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by badsectoracula 1282 days ago
Pretty much everyone i remember hated XP's "Fisher Price" look.

Also there was a ton of compatibility issues, at the time Microsoft saw Win98 as the biggest competitor to XP and it wasn't until SP2 that XP was seen as good.

Funny enough, a quick search for "windows xp fisher price" has this Ars Technica article about exactly that topic (people hating Windows XP when it first came out):

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/04/memor...
3 comments
userbinator 1282 days ago
One of the first things I did was always revert to the Windows Classic theme, because it was very easy to do so. There were also plenty of other custom themes should you want something different.

Starting with Windows 8, they removed that option completely.

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highwaylights 1281 days ago
Windows 8 was genuinely the only one I felt was objectively a step backwards.

Even Vista had its goals in the right place (it was a broken mess, but it meant well).

Windows 8 had so many improvements to the core O/S (even Task Manager was a massive leap forward in 8!) that were just utterly undermined by that horrific metro UI. It must have been so frustrating to have worked there at that time then have some idiot force a touch screen interface on to it that didn’t make any sense.

Windows 10 resolved most of this, and Windows 11 fixed a lot of the fundamental issues with the security model that have plagued Windows for decades.

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narag 1282 days ago
I must be the only person in the world who really loved that theme. It always cheered me up. The default wallpaper not so much, but I never let the default one anyway.

The coloured "rubber" gadgets were very nice. Those haters surely dislike Comic Sans too!

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highwaylights 1281 days ago
Exactly!

Comic Sans for when I’m happy, Papyrus for when I’m in a mood. Easy peasy.

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highwaylights 1281 days ago
You gotta stick the Silver theme on that puppy.

It went from a Toys R Us to a slick Lamborghini dealership.

Or how about some of that Olive Green action? Get you the muted natural look, you know what’s up.

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causality0 1280 days ago
Nah, nah man. The Zune theme is where it's at. Orange and black.
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