this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2025
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I've run into gen-z people talking very nostalgically about 2000s UI design trends. They've even retroactively dubbed the era as 'futiger aero'.
I'm a bit older and don't as fondly remember that era; I remember a lot of excesses like nonsensical reflections and calendar apps with leather textures. The 2013 turn to "flat" design felt quite fresh to me, and I haven't really gotten tired of it yet.
I miss the glass and translucent looks, the flat boring look of today is very bleak and dystopian looking imo. Don’t miss vista though, that was what started my move to Linux (with Compiz fusion and as many of the ridiculous effects as my poor $300 laptop could handle).
I feel the same way! I think a lot of hate for Vista was just instability and high system usage.
I feel like things have definitely come a long way, where my KDE machines can have pretty glassy UI without crunching the whole system.
I also really liked ME before XP, where there was a heavy emphasis on personalizing and theming.
100%. It feels very corporate and like any artistic touch was forcibly extracted from it because trends say that aesthetic hurts readability or something. Blegh.
It's like the UI equivalent to that "Memphis techbro" art style with the freakish flat purple people with wonky arms and tiny heads.
I mean, I'm not entirely opposed to some translucency and gloss if it doesn't get in the way of legibility. For me early Mac OS X 'Aqua' circa 2003 is the peak of that aesthetic.
Any UI theme should also be applied consistently. What I hated about Vista is the Aero theme was only surface deep. You were always only a few clicks away from some program that look liked it hadn't been updated since Windows 95.
That remains true for 10 and 11 too. For a quick trip back to 1995, just do something that you probably haven't done this millennium, change your mouse pointer. Instant nostalgia. Device manager in general hasn't changed much either.
I wouldn't even count that against them, working functionality shouldn't be changed without good reason, except that it exposes how much windows is a patch job on a fundamentally flawed design. If it were a boat or car, it would be more Bondo than metal at this point. Why are these dialogs so stuck in the past? Shouldn't it be a simple matter to have them use the latest design elements to at least look consistent, even if the functionality hasn't changed a bit.
IMO, it's all about giving the user control. KDE's transparency/translucency controls are the bare minimum. Apple hates giving users choices, though, so I hope they do ok for those folks.
They’ve definitely improved on this front. It’s fun comparing my iPhone homescreen (a user who moved to iPhone after over a decade of Android customization and arrived at almost just the right time) to people who’ve used iPhone all along. They don’t know what to do with themselves, they’re still pages of app icons.
Meanwhile I’m sitting here with a single beautifully minimal screen with some folders and a big ‘ol weather widget, a swipe gets me to a page full of useful widgets, a swipe the other direction gets me to my app drawer or whatever the hell Apple calls it.
Yeah, I've always hated that about Apple, and I primarily use Apple products. They have opened up a little bit in the last few years though. Like in macOS you can choose from a few different accent colors, you can turn borders on around buttons (I think that's a contrast setting in accessibility), you can turn off transparency, and you can change the color of your mouse cursor (mine is now hot pink—never lose sight of it).
There was the unreleased Windows “Blackcomb”, basically prior to Redmond seeing Apple’s Aqua, which was like a bit Windows 2000, a bit ME, flatness, outlines, square corners, and it could’ve been metro.
But resolutions and anti-aliasing were getting (slightly) better, so copy Apple, XP instead gets texture and rounds everything.
Vista was another interesting take, especially weird was the window controls. We are still living with those weird long controls with a margin below, but not above them, a lot of the time, even in flat land Windows 11.
Man, I have. I liked it at first, but I’m so ready.
The processing power wasn’t there yet in 2007 for the level of refraction and skeuomorphism that makes this look work on a system-wide level. In Vista and 7 Aero was just fancy transparency with some blurring and flares. But this design language Apple is showing off is beautiful. I hope others copy it (which will probably happen, since everything in tech is everyone copying everyone else).
(That said, I would probably also take a return to the 9x/NT4/Windows 2000 2.5D grey UI over the flat stuff at this point, so maybe I’m not a good source of opinion. 😅)
FTFY although I wish it wasn't so. ._. Lol
Hell yeah I love that shit. Gimme unnecessarily textured UIs, frosted glass effects and all the skeuomorphisms you can manage.
No joke, that kind of design was super useful for touchscreens. Especially if the buttons animated like a button and visibly depressed upon being tapped. Made it real easy to tell if you mistyped or of the touchscreen was fucked up and registering your tap in a slightly different spot.
I got tired of it in 2013. While it does work in some places (Android does it reasonably well), I haven't yet seen a good flat design on the desktop.
Windows 8 and 10 looked garish and hard to read, especially since everything is a rectangle with a one-pixel outline. Is it a button? Is it a text field? Maybe a thick progress bar? Who knows, they all look extremely similar.
While Apple did overdo it in the later big-cat OS X releases, I'll take a felt-textured widget panel and a calendar bound in leather over an endless sea of hairline rectangles.
If they are really nostalgic for that, tell them to use react os.
Windows XP was the peak of Windows' UI.
Disagree. 2000, Vista, and especially 7 all looked better than XP. XP was childish.
Aged badly.
However, the Embedded Edition theme looks fine.
I am definitely older (my first programming job involved a mac plus) and personally, I can't stand the flat look era.
It would be fine if it had more ways to differentiate elements from each other - darkening around the edges of windows, buttons that actually look raised so they aren't identical to a text box, scroll bars that aren't SO FUCKING TINY that it's clear MS is embarrassed that they exist in the first place, etc. etc.