparent. "You must upgrade because old software is insecure!" But it grew into the monster we have today. Some people literally panic if they discover an older piece of software.
Think of young people growing up with that being blasted at them constantly. It must have contributed to the has-to-be-new-and-shiny mindset of Javascript developers, where they're terrified to touch anything that hasn't been updated for a few months.
That long, sustained, and paradigm-shifting PR campaign has been a huge win for many software vendors, and for Microsoft in particular. (Of course, after that, and after a few failed attempts, they managed to get the subscription-based model to work for Office, which in that particular case, bypasses the mess left by their earlier selling strategy anyway.)
I work with Windows 11 and don't see any major issue whatsoever. But note that 16GB RAM is "just" enough to run it smoothly. 32GB is better for serious (e.g development) work. I have run it even on Intel 4200U/4200M CPUs fine (CPU is from year 2014).
I agree that new Outlook is buggy and not fully functional - that's why I still use old native MS Outlook.
It's possible half of my problems are because I don't have admin rights, and the other half is because the machine is too weak.
Why do modern OSes need so much power and RAM anyway? I used to produce documents on an Amstrad PPC640. 640 stood for 640k of RAM (no hard disk). It was fine.
I understand the above makes me sound like an old fart (or fool), and we have moved on from DOS. But what does Windows 11 do that Windows 7 couldn't?
I honestly think this is a difficult and fascinating question. This is like the dark energy of software cosmology. Why is the natural state to get larger and more complex for un-proportionate pleasure of use?
Largely, I think, because devs are given too powerful computers. It's easier for companies to "fix" or preemptively had off performance bugs by giving developers high-end computers than to spend extra development time truly fixing them.
Windows 11 can run many more different UI toolkits, all jumbled together. It has more graphical effects in there. It has so much telemetry and Microsoft Defender will never-ever give up and will inspect everything, all the time.
My main issue with Windows 11 (and where I use it I do see quite a lot of issues) is that apparently it won't run on my personal PC at home - and no way am I going to buy a new PC just to run Windows 11. So installed Linux Mint and I'm perfectly happy!
How large is the company you work at? I'm guessing large. What is the general sentiment across layers in the company? My guess is everybody hates it (all layers)?
It's a client of mine; the IT department is extremely small (fewer than 5) but the company has maybe 500 employees total? Since I work there, I've not heard anyone complain specifically about their computer or the Windows version. Most people don't care / don't know better, they just use what they're given.
I daily drive Windows 11 (with WSL) and with some tweaks it feels okay: the O&O ShutUp10++ utility (or any number of similar ones, as long as you trust them), some group policy, maybe Everything if you want fast search, LibreOffice instead of MS office and just some Settings changes. It sucks if you don't have the permissions to change that stuff and are stuck with the bad defaults.
In some ways it's a bit like having to customize a Mac to feel comfy (AutoRaise, Rectangle, DiscreteScroll, ...), except in Apple's case it's because they believe that they know better what my computing experience should be like, and in Microsoft's, it's some enshittification and pushing me towards features that I don't really want or need.
At the same time, games work (even the shitty rootkit anti-cheat), lovely software is all there like Notepad++, MobaXTerm, SourceTree (though GitKraken is really good if you want to pay for it), SteelSeries Sonar (the only experience of managing audio devices that wasn't unnecessarily messy or complex, tbh even VoiceMeeter has weird UI/UX), oh and FreeFileSync and ofc all of my dev tools and other software. It's just passable in most categories.
I still believe that something like Linux Mint would give me the best desktop computing experience, cause it almost never is actively hostile to me as a user - all of the instances of it sucking and being broken are either growing pains, ecosystem fragmentation, insufficient development effort (given that there isn't a multi-billion dollar org behind it, or at least not really the DEs or most userland software, or that the drivers don't always get as much love from vendors), or circumstances outside of their control (e.g. the anti-cheat situation with games), rather than a conscious choice on the part of the developers.
Outlook should be illegal. My biggest pet peeve is that its search doesn't work properly and it misses showing emails. I cannot count how many times I had relative crying calling me that someone is deleting her emails. The emails were there, just incredibly hard to find. Oh and the "Focused" mode that has zero sense.
I don't know how businesses operate using this garbage.
I once got abuse from an Income Tax official for claiming that an email with the details they requested had been sent to them, as the official opened Outlook and searched for it in front of me and couldn't find it! Had to convince the guy to try multiple different keywords before it luckily emerged in the search results.
Just to offer a counter point - I'm at Windows 11 Enterprise at work(as a game developer) and it just works. We don't have any copilot stuff because it has been disabled by corporate policy. I don't see any ads. The system is mega stable, for search I just use Everything, I don't have any issues with Explorer really, other than the stupid change of copy/paste into icons, which I've undone with one powershell command. I think as a C++ dev it's a great environment to work in.
I just want my brightness/volume indicator back in the middle of my screen without fluffy graphics.... :( I dont know why it isnt even a power-user option....
I'd rather have KDE on windows 10.
Or, better, the whole lot of tiny UX improvements kde has (all the visual/audio controls, the system settings that make sense and are not buried withing 4-5 menus, things like that)
2 applications: StartAllBack and Winaero Tweaker are both lifesavers, as far as I'm concerned. Both allow you to customize the look and feel of different elements so you can run the latest Windows 11 but still preserve elements of the traditional UI's - classic Start Menu, analog clock (sounds quaint but it has a second hand and the calendar is much more responsive), different versions of Windows Explorer, etc.
Everyone seems to love the Windows 7 era but for me, Windows peaked GUI-wise with Windows 2000 and everything since then has felt like a poor 'skin' or misplaced 'theme' on top of something else.
Windows XP's level of 'plug and play' for devices/drivers ushered in the modern OS feel from a usability standpoint, but from a 'get-shit-done' GUI and responsiveness standpoint Win 2000 (and up to Windows Server 2003 by extension) was all I ever wanted/needed.
These may be rose tinted glasses though, and I'd be interested to hear counterpoints.
Nah, its not rose tinted glasses. Win2000/Win2003 were amazing. I still run Win2003 because it just workz. GUI is great, it snappy, I have all the tools to tinker here and there.. Leaked SRC code helps tiny bit ;)
Win7 wasnt that bad, you still could set classic GUI. If they only kept it like this and plow money to improve kernel...
For me, search integrated into the start menu was a major quality of life improvement. Particularly the ability to hit the Windows key and type the name of an application. Strictly speaking, this was introduced in Vista, but I feel like Windows 7 added a lot of useful polish to the Windows Vista style of UI.
I otherwise agree that the older Win 2k era UI was pretty much an ideal UI. The whole "frutiger aero" look did not age well.
I use the Win-key+[start typing] search all the time, but I also used it in the XP era. Only then it was a third-party app, with order of magnitude more customization and control. I actually have a worse experience now, but it's just above my tolerance threshold so I don't do anything about it.
The Start Menu integrated search would have been real nice if it worked properly, but unfortunately they decided on some kind of “search” algorithm that can't even do a substring match on items in the Start Menu. I have no clue what the thinking there was, but it drives me to not want to use it.
I think what drives me mad is its nondeterminism.
If I hit Winkey and type a string, it should not be the case that I get different results from doing that 6 times in a row because it depends whether some background task which changes the results finishes first.
Yeah... sometimes it doesn't find anything.
Anyways, this has pitched me towards app "Everything"
I occasionally check whether after all these years MS has fixed the search... no, no surprise there.
I get that it depends on indexing service which may be buggy, etc... but I guess it is possible to prioritize/have alternate index for most important stuff like executables. This bugs me the most: there is a program, but I cannot find it. I must know to navigate my way within start menu or program files (for stuff like debugging/perf tools from Microsoft)
And given lots of comments there are on HN about Windows search, why no MS guy here silently sitting has escalated this "sentiment" to the correct ears? Oh please.
I've lived through every evolution of Windows from 3.1 up to 11 and Millenium/2000 still remains my favourite and I will always consider it the most 'get-shit-done' UI that Microsoft has ever built. Up until W10 removed the feature, I used to turn off the Themes service so that I could get the classic UI back.
And I also completely agree with your point that everything else since then has felt like a poorly placed theme on top of something else.
Wait a sec. Windows 2000 was probably their best operating system. Windows ME was absolutely their worst. They were so different I’m not sure the entire company wasn’t swapped into the set of Severance (tv show) or something of that ilk.
They were developed by completely different teams.
As an aside - as someone who used ME back in the day, I feel like I honestly had more problems with Vista. ME was a downgrade from 98SE for sure, but I don't remember it being the same level of performance and reliability degradation that I saw going from XP to Vista pre-SP2.
Looks like this mod supports the "classic" theme too.
That was the thing I missed most in Windows 10. With the previous versions of Windows (I think up to 7?) you could still switch back to classic theme.
Agree, that 2000/Millennium aesthetic was absolutely peak design and usability.
Same here, Windows 2000 is peak UI, I never liked the Frutiger Aero aesthetics. My only criticism is that it was, in a sense, too successful and elements like the taskbar and start menu got ossified and the design stagnated. Apple's F3 show all windows, F4 spotlight is far better. Windows didn't even get multiple desktops until Windows 10.
I guess I like the design language but I wouldn't be prepared to give back the usability of modern UIs.
Frutiger Aero was never called like that. It was just a non-copycat gloss theme cleraly inspired from OSX' Aqua design. Even KDE3 did that for some time (Everaldo/Crystal icons, Keramik...) were rounded, glossy designs were hip and transparencies with XRender were everywere.
Both desktops tried to create someting shiny without being too close to Mac OS X.
TBH KDE has better themes like the Slick icon set and plain but contrasted widget and menu themes, kinda like the semi-flat theme from Office 2003 (was it the .Net theme?) or something like that, which was modern but not baroque and overloaded like Keramik or XP's silver theme with too many gradients.
That style would modernized would be several times than the unusable flat themes from today. Kinda like Zukitre for GTK2/3/4 under GNU/Linux and BSD desktops (ad QT5/6 being set to match the GTK3/4 themes under the settings).
Booting win2k with under 10 processes running at startup and ~50MB RAM consumed was glorious. Updated Warp on a child's computer last evening and 7GB consumed at boot with W11 reminded me of win2k days and how much they are missed...
Yeah I agree too. I never understood the love for the win7 aesthetic!
7 was the peak though cus it actually worked flawlessly.. In my experience earlier versions of windows were kinda janky and unstable.
The Win7 UI was comfortable, and still configurable enough that I could make the tool work for me rather than having to work for the tool.
I'd be more interested if it brought back the performance of Win7. That OS was released into a world that still had HDD boot drives and had to pay attention to the details. I still run a Win7 machine that boots in under ten seconds.
Sadly no extension can bring either of those back and we are unlikely to see anything along those lines from MS ever again.
I still have a windows 7 system from 16 years ago. Works great.
Sorry for being (slightly?) off-topic: Is there a decent way to buy this LTSC edition of Windows?
I have used windows 7 since it launched and moved to 10 & 11. I like some design elements of windows 7, but I would absolutely not use it today.
If you think, "I should try this", Any reason why? I'm really curious to know
> Any reason why?
The 2d design of modern interfaces is terrible. Everything looks like a "Label". Scrollbars are terrible. Light gray on dark gray. And, worst of all, they need 3d acceleration to draw a bloody 2d label.
I really do miss the design of Windows 7 and the apps of that era (think Office 2007 style)
I hope it comes back
Office 2007 was the last time someone had a vision and fully executed it.
Every design refresh since then has been half finished and pushed out the door with too many bits of the old left.
"Please do not power off your machine. Installing update 1 of 100."
I definitely prefer XP over 7. No automatic updates."
Have you never used Group Policy?
I love this kind of thing but feel really worried when I can't see source.
Looks like the repo is here - https://github.com/Classic7-Mod/WindowsOOBERecreation
The repo is only 8 months old, which could be seen as good or bad.
That is only the out of box experience but the whole thing
I think you'll need to slowly make peace with the fact that people don't want their work stolen by AIs.
Ironic, considering that this whole project is built upon stealing the design of Windows 7
Don't think it's really accurate to describe restoring an old theme to an OS as "stealing". It would be stealing if they made their own OS using the Win7 theme.
At work I am made to use Windows 11 and I hate it immensely. Everything's so slow. Nothing operates properly. In addition to forced reboots which are annoying as hell, it also reboots after some time on sleep, for no reason whatsoever. Copilot is everywhere and cannot be truly disabled without admin rights. While not strictly a Windows issue, Outlook is an incredible piece of garbage. It doesn't know if it's running and so can be launched more than once; the icon for new messages doesn't show when it should; search is still as broken as ever; the ribbon, which makes little sense in other Office apps, is absurd in Outlook; folders are useless and confusing; etc.
At home, while I have a Mac Mini 4, a MacBook Air, and several Linux boxes, I still use an old PC on Win7 as my primary machine. Is it insecure? Probably. But today "insecure" feels more like a feature than a limitation. No forced updates of anything => everything that works, keeps working indefinitely.
> In addition to forced reboots which are annoying as hell
Not to defend Microslop here, but your workplace should disable this via Group Policies. Sounds a like badly or unmanaged work environment.
Obviously you shouldn't have to pay your works to constantly fight against and disable microslop's bullshit all the time, just so your other employees can actually get work done.
> I still use an old PC on Win7 as my primary machine
So do I. I've had to deal with 10 and 11 at work and had the same sort of problems, so I've refused to "downgrade" this PC.
It particularly used to really piss me off that when I was partway through working on something and had several applications open, with data loaded, that if I tried to leave it like that overnight so I'd be able to continue immediately the next morning, chances are Windows would decide to update and reboot, closing everything.
I found several ways online to supposedly stop it from doing that, but nothing ever worked.
Although 7's UI is much better than the flat nonsense we get these days, I don't find the UI to be the biggest problem. If using Windows 11, I'd want to replace the underlying OS, not keep it and replace just the UI. So while this project looks interesting, to me it's not fixing the real problem.
Just thinking more about how we're told it's "insecure". It's unfortunate that so many tech people are so gullible when it comes to the industry's marketing around this.
Many of us know a huge proportion of news stories come from PR firms that just want to sell us something (it comes up on HN every now and then). In the mid-2000s or so, Microsoft had a particular problem selling Office - there was no reason to upgrade to the current version, because the older one already did everything you wanted. Until that time, established practice was to buy new software only if you wanted its new features; the vendor had to give you a good reason to pay for it. To some of us, the PR that immediately followed the stories of struggles to sell their newer versions - PR that suddenly exploded everywhere - was obvious and transparent. "You must upgrade because old software is insecure!" But it grew into the monster we have today. Some people literally panic if they discover an older piece of software.
Think of young people growing up with that being blasted at them constantly. It must have contributed to the has-to-be-new-and-shiny mindset of Javascript developers, where they're terrified to touch anything that hasn't been updated for a few months.
That long, sustained, and paradigm-shifting PR campaign has been a huge win for many software vendors, and for Microsoft in particular. (Of course, after that, and after a few failed attempts, they managed to get the subscription-based model to work for Office, which in that particular case, bypasses the mess left by their earlier selling strategy anyway.)
I work with Windows 11 and don't see any major issue whatsoever. But note that 16GB RAM is "just" enough to run it smoothly. 32GB is better for serious (e.g development) work. I have run it even on Intel 4200U/4200M CPUs fine (CPU is from year 2014). I agree that new Outlook is buggy and not fully functional - that's why I still use old native MS Outlook.
It's possible half of my problems are because I don't have admin rights, and the other half is because the machine is too weak.
Why do modern OSes need so much power and RAM anyway? I used to produce documents on an Amstrad PPC640. 640 stood for 640k of RAM (no hard disk). It was fine.
I understand the above makes me sound like an old fart (or fool), and we have moved on from DOS. But what does Windows 11 do that Windows 7 couldn't?
Because they’re a bunch of perverts and want to know every button you clicked.
I honestly think this is a difficult and fascinating question. This is like the dark energy of software cosmology. Why is the natural state to get larger and more complex for un-proportionate pleasure of use?
Largely, I think, because devs are given too powerful computers. It's easier for companies to "fix" or preemptively had off performance bugs by giving developers high-end computers than to spend extra development time truly fixing them.
> Why do modern OSes need so much power and RAM anyway?
Because code writers are lazy and prefer to use 20 levels of abstraction or a 5MB library for a simple function.
Windows 11 can run many more different UI toolkits, all jumbled together. It has more graphical effects in there. It has so much telemetry and Microsoft Defender will never-ever give up and will inspect everything, all the time.
My main issue with Windows 11 (and where I use it I do see quite a lot of issues) is that apparently it won't run on my personal PC at home - and no way am I going to buy a new PC just to run Windows 11. So installed Linux Mint and I'm perfectly happy!
How large is the company you work at? I'm guessing large. What is the general sentiment across layers in the company? My guess is everybody hates it (all layers)?
It's a client of mine; the IT department is extremely small (fewer than 5) but the company has maybe 500 employees total? Since I work there, I've not heard anyone complain specifically about their computer or the Windows version. Most people don't care / don't know better, they just use what they're given.
I daily drive Windows 11 (with WSL) and with some tweaks it feels okay: the O&O ShutUp10++ utility (or any number of similar ones, as long as you trust them), some group policy, maybe Everything if you want fast search, LibreOffice instead of MS office and just some Settings changes. It sucks if you don't have the permissions to change that stuff and are stuck with the bad defaults.
In some ways it's a bit like having to customize a Mac to feel comfy (AutoRaise, Rectangle, DiscreteScroll, ...), except in Apple's case it's because they believe that they know better what my computing experience should be like, and in Microsoft's, it's some enshittification and pushing me towards features that I don't really want or need.
At the same time, games work (even the shitty rootkit anti-cheat), lovely software is all there like Notepad++, MobaXTerm, SourceTree (though GitKraken is really good if you want to pay for it), SteelSeries Sonar (the only experience of managing audio devices that wasn't unnecessarily messy or complex, tbh even VoiceMeeter has weird UI/UX), oh and FreeFileSync and ofc all of my dev tools and other software. It's just passable in most categories.
I still believe that something like Linux Mint would give me the best desktop computing experience, cause it almost never is actively hostile to me as a user - all of the instances of it sucking and being broken are either growing pains, ecosystem fragmentation, insufficient development effort (given that there isn't a multi-billion dollar org behind it, or at least not really the DEs or most userland software, or that the drivers don't always get as much love from vendors), or circumstances outside of their control (e.g. the anti-cheat situation with games), rather than a conscious choice on the part of the developers.
Outlook should be illegal. My biggest pet peeve is that its search doesn't work properly and it misses showing emails. I cannot count how many times I had relative crying calling me that someone is deleting her emails. The emails were there, just incredibly hard to find. Oh and the "Focused" mode that has zero sense.
I don't know how businesses operate using this garbage.
I once got abuse from an Income Tax official for claiming that an email with the details they requested had been sent to them, as the official opened Outlook and searched for it in front of me and couldn't find it! Had to convince the guy to try multiple different keywords before it luckily emerged in the search results.
Just to offer a counter point - I'm at Windows 11 Enterprise at work(as a game developer) and it just works. We don't have any copilot stuff because it has been disabled by corporate policy. I don't see any ads. The system is mega stable, for search I just use Everything, I don't have any issues with Explorer really, other than the stupid change of copy/paste into icons, which I've undone with one powershell command. I think as a C++ dev it's a great environment to work in.
Can we have something similar for macOS (to turn the UI to Mac OS 9)?
I would even take any Leopard/Lion.
I just want my brightness/volume indicator back in the middle of my screen without fluffy graphics.... :( I dont know why it isnt even a power-user option....
can something like this happen for linux, I would love to see a linux desktop environment like windows 7
for windows 8 on linux, there's this: https://github.com/er-bharat/Win8DE
I'd rather have KDE on windows 10. Or, better, the whole lot of tiny UX improvements kde has (all the visual/audio controls, the system settings that make sense and are not buried withing 4-5 menus, things like that)
https://gitgud.io/aeroshell/atp/aerothemeplasma
There's a lot of them. Just search for Frutiger Aero on GitHub.
There is a huge pletora of themes for KDE and Gnome to imitate OSX, Windows 95/98, XP, Vista/7, etc...
This can create both incompatibilities and use more resources than Windows 7 itself.
It's just a skin. Of course it uses more resources than windows 7.
Windows 11 itself uses more resources than Windows 7 ;)