Everyone seems to love the Windows 7 era but for me, Windows peaked GUI-wise with Windows 2000 and everything since then has felt like a poor 'skin' or misplaced 'theme' on top of something else.

Windows XP's level of 'plug and play' for devices/drivers ushered in the modern OS feel from a usability standpoint, but from a 'get-shit-done' GUI and responsiveness standpoint Win 2000 (and up to Windows Server 2003 by extension) was all I ever wanted/needed.

These may be rose tinted glasses though, and I'd be interested to hear counterpoints.

2 applications: StartAllBack and Winaero Tweaker are both lifesavers, as far as I'm concerned. Both allow you to customize the look and feel of different elements so you can run the latest Windows 11 but still preserve elements of the traditional UI's - classic Start Menu, analog clock (sounds quaint but it has a second hand and the calendar is much more responsive), different versions of Windows Explorer, etc.

The Win7 UI was comfortable, and still configurable enough that I could make the tool work for me rather than having to work for the tool.

I'd be more interested if it brought back the performance of Win7. That OS was released into a world that still had HDD boot drives and had to pay attention to the details. I still run a Win7 machine that boots in under ten seconds.

Sadly no extension can bring either of those back and we are unlikely to see anything along those lines from MS ever again.

Sorry for being (slightly?) off-topic: Is there a decent way to buy this LTSC edition of Windows?

I have used windows 7 since it launched and moved to 10 & 11. I like some design elements of windows 7, but I would absolutely not use it today.

If you think, "I should try this", Any reason why? I'm really curious to know

I love this kind of thing but feel really worried when I can't see source.

I really do miss the design of Windows 7 and the apps of that era (think Office 2007 style)

I hope it comes back

At work I am made to use Windows 11 and I hate it immensely. Everything's so slow. Nothing operates properly. In addition to forced reboots which are annoying as hell, it also reboots after some time on sleep, for no reason whatsoever. Copilot is everywhere and cannot be truly disabled without admin rights. While not strictly a Windows issue, Outlook is an incredible piece of garbage. It doesn't know if it's running and so can be launched more than once; the icon for new messages doesn't show when it should; search is still as broken as ever; the ribbon, which makes little sense in other Office apps, is absurd in Outlook; folders are useless and confusing; etc.

At home, while I have a Mac Mini 4, a MacBook Air, and several Linux boxes, I still use an old PC on Win7 as my primary machine. Is it insecure? Probably. But today "insecure" feels more like a feature than a limitation. No forced updates of anything => everything that works, keeps working indefinitely.

Can we have something similar for macOS (to turn the UI to Mac OS 9)?

can something like this happen for linux, I would love to see a linux desktop environment like windows 7

for windows 8 on linux, there's this: https://github.com/er-bharat/Win8DE

This can create both incompatibilities and use more resources than Windows 7 itself.