what was nice about Win2k UI

From the «UI experts made it worse?» department:
Feed: OSnews
Title: What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000
Author: Thom Holwerda
Date: Fri, 19 Jun 2026 20:21:34 +0000
Link: https://www.osnews.com/story/145346/what-was-nice-about-the-ui-of-windows-2000/

I mean, this is preaching to the choir, but let’s go anyway.

I liked the UIs of the entire era from 3.0 to 2000, really. I’m mostly
using Windows 2000 as an example here because it runs so well in
QEMU/KVM and that allows me to easily take screenshots.

Some of the following will sound absolutely trivial, but I think it’s
worth pointing out.
↫ movq.de blog[1]

Just a series of observations about how much better graphical user
interfaces were back in the ’90s and early 2000s. We’ve lost so many
affordances based on both common sense and scientific study, and what we
ended up with is a confusing, inconsistent mess. It doesn’t really
matter where you look – user interface design has deteriorated since the
early 2000s, a decline that only accelerated thanks to the arrival of
the iPhone, where consistency is a dirty word, and the web, where the
advertising people took prominence over the design people.

I just want my buttons to look like buttons man.

Links:
[1]: https://movq.de/blog/postings/2026-06-16/0/POSTING-en.html (link)