> As a highschooler, this looked so futuristic & colorful as compared to 2000/XP desktop themes & icons.
Exactly my experience. The first time I installed Linux when I was around 15 I was surprised how modern, "sharp" and professional everything looked compared to Windows XP.
(The default Windows XP design was really the beginning of a downward curve for Windows designs. Windows 98 looked like a tool, Windows XP looked like a toy, which is a shame because Windows XP was a vastly superior (and in my experience ridiculously stable) OS. I always used the "classic" Win 98 design).
I had a Win2K cd-rom with a license key that I dragged around with me for almost a decade for this exact reason. It was all downhill for Windows after that.
Windows 2000 startup screen (as well as the ill-received Windows Me) was very elegant for its time. I think the Windows 7 GUI emulation in 8.1 was also pretty good.
What do you mean by Windows 7 GUI emulation in Windows 8? I didn't use Windows 8 much, but I thought all apps, including those that run on Win7, had a Win8 look, title bar, etc?
Windows 8 Metro UI and its flat glyph-inspired iconset (similar to minimalist signage, e.g in EU traffic signs) was such a disaster that 8.1, that soon followed, allowed options to toggle between Metro (for those who preferred) and the classic Windows 7 look & icons. It was called Legacy UI in their options.
Hence it was and still sometimes is being called Fisher-Price. Microsoft had to drastically change their flagship project so it would be attractive against OSX. The Whistler's Watercolor theme that existed during beta period was good but wasn't enough for the final release [1][2].
That period was full of candy/toys/glass/acrylic GUIs. Apple had Aqua, and Linux distros had Keramik and Plastik window/widget themes with Crystal icons in KDE. The latter become preserved in the Trinity envirnoment [1] since KDE moved to Plasma in version 4, which looked to me like a Vista's Aero step-sister [3]
Exactly my experience. The first time I installed Linux when I was around 15 I was surprised how modern, "sharp" and professional everything looked compared to Windows XP.
(The default Windows XP design was really the beginning of a downward curve for Windows designs. Windows 98 looked like a tool, Windows XP looked like a toy, which is a shame because Windows XP was a vastly superior (and in my experience ridiculously stable) OS. I always used the "classic" Win 98 design).