Classic theme, not even the XP look, but the older Windows 98 look!
So, recently I bought a new laptop, which I use mainly for work - software development. It replaces my 5-year old laptop, still running Windows XP. Time was very much running out on it: Microsoft is stopping support for XP in April this year. That meant, it was time to choose a new OS.
I'm a Windows guy, so I was wondering on a choice between Windows 7 and Windows 8. Windows 8 is said to have better performance and better driver support (my own anecdotal experience later on seemed to support that), yet it also has the Metro interface, woefully inadequate for a desktop - and even more so for power users. However, with utilities such as Classic Shell, Metro was something that could be easily disabled (remove the Metro home screen and restore the Start menu), so I wasn't too worried about it. Overall, I was keen to try out Windows 8.
So I did... but things didn't work out very well. Like I mentioned, the OS seemed leaner, faster, and some drivers worked better out of the box. But crucially, Windows 8 does not have true Classic UI themes/mode, it only supports the Aero theme engine. And personally I really hate Aero themes (even the Metro version). Specifically, I hate all those stupid mouse-over highlights that happen all over the interface. By "mouse-over highlights", I'm referring here to any graphical UI change that happens just because of moving the mouse cursor around.
Objectively speaking, these effects are pure eye-candy: they offer a visual aesthetic of sorts, an artistic effect that might be pleasant to some. But they do nothing to improve the functionality of the UI. Rather, it denigrates it, because it introduces a distraction, an unnecessary cognitive load on the user. It may have appeal to users who prefer said artistry, but for those who prefer clean functionality (like myself), it is unwelcome. That said, there are some minor mouse-over highlights I can live with, if the effect is subtle. Even the Windows XP interface (Luna) had a few of these already. But the ones in the Aero interface are not subtle at all, and in particular there is one which is an absolute deal-breaker: the list selection highlight:
This highlighting features prominently in the Windows File Explorer, as well as many other applications (Eclipse for example) that use list views, tree views, etc.. This effect is annoying not just because of the distraction during the time you are moving the cursor, but even afterwards, given that the highlight color is very similar to the selection color! This makes it hard to understand at a quick glance which are the selection items and which are not. Ridiculous! :/
This can't be disabled in the Windows UI, but a custom Windows theme might be able to disable it. I searched plenty for a theme that would do that, but found none. Even the many themes I found that purpose to imitate the XP interface, aka Luna (my favorite window theme so far), failed to address that. Not to mention they often also had visual bugs, or were unpolished in certain visual aspects. Examples: this, this, and this.
No joy. My second hope was a Windows customization program: WindowBlinds from Stardock software. I gave it a try, and tried to look for themes that imitated the Luna interface, or at least, otherwise clean themes with few mouse-over highlights and other unnecessary effects. I couldn't find any like such. I then turned to trying to customize the WindowBlinds theme myself. I had to purchase the full version of WindowBlinds, so I could use SkinStudio, the skin/theme editing software. The software has a very, very extensive collection of customization points... but crucially, there was a blind spot for the customization I wanted!... Apparently it couldn't not change those mouse-over highlights, at least not in a proper way (this thread in the Stardock forums has more info).
No joy... There was still the option of trying to edit Windows 8 themes myself (using resource file hacking and whatnot), but at this point that was mounting to be an huge task. I have better things to do. But still, I was getting desperate. At this point, I even considered using Linux. It had been more than a decade (!) since I last tried using a Linux as a main OS. I would never consider it for use in a desktop/leisure machine due to all the programs (mostly games) that I want to run, but maybe for a work machine, it would be feasible. Of recent distros, I was only familiar with Ubuntu - I had a VM with Ubuntu for testing out programs in Linux. But UI wise Ubuntu was going the way of Mac OS (blergh - too much eye candy) and/or of a tablet paradigm (I'm not even sure which). No go.
Linux Mint looked promising though. I installed it and gave it a go... but still, no good. Things have definitely improved with Linux with regards to hardware setup and configuration, everything worked fine, devices auto-detected, plug-and-play, all good. It was nice to see that. But the UI was still lacking, there was still a minor but clear lack of polish. Just as an example, when I opened a menu, there would be a brief fraction of a second (almost indiscernible) where a black rectangle would be drawn in the whole area where the menu would appear, just before the actual menu would be drawn - it was a sort of flicker. So, even though I managed to find some clean themes (even a Window XP lookalike theme, including icons!), otherwise the lack of polish, some visual bugs/artifacts, or certain limited functionality in say, the file Explorer, kept me from embracing Linux usage (I'm not going into detail why, since that would be material for a whole new post).
It was a bit disappointing, but not unexpected at all, that even after a decade, the Linux crowd still failed to get their act together, at least to the desktop environment.
So in the end I just got fed up, wiped my disk to install Windows 7, and set it up to use the classic theme (which is the Windows 98 look). I was quite glad to go back developing and not messing around with all this UI grief that I got from everywhere. My heart was not fully at ease though: while I was quite happy with the Windows 7 UI, per se, I feared for the future. I knew I would be fine for some years to come, but after that, when my hardware gets too old, when Windows 7 gets too old in terms of support and I need a new OS, where will I turn?
