[sprash]

Unpopular take: Windows 95 was the peak of Desktop UX.

GUI elements were easily distinguishable from content and there was 100% consistency down to the last little detail (e.g. right click always gave you a meaningful context menu). The innovations after that are tiny in comparison and more opinionated (things like macos making the taskbar obsolete with the introduction of Exposé).

[fragmede]

Heh, the number of points you've probably gotten for that comment, I don't think that it's that unpopular. Win 98 was my jam but it looks hella dated today, but as you said, buttons were clearly marked, but also menus were navigatible via keyboard, soms support for themes and custom coloring, UIs were designable via a GUI builder in VB or Visual Studio using MFC which was very resource friendly compared to using Electron today. Because smartphones and tablets, but even the wide variety of screen sizes also didn't exist so it was a simpler time. I can't believe how much of a step back Electron is for UI creation compared to MFC, but that wasn't cross-platform and usually elements were absolute positioned instead of the relative resizable layout that's required today.

[kvemkon]

> buttons were clearly marked

Recently some UI ignored my action by clicking an entry in a list from drop down button. It turned out, this drop down button was additionally a normal button if you press it in the center. Awful.

> UI creation compared to MFC

Here I'd prefer Borland with (Pascal) Delphi / C++ Builder.

> relative resizable layout that's required today.

While it should be beneficial, the reality is awful. E.g. why is the URL input field on [1] so narrow? But if you shrinks the browser window width the text field becomes wide eventually! That's completely against expectations.

[1] https://web.archive.org/save

[SoftTalker]

I would say Windows 2000 Pro, but that really wasn't too different from Windows 95. The OS was much better though, being based on NT.

[Telaneo]

I don't think it's a stretch to call it the UI language of 95, while 2000 just adds more functionality within the bounds of that framework. Add in the Win7 search bar in the start menu, and the OS not crashing, you haven't really done anything of note with the UI beyond staying within its framework. It'll still be a Win95 UI.

Meanwhile, WinXP started to fiddle with the foundation of that framework, sometimes maybe for the better, sometimes maybe for the worse. Vista did the same. 7 mostly didn't and instead mostly fixed what Vista broke, while 8 tried to throw the whole thing out.

[throaway45425]

KDE Plasma is better than all of these right now. Cinnamon also.