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

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

#121

Post by ConceptJunkie »

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…

Windows 7 was the best Windows and one of the reasons was that you could still have the Windows 2000 GUI, the "Classic" theme. That was peak Windows.

I'm so disappointed that all those years later, the Windows UI is literally less configurable than Windows 2.1, which is the earliest version I used. Yeah, I don't miss 16-color mode, but I definitely miss that you had so much flexibility to tweak the UI. Now you're just stuck with some art-school dropout's idea of "flat UI" (seeing as how Microsoft has thrown out most of the great HCI work they, IBM, and others did in the 1980s, in favor of lame aesthetics that are entirely orthogonal to usability) and there's almost nothing meaningful you can change about it.

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

#122

Post by ConceptJunkie »

Timwi wrote: post #56
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…

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.

Yeah, I never used it. I have barely ever used it since then.

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

#123

Post by ConceptJunkie »

jve wrote: post #61
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.

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…

Given that Windows search has been this broken for decades, do you think Microsoft is going to start caring _now_?!

Next thing you'll be asking to make OneDrive even remotely predictable in its behavior (other than the predictability of "never doing what I expect or want").

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

#124

Post by ndiddy »

xg15 wrote: post #72
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…

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…

> KDE or XFCE seem to mimic the Windows 2000 design in many ways, but they are still far away from feeling as snappy or as well-thought out than Windows 2000 did. They also paradoxically feel more "gray" than I remember Windows, even though the "grayness" of Windows from that era is sort of famous.

I haven't used XFCE, but you can attribute the lack of snappiness in KDE compared to early Windows to compositing and having more animations. There's not much you can do about compositing, it's kind of necessary on high resolution computers, but Wayland latency has been getting better and if you use a recent distro like Fedora it feels about the same as Windows 7 with compositing enabled. For animations, you can speed them up or disable them entirely using the "global animation speed" slider in the settings. For the grayness, you can re-enable colored window titlebars in the settings by going to "Colors & themes" -> "Colors" and then selecting "Breeze Classic". I don't know why they have them disabled by default.

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

#125

Post by ConceptJunkie »

irishcoffee wrote: post #45
drooopy wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

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.

I used Windows 95 for a few months and switched to NT and never looked back.

I did later run Windows 98 on my kids' machine for games, but I never tried, or wanted to try Windows ME.

Windows 2000 has the best look and feel for the GUI, but I do recall that I usually saw my first Explorer crash within an hour of a fresh install. Windows 7 was peak Windows because you could still get the "Classic" Windows 2000 theme, but with all the under-the-hood improvements. I've gotten used to the Windows 10/11 UI, but I've never liked it and just wish I could go back to the way it looked when Microsoft cared about usability, as opposed to trying to make everything look like a phone.

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

#126

Post by ConceptJunkie »

Uncle_Brumpus wrote: post #115
lachiflippi wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 foot…

I bought a machine with similar capability for my wife that shipped with Vista and it was literally unusable. I think I ended up "upgrading" it to XP.

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

#127

Post by bigstrat2003 »

drooopy wrote: post #76
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 an absolute dumpster fire but in no way compares to the awfulness of ME.

Vista wasn't remotely a dumpster fire. I used it for almost its entire lifetime, it was totally fine.

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

#128

Post by Gud »

venzaspa wrote: post #120
nikanj wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Windows 7 never took minutes to boot on a reasonable computer.

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

#129

Post by ConceptJunkie »

Borg3 wrote: post #65
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…

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...

In 2012, I was working for a company that did all the development for its Windows clients on an ancient version of Visual Studio running in a Windows 2003 VM, and I discovered that the Windows 2003 running in a VM could transfer files over the network faster than Windows 7 running on bare metal. I feel like transferring files over the network has been horrible in Windows ever since. Transferring over USB was often horrible as well, but that seems somewhat better now.

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

#130

Post by ConceptJunkie »

shin_lao wrote: post #105
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…

Windows 2000 was such a major improvement over NT4 and of course 9x that yes, you're right, it was awesome, but it still had issues and in terms of device drivers future versions brought a lot of things that improved overall stability. I think the best benefit of Windows 2000 was that the GUI was extremely coherent. Even in Windows 11 for some sub menu and options you sometimes have a Windows 2000 UI popping up out o…

26 years. You'd think they could update and unify the UI in 26 years. But they would have to care first.
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