[zoechi]

When I had to deal with Windows 10 recently I got the impression MS has given up on Windows completely. The last notable improvements were introduced in Win XP. Most stuff that came later was just changing the look&view of a few settings windows with the only effect that all consistency was lost and Win looks more like a mess than a Linux desktop where some apps were built for X, Kde, Gnome, ... It was also funny that SQL Management Studio crashed at the same use cases as it did 10-15 years ago. It would be interesting if there were any developers working on anything but cloud at MS the past 10 years.

[Crinus]

The last time there was a real UI and UX consistency was with Windows 2000 (or ME, if you want to stay on the consumer side). With Windows XP Microsoft introduced themeable controls but instead of making them available to all applications, they used an opt-in mechanism (based on special EXE resources or manifest files) so even nowadays unless you use that mechanism you get the Win2K era of controls.

Even then, with Windows 7 most things were consistent and if you really cared about consistency even with non-themed apps you could always switch to Windows Classic theme (which i always did, not so much because of consistency but also because i just like that theme :-P).

Since Windows 8 with the introduction of Metro/UWP/WinUI/WinWhateverNext consistency was thrown out of the Window, without even trying to pretend otherwise (it isn't a coincidence that the UI guidelines for desktop applications in Microsoft's site still use the Win7 theme).

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

Quite a few really good things came after XP. The new display[0] and sound[1] driver models, the new network[2] stack.

[0] Compositing, no longer need to reboot to install new video drivers [1] Centralized per-application volume control [2] VLAN tagging and bridging without third party products

Sadly, the thing with the new settings panels and mobile-ified look & feel is true. But that was all post-7.

> It would be interesting if there were any developers working on anything but cloud at MS the past 10 years.

There are, unfortunately, and they're terrible and keep pushing broken Windows updates and new features nobody asked for.

[ClumsyPilot]

> "last notable improvements were introduced in Win XP"

I am not here to advocate that Windows is great, but to write something like this is just daft.

Visual consistency is not the main challenge of an OS, Windows is not MacOS in terms of visual polish and never will be.

The list of changes since those days is enormous. Just as an example - in XP any software could outright delete Windows folder or boot file and leave your computer uncountable. Modern UWP applications live in a sandboxed container with tight permissions and uninstall leaving no trace.