I don't know, it's nice to have icons and buttons that actually look like what they're going to do instead of amorphous blobs.

People love to dogmatically claim that any appreciation for past design can only be chalked up to nostalgia but the XP design is objectively an excellent balance between UI 'gloss' and very simple and clear, unambiguous functionality.

People rarely complained that finding an application under the Start menu was difficult. In current versions of Windows, the Start menu is such a disaster, such a mess, that people don't even open it and rely much more on the search function.

I often have a hard time telling if I'm being nostalgic. For me, 7 was peak Windows, but Win2K/XP would rank pretty close as well. I suppose the question for me is what have subsequent releases given us; what can we actually do with more recent versions of Windows that we could not accomplish back then?

XP or 7 in "classic", aka 2000 look. For practical reasons, like hardware-support, really working USB.

If running in some isolated VM for some superspecial APP still supporting running on 2000, why not? Uses much less memory.

I was one of those people who stuck to classic theme all the way up to Win7, but that was the version that finally made me switch because the fancy default theme in it actually looked pretty well after they made the glass effects of Vista more subtle. WinXP looked like some kind of cheap plastic horror in comparison.

It's very funny to look at Apple progressing from "looks like Vista" to "looks like Win7" in its iOS 26 betas.