What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000

Post by nosioptar » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 3:38 PM UTC

forestingfisher wrote: post #153

nycticorax wrote: post #49

Andreas Kling has said that one of his inspirations for SerenityOS was the Windows 2000 UI ( https://corecursive.com/serenity-os-with-andreas-kling/ ). I found his general goal for SerenityOS ("Roughly speaking, the goal is a marriage between the aesthetic of late-1990s productivity software and the power-user accessibility of late-2000s *nix.") to be strangely validating ('Wait... So it's not just me?!'). And so of…

I love SerenityOS so much, I wish someone ported it as a DE to the Linux kernel so I could daily it

Post by vrighter » Sun, Jun 21, 2026, 9:02 AM UTC

RAM-bunctious wrote: post #208

hallole wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can recall a time when it felt rewarding to explore and poke around in software, clicking through the menus and the icons, seeing what conveniences and neat features might be hiding in there... Now, that's often not my experience. You can find some of the worst examples in anything made by Microsoft; Teams and Outlook are particularly bad, as you said. I don't poke around out of curiosity, I fumble around out of fr…

Maybe it's just me, but exploring the settings without a specific aim used to be a pretty fun. It was like seeing a vista of possibilities opening up. Now I often find it a frustrating experience, because, while I appreciate the attempt at organisation, settings are hidden behind so many sub-menus that it feels like a slog to click to deeper levels to find only a few settings, even if there are a lot of settings in t…