It can be more difficult to claim copyright over shapes and patterns than you think.

I have a gallery of cease and desist orders. I would love to add MSFT to the list.

The reason I started hram.dev was so I could have a native platform to port 90s.dev to. I love the idea of having native host for retro GUIs. But I am not a huge fan of html/css/js combo. It feels tacked on because it is. I came up with a relatively novel and I think truly innovative GUI methodology in 90s.dev that I did not know how to explain so I haven't truly shared with people how exciting it potentially is. Tomorrow I plan to put up a github-sponsors link with a few different projects, where for each $50 that I receive for a given project, I will work two hours on that project. This way the community can help sponsor me turning these things into realities.

I don't think you could 100% nail the Win7 glass or Win11 mica material without having transparency effects that have access to the compositor pipeline. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to get close enough!

98.css: https://jdan.github.io/98.css/

XP.css: https://botoxparty.github.io/XP.css/

Older people feel exactly the same way about windows2000... or sometimes 98... or 3.1...

Yeah. I feel like the main thing was it was the last version that still had essentially user-controlled updates. By default it would auto-update, but you could have it not do that, or have it download the updates but not install them until you decided to, and you could deselect individual updates and just skip them.

I suspect this is linked to its era: it came out on the cusp of the trend of having everything autoupdate on its own initiative. (I just looked it up and Firefox 15 came out around the same time and was the first version to have "silent updates".) This in turn came as some kind of tipping point was reached where it became simpler to assume everyone was always connected to the internet (and have some kind of "emergency mode" for when they weren't) than to assume they weren't (and have some kind of "online mode" for when they were). And that also led to the proliferation of telemetry and other such things that involve using that always-on-ness to talk back to the software company.

I see this as part of a trend away from what I call "bounded transactions" and toward subscription-type models, and I think it's been one of the most corrosive developments in our society. The thing about Win7 was that once you had a computer up and running with it, it was up and running and would continue to be, and you could just kind of leave it like that. You had security issues to worry about, but you still had the option of being the one to worry about them. In the following years, everything began to shift towards the "you own nothing" model where so much of the functionality of "your" hardware and software was actually just a short-term lease with some company on the other end that could decide to rugpull you at their convenience.

KDE and GNOME weren't as popular as Windows 7. Unless you mean porting Windows 7 to KDE as a theme?

they also change theming too quickly sometimes. windows 7 is set, it's not going to change, ever

I concur, I think the successor flat design trend has nailed on reducing the styling visual clutter and keeping the user just focused on the "substance" from the app UI whilst keeping the UI itself minimal with no distractions.