Yeah, despite 20 years of "progress", I don't see today's desktops being any more usable than Win 95's, for the typical mouse-and-keyboard setup. There's a couple niceties that have been introduced since then, mostly keyboard shortcuts for window management tasks, but otherwise it's all change for the sake of change, and change for the sake of advertisements.
Launch-programs-by-search becoming common is the only significant advance I can think of since the 90s. I've added some keyboard window management to my personal workflow since then but I don't know any non-geeks who do that—hell, most of them don't use launch-by-search either.
> Launch-programs-by-search becoming common is the only significant advance I can think of since the 90s.
Windows had this since at least Win 7, so it's not really a recent advance. I dislike that the the Win 10 start menu is essentially unusable enough that it requires actually doing a search, though, which is why I use a replacement start menu.
Which ironically doesn't work well anymore with Windows 10 because the start menu is often too laggy to open, or because it performs any other kind of unwanted search like web search.
Compositing was huge. I agree most of the usability stuff is around the window management improvements though. Overall I wouldn't say there has been a lot of change though, you could teleport a Windows 95 user into the present and they'd immediately be running with the current Windows 10 desktop.
I do not like compositing though, at least not the way it is implemented in pretty much every current desktop environment (including Windows) where the composition is synced to the monitor refresh rate, meaning that it will always be at least ~8ms late on average and that is assuming everything else is synchronized - but this is not the case as applications draw their output offscreen to a surface that is picked up by the compositor (the mechanism of which is irrelevant, the application might just render to a compositor provided resource or the compositor might copy a VRAM surface or it may transfer bytes from the system RAM, it doesn't matter much in what i'm describing) which happens asynchronously and then notify the compositor that the window contents have changed which is again picked by compositor asynchronously. This introduces several frames of delay between the application drawing something and it appearing on your monitor. It is not a big problem when you are passively watching something, like a movie or an animation, but when that "something" that is drawn is an immediate reaction to an action you just did (like resizing a window with your mouse) you can "feel" that delay.
With non-composited window systems (which nowadays is pretty much only Win7 with DWM disabled and pure X11/Xorg) all that overhead goes away since applications draw directly to the video memory that is to be presented to the monitor (the GPU might do some minor composition itself but that is irrelevant as there aren't any delays involved).
Compositing would work if all composition was done on the GPU using dedicated hardware (similar to how the GPU already performs composition for the mouse cursor and an overlay that is often used for HUD-like controls like volume control, but those are not general purpose features that can be used for desktop composition) and applications could draw directly to the video surfaces that would be composited pretty much the same way a non-composited desktop can draw directly to the video memory (this would introduce artifacts like tearing but this is something that could be handled separately and to some - like me - tearing is perfectly acceptable for pretty much all interactive actions).
I am not aware of any GPU or window system that does compositing like this though.
Compositing was a hardware change, though. Modern GPU's (including GPU chipsets that are integrated as part of a CPU chip) basically accelerate 2D rendering by managing arbitrary surfaces as glorified sprites, which the hardware can "project" or "render" into other surfaces or on the screen in all sorts of ways, including occlusion, alpha blending, arbitrary 3D transforms etc. Hardware of the Win95 era didn't have anything like this; even moving and resizing windows only "animated" a wireframe rendition of the window, as with twm today.
Windows 95 was the first release to support dragging of full window contents. I think that hack was even supported in the Windows 95 tech preview for Windows NT 3.51.
But that was via BLT copy IIRC. Which is why there can be a slight delay filling the part of the screen being unobscured as the overlapped program repainted itself.
I really miss that design. It's a lot more relaxing to look at than modern "flat" UI, IMO. Depth and consistent use of UI elements make it so easy to tell what's what. Modern UI seems to be designed to look like a static glossy brochure, even when it's full of interactive elements.
Control panel has to stick around for compatibility with legacy apps, including those that register functionality into it and call it's paths directly.
It's pretty well hidden from users at this point and basically just a collection of links to compatibility components. I've never understood the concern.
How do I edit environment variables with new UI, for example? It's pretty common task and I always have to use that old UI. Thankfully it was actually slightly improved in Windows 10. Another thing is hotkeys to switch keyboard layout, it's still the same UI from Windows 98.
The existing editor does everything you need. The only benefit for that tool would be editing %PATH% more easily, but Windows 10 includes a pretty good editor for that.
There is a ton of stuff you can’t do with Settings but only with Control Panel. I don’t think you can admin a Windows machine without ever using Control Panel.
There are plenty of perfectly mundane, common settings that are only accessible through the old control panels. And, of course, there are a couple of different styles of old control panel to begin with - the more recent 'modular'-ish ones and then ur-panels with lots of tabs and 'Advanced' buttons. As a UI thing, it's easily Windows at its ugliest and most baffling.
But there’s so many settings where you need to drill into the legacy control panel to change things properly. Want to do anything advanced with your network connections or adapters? Got to go into the old style network settings in the control panel. Want to change your audio output device (for example to output to Bluetooth headphones)? Got to go into the legacy control panel audio settings. Want to change your power settings to not go into standby when your laptop screen is closed? Legacy power settings. Want to enable windows features like IIS, hyper V, etc? You can add features in either one but the old fashioned one has a nice tree list with additional tooltip information, whereas the new Settings interface just has one long list that is clunky to interact with.
This you can do right from the volume control widget on the taskbar. One of the few things that's arguably easier and more obvious in Win 10 than in OS X (where you either have to hit the control panel or know to option-click the menubar doodad).
The investment is too great in custom Control Panel extensions from hardware vendors, including for hardware supplied to basically all major OEMs. If they toss that, a lot of hardware will become unconfigurable.
I installed Lbuntu on an older ultra-portable machine, and while not extremely pretty the UI is extremely snappy -- and mostly resembles win 95. I do miss the ability to search for a program by name, but that is about it.
Lubuntu is using LXQT these days right? I'm running it on arch, but by default that DE should support menu searching out of the box, and if it doesn't I expect it's been configured out for some reason. Definitely worth playing around to bring it back.