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excalibur | on: Oldest GUI application that still runs on Windows 11
> The desktop UI was perfected around the time of Windows 95 and has gotten worse with every iteration since then.

Well that can't be entirely true, the desktop experience on Windows 10 improved on Windows 8 by leaps and bounds.

john01dav | parent | next
> Well that can't be entirely true, the desktop experience on Windows 10 improved on Windows 8 by leaps and bounds.

In large part, windows 10's ui is more like that of windows 95 because it undid the changes away from the windows 95 paradigm that windows 8 did. Furthermore, those changes away from windows 95 in windows 8 were the exact kind of thing that might be called "mobile first".

MattPalmer1086 | parent | next
Haha, yes. It does not account for releases which made UX dramatically worse (win 8) which were then reverted to some extent.
layer8 | parent | next
Only because Windows 8 was such a dramatic step back. Windows 7 is still better than Windows 10 in terms of UI.
nubinetwork | parent | next
Not until they settle on one control panel.
| parent | next
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theandrewbailey | parent | next
I can't tell if this is sarcasm. Windows 8 is a very low bar in terms of desktop UI. It was universally panned as a regression.
Borg3 | parent
Are you nuts? Or wait.. you must be Gen Z then, never really used Win95.. If so, you cant make any statements in the subject.

I still run Windows Classic GUI here, because its fast and confortable to use. Can you do better? Hmm, maybe. But im not conviced :)

PorciiVorbesc | root | parent | next
>Are you nuts? Or wait.. you must be Gen Z then, never really used Win95.. If so, you cant make any statements in the subject.

What a terrible attitude to have as a comment reply. I've been using Windows since Windows 95, meaning I have plenty of experience and some emotional attachment to it and I'm as millenial with knee pain as they get, so not Gen-Z, and I can't imagine going back to using W95 today productively in a non-ironic way.

Windows 95 was perfect ... for what people did on computers back in 1995, not for what I do now in 2026 on the HW of today. May W95 rest in peace, but I'll take my modern OS for my moderns entertainment and productivity tasks on modern HW. There's no way in hell I'd want to go back to W95 even if that's what popped my cherry. People calming otherwise have rose tinted glasses and only remember the good parts of that era without the downsides.

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