Comment by jwells89

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.