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Aero is a thorough evolution of the Windows UX, I think many people never realised just how much it improved when praising XP and prior.
In modern WIndows, from 7 onward, I can hit the meta key and type the first letters of the app I want to open, hit enter and boom, it's opened. I can mouse snap the two app windows side by side on my large monitor. I have 125% scaling so things don't look tiny on my 4k monitor.
Win 95 had none of that, the only way to launch an app was via shortcuts on the desktop or navigating a long and tedious star menu tree, which was perfectly fine for 1995 since you had ~10 app on your PC and you used it sparingly, but is really shit UX if your PC has 50+ apps like in 2026 and you use it for half a day. "Classic windows" only makes sense if you also use your PC in a classic way like it's the 90's, with like 1-2 concurrent apps opened at once, instead of 10+ leaving them on for days/weeks.
>Good that there is Cygwin, so I could move most stuff there.
Cygwin is CLI, not UI, which is what we were talking about. Are your complaints about the Windows CLI or about UI, because those are different topics you seem to mix up?
>Classic Windows just works, and if you care, you can even customize it.
I can also customize modern Windows, at least in the ways I need it to be productive. Sure, you can't customize it anymore in the W95 way, such as having a Matrix screensaver or Rollercoaster Tycoon theme on it, but I don't need that anymore since I'm old now and don't have time for that anymore. If I want a short hit of nostalgia I boot up my vintage Windows XP machine, but that's not my daily driver.
>Im really curious, because I was using corporate Win10 and hell, it was really driving me crazy.
If Win10 was driving you crazy, then "classic windows" would also drive you crazy even harder because it doesn't have any QoL over Win10. Please explain yourself here what you mean since you seem to be contradicting yourself. Or are you only talking about your limited corporate windows experience and and not what you can do as an admin on "home" windows?
Yeah, scaling is improvement (but I would be cautionus here, it can bring artifacts). I preffer just good native resolution.
For running stuff quickly, I have an app that handles that:
I mean in theory I can also do that on my Win 11 machine... In practice if I actually performed those exact steps I will probably have edge open up with a web search of the letters I typed.
The amount of times I actually have to use the now even less user friendly way of finding an app in the start menu regardless is infuriating, give me both, a star menu that is deterministic and a search that works...
Just because I want the older stuff does not mean I have to give up some of the newer stuff.
Not for me since I disabled web search feature of the start menu, but I get what you mean. I still prefer this option than being limited by the Win95 way. I always have 10+ apps opened at once. Having to manually launch them via the menu tree every time I boot up my OS would be a nightmare. This wasn't an issue in Win95 because I only had 16mb of RAM so I only launched one or two apps simultaneously, like for example MS Word for a school project and Winamp for listening to music while working and that's it. The kind of multitasking people do today without even thinking (50+ Chrome tabs, IDEs, Discord, Signal, Spotify, Steam, WSL, Plex, etc) was unheard of in Win95.
>Just because I want the older stuff
Yes, but you failed to explain exactly what "old stuff" UI did Win95 had that you don't have today and really need? You can still launch apps via the desktop shortcuts or the tedious start-menu tree view in Modern Windows as well like it's 1995, if that's what you miss from Win95, nobody forces you to use the broken search feature you dislike of modern windows.