by lproven | 2025-10-19 17:41:56+00:00
> That Windows was a visually pleasing design?

For a while, it was.

Windows 2 was kinda ugly.

https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/win203

Windows 3/3.1/3.11 were fine.

https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/win30

Muted, boring, but you could look at it all day. And we did.

95 improved it.

https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/win95osr2

Tasteful greys, spot colour.

NT 4 improved that a bit more.

https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/winnt40

Categorised Start menu, for instance. But nearly identical.

95/NT4 were visibly inspired by NeXTstep, IMHO the most beautiful GUI ever written.

Then it all started to go a bit wrong. The first pebbles bouncing down the mountainside presaging a vast avalanche.

Windows 98.

https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/win98

IE4 built in so Microsoft didn't get broken up my the US DOJ. Explorer rendered local content via HTML. Ugly extra toolbars. Some floating, some embedded in the task bar. Ugly gradients and blends in window title bars.

Cheap and plastic and tacky.

But that is around the time that media and gaming PCs went mainstream, home internet use (often over dialup) went mainstream, and the alternatives died out (Amiga, ST & GEM, Arm & RISC OS) or very nearly died (classic MacOS, NeXT merger, Rhapsody).

So it's what many saw first and loved and remembered.

Result, people write entire new OSes designed in affectionate homage:

https://serenityos.org/

Look at the toolbars. Look at the textures in the title bars. This isn't Win9x, this is specifically Win98.

https://www.digibarn.com/collections/screenshots/KDE%201-x/i...

Specifically:

https://www.digibarn.com/collections/screenshots/KDE%201-x/h...

<- textured title bars

https://www.digibarn.com/collections/screenshots/KDE%201-x/t...

<- gradients in title bars

https://www.digibarn.com/collections/screenshots/KDE%201-x/m...

<- Windows-style colour schemes

KDE started out as a reproduction of Windows 98/98SE by a team who didn't realise that what they were looking at was WordPerfect 5.x instead of WordPerfect 4.x -- as the late great Guy Kewney put it:

"WordPerfect 4.2 was a bicycle. A great bicycle. Everyone agreed it was a great bicycle, just about the best. So what Wordperfect did was, they put together a committee, looked at the market, and said: 'what we'll do is, we'll put 11 more wheels on it'."

Win98 is Win95 festooned with pointless needless Internet widgetry because the DOJ was about to split MS into separate apps and OS companies, because MS drove Netscape into bankruptcy by bundling IE free of charge with Windows.

Strip all that junk off and what's left underneath is a better UI. But the German kids writing their "Kool Desktop Environment" didn't realise.

After that came WinME and Windows 2000, which turned down the bling a bit as the lawsuit was over, but it was only a blip.

Then came XP with its "Fischer-Price" themes.

Then Vista with gratuitous transparency everywhere because GDI.EXE had been ripped out and replaced with a compositor and that's no fun if you don't use some 3D features like see-through stuff.

Then 7 toned that down a bit and everyone love it.

Then the universally detested Win8, and then that was toned down and the Start menu put back for Win10, which is roughly what UKUI and Deepin copied in China, or Wubuntu in the West.

Then Win11, as copied by AnduinOS and a few others, which for this long-term Windows user is the worst release ever. I can't even have a vertical taskbar any more. It's abhorrent.