joking aside, windows 7 is by FAR the greatest looking version of windows. i’m probably biased because it’s the one i used during my formative years, but holy shit man everything from win8 and up just looks like complete soulless corpo garbage. that new shit looks like a free powerpoint template
Win7 was also the last "neutral" version of Windows in terms of integrated spyware ("telemetry") features (or rather, the lack thereof).
Since Win8, this OS truly rolls downhill in many aspects. Since Win10, with greater speed.
I feel like Windows 7 fills the sweet spot between the seemless UI of the 2000/XP era and newer versions. Windows 10/11 could top that list if Microsoft had bothered to create a proper UI instead of just slapping some material design on a handful of apps, while everything else is still basically 2000/XP. Then again, GTK2/3/4 can be almost as bad.
Vista and XP were pretty baller. Really like the glassy look that Vista had, and it had video wallpapers built in. They were ahead of the game with ricing, and the transparency/glass is just now coming back!