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Classic 7 is a Windows 10 LTSC mod to look 1:1 to Windows 7

classic7.lol

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Re: Classic 7 is a Windows 10 LTSC mod to look 1:1 to Windows 7

#111

Post by xg15 »

d3Xt3r wrote: post #93
xg15 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, are there any good comparisons in-detail between Windows 2000 and present-day Linux? I do have the same feeling that Windows 2000 was in many regards the best UI (tied with 7 maybe), but after switching to Linux I'm wondering if this is maybe more rose-colored glasses than I thought. KDE or XFCE seem to mimic the Windows 2000 design in many ways, but they are still far away from feeling as snappy or…

I can't speak about the grayness, but the lack of snappiness I think is thanks to the bloat and complexity of modern UIs. KDE in particular is a beast with a ton legacy code built up over the time, and a lot of bits and pieces put together by people from around the world, which results in a lack of cohesiveness... but that goes for most Linux DEs. XFCE comes a bit closer to the old UX and cohesiveness, but is still a…

Thanks a lot for the writeup and all the pointers. Yeah, I think incoherence might play a role here.

Will definitely check out those themes and have a look at ReactOS (what I wanted to anyway but was procrastinating)

Re: Classic 7 is a Windows 10 LTSC mod to look 1:1 to Windows 7

#112

Post by Uncle_Brumpus »

dmos62 wrote: post #63
ch_123 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

I've navigated systems this way for so long, I forget people do it any other way. Someone from IT had to remote-connect to my system yesterday to do something, and to get to the control panel they opened the start menu --> clicked the Settings gear --> Bluetooth & devices --> Scrolled all the way to the bottom of that page to click "More devices and printer settings", which then opens 'Control Panel\Hardware and Sound\Devices and Printers', then clicked "control panel" in the address bar. I was baffled. Winkey --> type "CON" --> hit Enter is so many fewer steps.

Re: Classic 7 is a Windows 10 LTSC mod to look 1:1 to Windows 7

#113

Post by FuriouslyAdrift »

heresie-dabord wrote: post #82
mk_stjames wrote: post #31

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 ext…

"Peak Windows GUI" and "Peak GUI" are two separate things. For "Peak Windows GUI", MW10 and MW11 both score high in my opinion, but the changes in Start Menu behaviour in MW11 and the horrible "Show more options" sub-menu in the MW11 right-click context menu are confusing. So I'll give MW10 the advantage for consistency and less insult to the principle of Least Surprise. For Peak GUI, I would say there's a tie. An An…

I still dream about a world where we ended up with BeOS instead of OS X.

Fastest and lowest latency UI I have ever seen.

Re: Classic 7 is a Windows 10 LTSC mod to look 1:1 to Windows 7

#114

Post by cosmic_cheese »

Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #10

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

There aren’t any 1:1 recreations as far as I know, just themes of varying levels of quality.

It’s a missed opportunity in my opinion, “here’s an accurate Win2K/XP/7 replica desktop that you get to keep forever” is a strong pitch for Linux for a lot of potential users.

It has massive nostalgia appeal but is also practical because it signals to users that they won’t need to learn any new UI bits or behaviors and that they’ll be comfortable right away. It removes a lot of the spookiness of switching that comes with even the most Windows-like DEs like KDE.

Re: Classic 7 is a Windows 10 LTSC mod to look 1:1 to Windows 7

#115

Post by Uncle_Brumpus »

lachiflippi wrote: post #75
ch_123 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Vista was fine from the get-go if you had enough (>=4GB) RAM, which OEMs mostly didn't bother shipping. My ME machine would reliably BSOD when I opened / closed the CD tray.

My first (and only) experience with Vista was with a stripped-back Toshiba Satellite A135 my mom bought my brother and I during some Black Friday sale. It had one single 512MB RAM stick. I still have a screenshot kicking around somewhere of the "Windows Experience Index" of 1.0 or 1.5 or something (1.0 was the lowest) that also shows the RAM amount. We made it work, though. Many good memories of recoding Xbox360 footage using some Lexar capture box that only accepted analog RCA in as the laptop cooked itself alive sitting on the carpet in front of the TV.

Re: Classic 7 is a Windows 10 LTSC mod to look 1:1 to Windows 7

#116

Post by orphea »

hulitu wrote: post #26
insumanth wrote: post #17

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.

  And, worst of all, they need 3d acceleration to draw a bloody 2d label
Disagree it's worst of all. Why should a specialized piece of hardware not render labels? Even tosters have some GPU cores these days.

Re: Classic 7 is a Windows 10 LTSC mod to look 1:1 to Windows 7

#118

Post by edvinbesic »

embedding-shape wrote: post #103
rincebrain wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Another thing these "search boxes" (happens on macOS/iOS also AFAIK) is that sometimes even exact matches don't match unless you're using some specific length. So if I type "ABC" I see the right application. If I type "AB" I don't see it anymore. But if I do "A" then I see the right application. So you have to then always remember to do either "A" or "ABC", because doing "AB" shows a completely different result as th…

A personal pet peeve of mine as well, and a good example of when a product is trying to be too clever. I think (suspect) what is happening is that it is remembering partial matches and your selection, but like you I find it has the opposite effect.

If I type `f`, the first item on the list is Firefox, if I then type `fi`, it selects Figma instead. Keep typing, `fig`, now it has a Safari tab selected instead for figma.com. Pinnacle UX.

Re: Classic 7 is a Windows 10 LTSC mod to look 1:1 to Windows 7

#119

Post by unethical_ban »

abanana wrote: post #54
abanana wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ne…

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 upgrad…

But... Old software is often going to be insecure on the network. Are you arguing that an OS from 2013 with a browser from the same time is fine on the Web?

Re: Classic 7 is a Windows 10 LTSC mod to look 1:1 to Windows 7

#120

Post by venzaspa »

nikanj wrote: post #69
ch_123 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Now you can hit the Windows key, type Visual Studio and open a Bing search for Visual Studio, instead of actually opening VS. It’s great - if your KPI is bing DAU

I know it should be the default, but if you turn off online searches for the Start Menu, it operates exactly how you'd expect it to on Windows 11.

Windows 11 is also a lot faster than 7 was on equivalent systems. Windows 7 would take minutes to boot.

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