When Windows XP came out, computer magazines wrote articles on how to switch the more modern, colorful UI back to the old, grey, drab, boring UI of Windows 95/98/2000.
I was young at the time and this seemed absurd to me. Why would you willingly use a UI that looks like wearing an old grey tie for a dusty office job in a depressing concrete building?
Yeah, it was butt-ugly. The default Windows UI didn't actually look better until Windows 7, but I used the "Classic" look as long as it was supported. I skipped Windows 8/8.1 entirely, and while Windows 10 was reasonable in terms of how it worked, it was also butt-ugly, but now you couldn't do much of anything to customize it.
Windows 8 was stupid with the tablet-optimized UI, but I thought it was OK aesthetically, and Windows 10 more so. Even Windows 11 is "pretty" if you don't click the wrong thing and get a legacy dialog from 1...∞ versions back.
I use Linux by the way... but not all Windowses look ugly IMO.
Maybe Windows 2000 was faster than XP, but I'm pretty sure the old and new UIs in Windows XP didn't have any speed difference. It was just different cosmetics.
I think is so ugly that I'm half tempted to chatgpt fact check this comment. It very well could have been a deliberate conspiracy to lie to the public and say it looks good to make some austerity go down easier.
I hate brutalist architecture, but love the Win2K design language, for what should be fairly obvious reasons. I interact with software. I don't interact with architecture beyond the visuals. It can look as shit as it wants, but if it gets out of my way and lets me do what I want to do, then it's great. It'd be nice if it look better, but I'll take function over form 10/10 times.
The only reason brutalist buildings were made in that style is because it's cheap(er), and because some architects started to smell their own farts a bit too much. Win9X/Win2K were made the way they are because it's actually conducive to get shit done.
I'd suspect one of the big constraints was that you had to support basic VGA: 640x480 at 16 bold colours on a cheap CRT.
With that palette, using white/black/dark grey/light grey for the UI leaves most of the "saturated" colours for the software's own messaging. If you make the main body of the UI red or yellow, it's going to wash out if software uses those colours for alert indicators. If you make it blue, it's probably going to be a bit subjectively dark, and you'd need to use light characters for contrast. White input fields might have a skeumorphic aspect in that they look like paper you can write on.
An interesting comparison is the colour schemes of CDE. It was usually used on 256+ colour systems, so many of the themes are pastel-centric, but it's aggressively beveled and has similar high legibility.
If you were to quiz people who preferred the Windows 2000 look, you would more likely get detailed answers regarding the design language and functionality. If you were to quiz people who preferred the XP look, you would more likely get answers revolving around colors and shiny.
I was young at the time and this seemed absurd to me. Why would you willingly use a UI that looks like wearing an old grey tie for a dusty office job in a depressing concrete building?