What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000

Among tech and design folks of a certain vintage, there is a fondness for the design language used by Windows from Windows 95 to Windows 2000.While you could argue that this is mere nostalgia, I've always thought there is more to it than that. The Windows 95 UI was famously the result of comprehensive UX studies and careful design. While Microsoft has always been Microsoft—a company defined by a lack of care in everything it puts out into the world—the developers and designers who worked on early versions of Windows really did care about what they were building.movq writes about what made the Windows 2000 UI great. Things that stood out to me:The Start menu (in my opinion, this is the greatest idea in the design of desktop operating systems).Icons are colored and have unique shapes, making them easy to identify at a glance.All interactive elements share visual similarities.The color palette consists of sharply contrasting colors, making it easy to distinguish between different parts…