Eh, I was being hyperbolic when I probably shouldn’t have been. It just feels very lifeless to me. I understand the arguments for it, it just feels soulless and lifeless.

But also win 7 had little to do with skeumorphism

I like them in different places. I minimalism in car screens because the focus should be the physical interior. But skeumorphism is way better for usability on a PC.

Damn I missed NT 4’s clean style back then…

I remember having a Wacom usb tablet at the time, and Windows kept slapping a virtual keyboard in the middle of my screen. It was infuriating, to say the least.

Counter-point, you could do that with skeumorphism via procedural generation by sending the base algorithms instead of icons and then rendering the icons client-side. It’s already done to a limited extent when it comes to games. Substance Designer and Painter are industry standards when it comes to creating textures and materials, and they can generate textures with resolutions anywhere from 128x128 to 8192x8192 without requiring any additional effort due to their procedural workflow. Granted, the textures are usually “baked” before actually being imported into the game engine, which is why you can’t tell a game to generate 8k textures (the game only has the rasterized textures, not the original procedural ones); however, the technology is already kinda there. That said, it can be hardware intensive, but it could be done.

Not related to your point, but I would argue that computer usage is actually down today compared to when 7 was released, as computer literacy is proving to be more of an issue for generations younger than Millenials entering the workforce compared to generations older than Millenials. And that’s because smartphones work differently from laptops and desktops. The UI and how you interact with your phone is fundamentally different enough to make the skills not interchangeable. I worked with kids in their first jobs for a number of years, and many didn’t have a computer in their house because they did everything from their phones.

Skeumorphims is much harder to implement for varying screen sizes and resolutions. When windows 7 was first released the different screen resolutions and sizes was very limited.

Skeumorphism can scale, it’d just require procedural generation of assets. Granted, that can be pretty hardware intensive, but you could bake the assets for common screen sizes and include the procedural versions for future resolutions. Then again, you’d probably get people complaining about how their computer is slow for a minute or two after plugging it into a new display (because it’s baking new UI assets for the monitor’s resolution).

Hmmm…

Skeumorphism is also much less useful. People needed hints to help them understand what things did on their computer. Many people had limited interactions with computers, now almost everyone uses computers of some form daily (largely smartphones). The remaining skeumorphism can hinder them not help, they have no idea what a floppy disk is or why that would be a save symbol.

Yeah, but it’s kinda the designer’s role to find new ways of visually explaining things to people while updating existing design language to account for changes in technology, culture, etc. If a floppy disk is so outdated that it confuses people when it’s used to symbolize saving files, then they need to find a new icon to symbolize that.

Also, to be clear, I’m not against buttons having text labels to go with them (e.g. if the button’s function is difficult to convey in an image), I honestly just want buttons to look like buttons. I’m tired of all the abstract, minimalist design. I want things to look “real” again.

Edit: an example of where procedural asset generation is widely, commercially used is video games. Believe it or not, but most game textures nowadays are procedurally generated and then baked/rasterized before being imported into a game engine. Substance Designer and Painter (material creation and texture painting, respectively) both use procedural workflows which allows them to generate textures at practically any resolution without any additional effort. The only reason why you can’t tell a game to generate 8k textures is because they’re usually baked before being imported into the game engine.

Meh, I’m just really annoyed because modern design seems to be all about sucking life out of everything. It’s just all so flat and bland. I understand the arguments that it’s cleaner, less cluttered, less distracting, more efficient, etc. I just… it feels so… soulless.

Windows 2k was niiiiccce. I kept it on for as long as possible.

I ran Win2K for as long as I possibly could. I completely bypassed XP.

The main issue with Vista was an absolute garbage HAL and driver stack.

It was incapable of working with hardwarw that XP did out of the box. Even if you managed to find a working driver it would likely crash once a day.

Also the active desktop that would always crash leaving you with an IE error page for a wallpaper.

Microsoft has always had ridiculously low system requirements. Even if they seemed high at the time, they were rapidly outpaced by the technology.

After XP, if someone fell below the minimum spec, it was more of a question of, “why do you still own something so shit?” Rather than, “why are the requirements so high?”

Even with W11, which I’ll only lightly touch on, the only concerning requirement is the TPM. Until Microsoft required that you have one to run 11, nobody really knew WTF a TPM is, outside of IT security circles. Most still don’t know, and only understand it’s a requirement for Windows 11.

It’s fine, for most people the role of a TPM is entirely technical mumbo jumbo. What hurts is that a lot of motherboard OEMs put little to no thought into even allowing an option for a TPM; so anyone who built their own machine essentially got screwed by the requirement.

Beyond the TPM, 11 requires a 64 bit processor, 1Ghz+, 4G of RAM, 64G disk, UEFI, a GPU with support for DX12, 720p display with at least 8 bits per color of depth, and internet.

Given that I’m not even sure they make single core or less than 1Ghz processors anymore, and who tf doesn’t have a 64 bit compatible CPU (that was added to Intel CPUs at the core 2 series… No, not core i* 2nd gen, the core 2, two generations prior), if you have less than 8G of RAM for anything now, WTF can you even use your computer for? 64G of storage is a joke. I don’t even think they still manufacture SSDs smaller than 64G now. HDDs are easily 500G+ pretty much exclusively. UEFI replaced BIOS booting a while ago. Like 5-10 years ago. It was at least an option for booting on systems for nearly a decade or more. DX12 is kinda new, if you consider 2015 (DX12’s launch date) “new”. 720p is tiny, are you using a netbook? I don’t even think you can find anything smaller than 720p as a full monitor anymore to buy, and 8 bits per channel of color is 24bit, which has been the standard to strive for since XP.

The only pinch was the TPM. Most people didn’t have one, many couldn’t even get one, and those that could, couldn’t find them. Most custom builds didn’t have one included and the main board OEM didn’t make one available, even if they had a port for you to put one in. People using prebuilt systems were mixed, some laptops (and some desktops too, I suppose) shipped with one whether you asked for it or not, notably business systems were often in this category, and if they didn’t, you were SOL. Buy a new computer.

For CPUs, anything before the Intel core i series 8th gen was generally “unsupported” according to Microsofts supported CPU list for W11. 8th gen came out in what? 2017? Making them 4 years old by the time W11 landed, at which point you’ll probably want to upgrade to something newer before upgrading to W11, since an unsupported CPU would be at least 5+ years old at that point.

The required specs are so far below what I would have recommended for a build when W11 launched. Most people only failed on the TPM. A product which they had never heard about before, didn’t know what it did, and didn’t know why they would even want one at all, at the time.

I’m not saying older hardware isn’t useful, but most people upgrade more than once every 5 years. Enthusiasts like myself are the ones running systems from 2010, and they’re happy about it. The TPM was, and is, the issue.

The ones that seem to have stuck in my mind the most is sorting files. Using certain combinations of storing and grouping would do one or the other, and not both.

I think this one sticks out so much because it seems like something people would notice more. But I guess people don’t use the “group by” feature in Windows all that much. I’m certain there’s more but it’s been a while since I learned about them.

The search in Windows has never been good, but you can literally put in a partial match, and not find what you’re looking for, then put in a specific match and it comes up.

Eg: *.jp* vs *.jpg

Maybe you want to find .jpeg, and .jpg files? Nope, fucking broken.

Which isn’t to mention all the times I had to repair goddamned Cortana, in order for the start menu to find programs.

Like, shit was broken. IDK what to say. I didn’t have those issues with Vista. After the patches for stability, the OS worked a treat.

The original 98 was rough around the edges (BSODs galore) but SE was a bit more stable.

XP was so stable you could generally run things without too many issues barring running out of memory (late era)

Saved this comment for when I started work today. Thank you. This is so much better. I was shocked when I got a Mac for work and window snapping was not a thing.

Seconding Rectangle. First thing I set up on a fresh install!