The placeholder name for the Windows 8 experience was "modern" (opens in new tab)

It was a great UI for mobile. It just was a terrible UI for a real computer, so people reacted badly to Microsoft trying to force it in there. Mobile devices and normal computers have very different UI needs, and you can't simply paste one onto the other - something Microsoft should've learned from their failed attempts to make a tablet with the older Windows UI.

Yeah. The Windows Phone was an amazing piece of technology. It's a tragedy it did not win at all in the marketplace.

In particular, it was pretty easy to write apps for, unlike the other two big giants.

My first smartphone was a Windows phone with half a gig of RAM and it's still the best phone I've ever owned in terms of software

Same here. I had a window's phone at some point. Would have loved it with a stylus.

One of my high school friends had a Windows phone around this time, the one with the giant camera bit. I thought it looked super cool but he hated the thing. No apps.

And the Windows Phone 7 had a hard realtime kernel!

They had some cool form factors too. I remember I had one of the phones with a landscape slide-out physical keyboard.

Ditto. Metro was the best graphic UI I ever used. I liked even on the laptop.

Same for me. Windows Phone was super smooth even on budget phones with 1GB/512MB of RAM while Android would have been choppy as hell on such hardware.

Also, the Windows 8 tablet mode had better touch and swipe UX than the current Windows 11 when put in tablet mode. What a joke Microslop has become.

Nadella needs to clean house or step down. The only thing he executed well was the cloud/hyperscaler side of the business because he caught the period when everything was moving to the cloud and MS was well positioned to take advantage of that as big companies were already invested into the on-prem MS ecosystem, but on the consumer facing side he fumbled everything, all consumer products are worse than how they were under Balmer: Windows - trash, Office - trash, Xbox - trash, Bing - trash, Copilot - trash.

Modern in the art & design world is actually quite retro.

This is from the same company that brought us Windows NT (New Technology).

Adding "fast" is similarly fun, it's probably true when you came up with it, probably won't be true in the future anymore.

No. Modern like 1950's modern. Unadorned, functional.

1900s: Noveau - plant shapes. 1940s: deco - geometry. Windows XP: gradients, color. Windows Vista: semitransparency.

1950s, Windows 8: 'modern' - strip away unnecessary decoration.

I was one of the few people that thought people would like it. That is, why shouldn't it be better to have a bunch of tiles on your desktop that have the most important information and then you choose the one you really want to concentrate on full screen? Well, of course the problem is you aren't using a tablet. It's trying to fix something that never needed to be fixed.

But yes, Linux is great now and most people on the site can easily debug potential problems they run into on it and not look back.

I ran Windows 8 and the 8.1 on a Surface Pro 2 for about two years as my daily driver. It was great for travelling with since it was so lightweight and easy to use in cramped airplane seats. However, I never bothered using any of the "modern" applications at all.

Windows 10 was certainly an improvement.

I didn't care for the UI at all which is the most common complaint about it. But it was the least offensive complaint to me, the existence of the Microsoft Store was had me looking for the exit. I guess I overestimated Microsoft's competence because the store remains an irritating tumor that hasn't yet metastasized.

Unpopular opinion: Windows 10 is worse. You could still control updates and uninstall or never install the telemetry packs in 8/8.1. And the UI problem could be solved with 3rd party tools. Windows 10 had the spyware baked in and got more annoying over time. But poor adoption of 8 and Microsoft abandoning it meant that in practice driver and software support for 8.1 often disappeared before even Windows 7.

My converse hot take is that I actually really liked Aero, I've always had a thing for translucent UI elements and glowing things.

This. I don't see the point of constantly changing UI as an end-user. The old one just work. It works perfectly. Now that you changed it and thing breaks. :|

> [UI] should have stopped changing almost 30 years ago

In some ways it did, modern CLIs haven't changed that much fundamentally from their older counterparts. You can do more things but someone using a CLI 30 years ago wouldn't be phased by modern ones; the interaction model has barely changed.

They're all emulating the video terminals of yore too, which themselves were descended from even older teletypewriters.

Microsoft must have an unwritten rule to avoid anything that might appear to be even slightly tasteful on their account.

Way more fun than JaCoCo (which I actually like): https://www.eclemma.org/jacoco/

I spell it KDE but it might be regional variance (:

The solution to Windows 8 UI issues was aptly named, Classic Shell

I sort of like the term “early Modern” in history. Putting the “early modern” period 250 years ago causes us to reflect on how much life has changed over that time, which is useful because it’s so tempting to imagine what life was like during the Renaissance or Middle Ages. Of course, every period has massive change, so the experiences of people on either end of a period are as different as somebody in the early modern and… actual modern… eras!