Disabling animations makes everything better no matter the OS.

When executing a sequence of actions, not having to wait 100-300ms for the device to show some random animation before inputing the next action is a time saver and a removes the "why is my computer/phone wasting my time" feeling.

Human reaction time is around 200ms but in a sequence of actions, we don't need visual feedback to move to the next action; it's just muscle memory and we can reach pretty low delay between inputs if the OS and apps do not impede us.

Back to Windows, I'm quite sad that 24H2 removed support for the legacy app switcher (alt-tab). It was very low latency and operated well in many high-load situations. The new one works okay but is not as snappy and can take a bit of time to show up under load. Plus I prefer the old style (smaller box, no need for eye movement to check its content).

That was my first concern too, but it does look like you can build the binary from source:

https://github.com/ramensoftware/windhawk

And the author is a security/malware researcher. Yeah, you might want to pass.

>fuck with winlogon.exe. Excellent idea.

That's mostly irrelevant because all the thing baddies want to do with your computer, they can do without touching winlogon or even getting admin.

https://xkcd.com/1200/

Not exactly afaik, but I've recently been going to System Settings > Accessibility > Display, and turning on:

    Increase contrast
    Reduce transparency
    Differentiate without color
    Show toolbar button shapes

https://imgur.com/a/DqfN07k

I like the retro and simple vibe compared to the new Liquid Glass controls.

They tried that during the Chicago development and discarded the idea due to multiple problems with how humans work.

Two different UIs meant that you had to learn them separately, you didn't have a slow ramp from one to the other, one familiar with one could get stuck on the other with no knowledge of how to get back, divided efforts between the two, etc.

Not quite what you are asking for, but closer to Win95 shipping with progman.exe which could allow someone to cosplay Win3.11 while running Win95.

I find the various privacy and 'feature' disabling scripts/utilities questionable for a similar reason, it's moving outside of the expected behavior of the OS for how applications and future MS updates expect things to work. The core issue seems to be you're working against what MS want and they provide a moving target, functionally it's their system, not yours.

I've come across Windhawk before but the mods being just C++ programs seemed a little suspicious to me, how do you make sure the mods dont include malware?

"but he's sweet sometimes"

It's just an abusive relationship and eventually some of them break out of it.

Linux isn’t hard, it’s just different. Better, but different. That’s too much effort for some.