A lot was got right back them. I use the MATE desktop, which is a very similar paradigm. When I saw this posted, I posted my attempt at running as many version of MS Word. It was fun playing with all the versions of word and seeing their progression. But Word 2000 was probably the pinnacle of UI as well.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23676040

yes. in my opinion though, windows 2000 was the pinnacle.

it had the user experience of windows 98 but was also a lot more stable.

I used a stripped down version of windows 2000, the installer was 50M and extracted on disk it used 200M. It was just perfect, I loved everything about it. When Ms abandoned support for windows 2000 is exactly when I went to use Linux full time.

If Windows 2000 had the ClearType fonts and technology, there would have been no reason to ever move on :-)

>it had the user experience of windows 98 but was also a lot more stable.

I tried Windows 2000 and really wanted to make it my daily driver but I kept getting blue screens when I played games. I spent hours looking for a solution never figured it out. Went back to 98se up till Windows XP release.

Non-NT Windows didn't support memory protection. That's the main reason why it was much more stable. Programming on Windows 98 was a nightmare. If you, for example, went too far with your `i++` you could've crashed the system.

That's not actually true. It was far more nuanced than this.

I think I remember there was a brief period when it was fashionable to hate on XP, which came on most new computers, but you could get Windows 2000 by special request on a ThinkPad.

Actually I've never used Windows 2000, I went straight to Windows XP, whose UI was already too bloated (many colors, gradient buttons, ...)

But at least XP would let you switch back to Windows 2000 look and feel. The eye candy was just that, and easily removed. When Windows 7 rolled around I spent years being mad that it was no longer possible to have a Windows 2000 style UI in unmodified Windows.

I recently set my desktop to the Windows 2000 default blue background color just for a bit of nostalgia. As far as I can tell, it's the only bit of Win 2000 UI that it's still possible to achieve.

To the day I remember the color (all my desktops are that color) rgb 45,110,145

There still was a "classic" theme.

Ah, I guess my memory is faulty. It looks like Windows 8 was actually the first version to do away with the classic theme entirely.

I have a Windows 98 machine I use almost daily, for games and as a "bridge" PC. The UI is just better than what we have now in modern Windows.