Comment by meepmorp
4 months ago
You're the only person I've ever seen who agrees with me on that. W2K was the perfect windows - more polished than NT4, less bullshit than XP.
4 months ago
You're the only person I've ever seen who agrees with me on that. W2K was the perfect windows - more polished than NT4, less bullshit than XP.
I also wholeheartedly agree: Windows 2000 was the pinnacle of the Windows NT line before Microsoft merged the consumer line (3.1/95/98/Me) with the professional line (NT) beginning with Windows XP, which unfortunately added all sorts of annoyances to Windows. The underpinnings of Windows are fine and are quite a formidable alternative to Unix. WSL has also been a major game changer, allowing me to have a Unix workflow without loading up a separate VM. It’s just a shame the upper layers get in the way, though the Pro and Education versions of Windows are less in-your-face with these annoyances than the home versions. I’d love to have a Windows 2000 UI (with a search bar, introduced in Vista) on top of Windows 11.
I really don't understand where the nostalgia for XP comes from. Well, actually I think I do because a lot of home users probably didn't use NT4 and 2k and went straight from 98/ME to XP. But I remember all the ridicule that XP got for being such a terrible bubblegum OS X imitation, with required activation, and a bunch of stability and driver issues that were eventually ironed out. XP after Service Pack 2 was also rock solid, and probably still the best choice for a retro gaming PC because it's got decent hardware and software support and the activation has been worked around.
But yeah, I used every Windows version since 3.11 full-time, and 2k was perfection - literally can't think of any downside to it.
I used both 2k and XP.
2k is pretty great, but fully patched XP is too. It’s totally subjective but as much as I loved 2k I’d give an edge to end-state XP mainly for its ability to be customized with third party .msstyle themes, of which there were many that were well made and good looking.
Fully patched 7 is a bit better yet for me though, because its theming engine added support for full depth alpha which really opened up possibilities for theme designers. It was a massive disappointment when Windows 8 came along and gutted the engine, regressing it to being barely more capable than Windows 1.x with all the flat squares.