Can we talk about how clean this UI looked? Why was it dropped for Luna?

I think Whistler is the peak of Windows design.

Luna sucks, Vista and 7 are glassy gaudy shit, 10 is ok but quite boring.

Pic related is an updated version i hacked together years ago, only works on MATE these days, maybe cinnamon. the gtk theme is broken nowadays. There's a GNOME version but the fat titlebars makes it look weird.

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windows became a consumer OS so they had to start pandering to lower IQ demographics

I remember that shit, windows ricing was such tremendous cancer. Everything was some edgy slipknot logo inspired dark theme or some gay hacker shit that looked like a winamp skin.

Hey Ryan, were you able to fix that horrible font rendering?

kek pretty sure that screenshot was before I discovered infinality and way before the patches were merged into FreeType. So yes, fonts are much better now.

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Yeah, looks better.
The horrible font rendering was one big reason why I couldn't warm up to anything Lunix back then. For some reason it took a long time for all those DEs to finally have something working alright.

i actually prefer the "horrible font rendering"
fuck this blurred fonts nonsense

glossy watercolor theme is best theme

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I rather meant the spacing between characters. It used to be all over the place and looked even uglier than monospaced fonts

Looks like a bad version of ME's UI. Maybe it'd look better with better icons, especially down in the taskbar.

Shut the fuck up zoomer, that shit was comfy as fuck.

OS X just came out, so MS thought they should rip off that.

I think Whistler's theme would've ended up looking like that if it was actually finished.

it's actually really good for it's era, it looks clean without using too much complexity like gradients or whatnot like win7 did, this nails it to a tee

Looks too much like Royale/Zune

>watercolor theme
OH MAAAN. I loved that theme so much.
I miss Windows XP so much, I wish ReactOS didn't suck after 20 years of development, I think WXP themes were compatible with it?

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Vista Aero > 7 Aero

>imagine thinking this

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>everything is either too big, too small or off by few pixels
the state of linux theming

This is so fucking good, how do I get XP or 2000 or 7 to look exactly like this?

Vista > 7 > XP > 98/95/ME/2000/NT4.0 > 8/8.1>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> 10

what makes vista better than 7 in your opinion?

My Windows 10 looks cleaner.

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This list was on a comfyness/looks basis

7 aero is peak Microsoft aesthetic and the only minor flaw is that title bars are bigger than they could be.

start menu?

why is it so difficult to make it pixel aligned?

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even in your super controlled and cherrypicked screenshot with no programs open other than "about Windows", the window title bar doesn't match the rest of the UI

how?

Not him, but looks like Open Shell.

It used to be a lot better before the 7 redesign removed a button for no reason and fucked it up.

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I think you mean
>the state of amateur made linux themes in 2013

I wasn't (and still am not) particularly good, and i'm pretty sure the gtk theme was copied directly from a theme from 2006 with little to no modification. Pretty sure this predates gtk3.

Dunno why but the fonts and icons on XP always looked decent to me. I could never get used to 7 or later. It's like they went "oh hey, people have space now, let¡s make everything waste space for no reason at all".