> Even with the "classic" skin there's pretty massive changes in the behavior and usability of most of the UI.
The windows themselves, the taskbar and the desktop all worked the same in 7 as they did in 95. Many of the changes made over that time came with settings to revert them — like that new thicc taskbar with icon-only buttons and window grouping.
> Imagine a user who has only used an iPad gets dropped in front of a Windows 95 machine
I'm sick of perfectly good desktop UIs getting redesigns which are compromised by the existence of iPads and other touchscreen devices. This just should not happen, period. Windows 95 UI is straightforward enough once you get the basic principles, which takes all of one hour of poking around. Microsoft didn't conduct all that research for nothing, after all.
What frustrated people about Windows 95 (and 98, and ME) when it was current wasn't the UI. The UI was nice. It was the inherent instability of the system itself due to its architecture. Same for classic Mac OS, it doesn't matter how nice your UI is if the system itself can be trivially crashed or locked up by a single misbehaving app because of cooperative multitasking and lack of memory protection.
> One could make the same argument of a bed or a couch or hell even a whole house.
All beds and couches work the same and look largely the same. You know a bed when you see one.
All buttons and text fields and window titles used to also look largely the same and everyone was fine with that. But then the plague of flat design happened.
Imagine being exhausted after a long flight, walking into your hotel room only to see white, textureless walls, floor, and ceiling, and multiple white textureless blocks of different sizes inside. You get to figure out which one is a bed, which one is a chair, which one is a toilet, and which one is a sink! How exciting! This is what modern affordance-less UIs feel like. A good tool shows how it's meant to be used by its form.
> And yet people are pretty dang picky about their furniture choices and paint comes in thousands of colors.
That same classic Windows theme was extremely customizable for that very reason. You could change all colors and fonts to your liking, and some people did! You could make yourself a dark theme way before dark themes became mainstream.
> Say there's two pieces of software with identical feature sets.
You mean the control skins are the only thing different between them, otherwise all UI/UX being identical down to the layouts?
> All beds and couches work the same and look largely the same.
It's almost like you've never been in a furniture store. They come in tons of different sizes, shapes, textures, colors, features, and more. There's not just a single couch model that you can then change the color on.
> The UI was nice.
I highly disagree. The taskbar would get filled up quickly and get squished for me since there was no grouping. The notification tray couldn't hide things. No virtual desktop support. The start menu was incredibly basic in form. No search from the start menu. Editing the start menu programs list was extremely non-obvious and not self explained. Navigating the nested start menu shortcuts was a huge pain. Installers just threw everything in the start menu leading to a ton of clutter. UI elements are miserable at scaling, in that there is zero scaling support. The taskbar was only on your primary display. Difficult to change default sound output device straight from the taskbar. No central place to see previous notifications. No jumplists. No Win+Number shortcuts to quickly swap between things on the taskbar. Alt+Tab prompt doesn't have window previews. I could go on and on and on and on and on about what I perceive to be massive failures of 95's UI/UX.
I didn't really care for the overall icon design throughout the OS and generally see the overall style in the OS as pretty basic, bland, and boring. Changing the color or setting the title bar font to Comic Sans isn't solving that.
In the end though, you probably disagree with a lot of these things. I think your couch is ugly and uncomfortable, and you probably think my couch is ugly and uncomfortable. UI/UX has some subjectivity involved. Not everyone agrees 95 was the ultimate software design unable to be improved upon.
The windows themselves, the taskbar and the desktop all worked the same in 7 as they did in 95. Many of the changes made over that time came with settings to revert them — like that new thicc taskbar with icon-only buttons and window grouping.
> Imagine a user who has only used an iPad gets dropped in front of a Windows 95 machine
I'm sick of perfectly good desktop UIs getting redesigns which are compromised by the existence of iPads and other touchscreen devices. This just should not happen, period. Windows 95 UI is straightforward enough once you get the basic principles, which takes all of one hour of poking around. Microsoft didn't conduct all that research for nothing, after all.
What frustrated people about Windows 95 (and 98, and ME) when it was current wasn't the UI. The UI was nice. It was the inherent instability of the system itself due to its architecture. Same for classic Mac OS, it doesn't matter how nice your UI is if the system itself can be trivially crashed or locked up by a single misbehaving app because of cooperative multitasking and lack of memory protection.
> One could make the same argument of a bed or a couch or hell even a whole house.
All beds and couches work the same and look largely the same. You know a bed when you see one.
All buttons and text fields and window titles used to also look largely the same and everyone was fine with that. But then the plague of flat design happened.
Imagine being exhausted after a long flight, walking into your hotel room only to see white, textureless walls, floor, and ceiling, and multiple white textureless blocks of different sizes inside. You get to figure out which one is a bed, which one is a chair, which one is a toilet, and which one is a sink! How exciting! This is what modern affordance-less UIs feel like. A good tool shows how it's meant to be used by its form.
> And yet people are pretty dang picky about their furniture choices and paint comes in thousands of colors.
That same classic Windows theme was extremely customizable for that very reason. You could change all colors and fonts to your liking, and some people did! You could make yourself a dark theme way before dark themes became mainstream.
> Say there's two pieces of software with identical feature sets.
You mean the control skins are the only thing different between them, otherwise all UI/UX being identical down to the layouts?