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Comment by mrweasel | Hacker News Reader

Part of it may also be down to features. Windows 10 is a mess, there's at least two different control panels and more features than any one person would need. Sadly there seems to be a sense that the next version of Windows or Mac OS needs to add new features, visible features.

If you shave a modern OS down to just the features that you'd need to do your work, the economics of carefully designing a desktop and the icons becomes more "reasonable" again.

I still think that a clone of the classic Mac desktop, or Windows 3.11 would be great on Linux.

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> Windows 10 is a mess, there's at least two different control panels and more features than any one person would need.

It's a purposeful mess in that regard. They know the control panel is unmanageable for the average user, so they've been building out the Settings app over the last few versions. The settings app is much more like the Settings in iOS and Android and purposefully laid out.

It makes perfect sense to have both those applications exists while the transition in progress.

They've been building out the Settings app for over 6 years.

Yep, it's getting better and better. For example, we can now change default sound devices - and apply monitor colour profiles - using the new settings.

Lots of work remains, but they're getting there step by step. E.g, there's no link to modify the colour profiles yet, but at least being able to quickly check and change from previously defined ones is a good little addition.

I hate how you can only have 1 instance of the settings app open, unlike the old control panel, really leaves people who wanna see multiple parts of the settings app no choice but to open the old control panel

This makes me very sad. Remember when you had to learn to program just to be able to load a game from a disc in the 80s-90s? People can't even be bothered to learn now a days. Is this part of the "instant gratification" societal aspect? Personally I found that everytime that they try to hide settings it just makes it harder for me to find things. For instance before the separation of the Control Panel, they made this Categories view. This is the worst of everything. The categories that they put the settings under rarely made sense and you can't just press a hotkey to jump to the known settings panel. I really really hate the category view! haha

If you must use Windows get Windows LTSC

A version of windows 10 that is completely free of bloatware (no Microsoft store, no preinstalled apps like candy crush, no tiles on start menu, no Cortana, only windows search, no edge, only Internet explorer). It only gets security updates instead of feature updates, and has support for 10 years. Best version of windows 10 IMO. FYI it was originally called LTSB (Long term servicing branch) and was renamed to LTSC (Long term servicing channel).

I put it on my new machine and it the 1st version of Windows I've been ok with since 7. Buying it is basically impossible for a normal person, but its readily available on tpb. (also kms activator)

I recently tried out LTSC again in a vm to see how W10 has progressed. Apps take a long time to open. I thought it wasn't registering the clicks or something, until 30 seconds later it opened it 3 times.

Start menu takes > 0.5 seconds to even begin animating. Disabling animations actually makes the lag subjectively worse.

I installed W7 a few hours later to compare, and I was amazed at the difference in responsiveness. I'm talking like 10-20x faster.

I bought 5 year old netbook recently and it didn't have the resources to open W10's start menu. (Well, it could, but it took three minutes.) Did a fresh install of W7, and like magic, you can actually use the computer again.

I don't use any version of Windows anymore, but I'd like to be able to. I'm sad support for W7 will be ending soon.

With classic theme gone, and everything so slow, the best Windows desktop experience for me in this day and age is XFCE.

Maybe it just didn't work well with the VM. Windows 10 is pretty lean and apps definitely don't take a long time to open.

Running LTSC in a VM right now with Linux / KDE on the host. It is very snappy indeed. A few ideas:

- you aren't running off an SSD and Windows Defender is choking your disk I/O out from under you

- you haven't allocated enough memory to the VM

- you've just installed the VM and a Windows Update is going on behind your back and dragging things down

Opening the Task Manager and seeing what is choking the life out of your machine would be very helpful.

I agree with the parent poster that LTSC is generally pretty great if you've got to run Windows. For everything else, there is KDE :-)

edit: formatting

The mess started with Windows 8. Up until Windows 7 the UI was stil usable, and the Start Menu was great.

I would genuinely be keen to have another go at linux on the desktop if it had a win3.1 or win95 shell.

Back to usable basics.

I wonder if this project is already out there... (Rather than try to start another side project)

I use this XFCE theme on my Raspberry Pi: https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95

It takes a bit of work to set up but once you do, it genuinely feels like you're using Windows 95 but with modern Linux apps.

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