[HN Gopher] Chicago95 - Windows 95 Theme for Linux
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Chicago95 - Windows 95 Theme for Linux
Author : acqbu
Score : 209 points
Date : 2023-07-30 08:28 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| rtpg wrote:
| If someone is on KDE, I recommend the themes by phobian [0]. I
| had an issue where I needed to force my DPI to get things
| aligning nicely, but there's a lot of themes based off of various
| operating systems that are fun to mess with.
|
| [0]:https://store.kde.org/u/phob1an
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| I like his color schemes a lot. Especially the contrast.
| stainablesteel wrote:
| this is the kind of stuff i use when we get a new IT person, i
| walk over and ask for help doing something mundane just to watch
| their reaction
| accrual wrote:
| I've never done hiring myself, but I'd joke with my manager
| that I should be allowed to watch potential new hires type for
| a bit before approving them for the role which involves a lot
| of typing/chatting, copy/paste, general UI work. So frustrating
| to see tech staff manually highlight words, right-click, copy,
| find some buried window, hunt and peck to type, etc.
| msie wrote:
| Seeing this brings me so much joy. If only they had it for
| Windows 11 as an add-on pack I would buy it!
| jug wrote:
| Would be cool to "do it right" and have a proper window manager
| for Linux like this rather than "just" a skin (I really don't
| want to diminish the ton of work sunk into this). So you get the
| last details about windowing behavior and animations right, and
| achieving much more in terms of start menu, task bar behavior and
| so on.
|
| To be less niche and reach even more nostalgic users it could be
| something like a RetroWM with modes for like Windows 95, XP,
| maybe even Mac OS 9.
|
| If I only had unlimited time on my hands... :D
| petepete wrote:
| It's not Linux but Serenity OS checks all the other boxes.
|
| https://www.serenityos.org/
| jug wrote:
| Yeah, I'm aware of Serenity and think it has a really cool
| combination of old school Windows and Mac OS!
| jwells89 wrote:
| I've wanted to work on OS clone desktop environments (to cover
| all the little things a window manager alone can't) for a while
| now because I think it's worthwhile to preserve older
| environments and keep them available for usage even after their
| commercial creators have abandoned them.
|
| Finding the time to do that is a challenge though, particularly
| with the higher activation energy of having to learn the ins
| and outs of X11, Wayland, and other bits and pieces involved in
| building a functional *nix desktop.
| jug wrote:
| Yeah, that's exactly it! Unfortunately the different skill
| sets required here are so different. You part need deep
| understanding of the low level inner workings, and part need
| great attention to detail in user interface design. It would
| probably be easiest to pull of as a team effort.
| lmz wrote:
| There are already proper WMs with the Win95 look e.g. IceWM.
| some-guy wrote:
| I used this theme for awhile but I kept running into visual bugs
| that caused certain applications to not render at all, and as a
| recent parent I just decided that tinkering with desktop / window
| manager constantly just wasn't worth it anymore.
|
| What it did do however is remind me just how much space can
| actually fit on a 1920x1080 screen, and that was very special for
| the experience and applications that did work (which was most of
| them).
| cat_plus_plus wrote:
| If you like it, you should check out era X Windows managers with
| a multi button mouse. Same hierarchical start menu, but bring it
| up from any location on the desktop with right mouse click! Then
| most simple apps don't really need menu bars or windows controls,
| just maybe small resize handles at the corners, use right click
| to do the rest as well. Once you created a perfect arrangement
| for each virtual desktop, save it and have it perfectly recreated
| on startup. With not a pixel wasted and apps themselves not
| wasting much white space, it becomes possible to have all the
| tools you need for your workflow side by side rather than
| constantly hunting for the right overlapping window. Plus,
| workstations had keyboards with dedicated copy/cut/paste keys,
| rather than remembering to press Control-Shift-C in Terminal and
| Control-C elsewhere and half of the time killing your current
| command by mistake.
| guestbest wrote:
| I think the late 1990's and 2000's X window managers was peak
| mouse/display productively
| Roark66 wrote:
| Windows 95 "theme" was very nice for the CRT monitors and their
| resolutions of back in the day (1024x768 etc). Running it on a
| modern display?... I don't get it.
| michaelcampbell wrote:
| Nostalgia, funzies.
| jszymborski wrote:
| I use this day to day and it's great. Bonus: people take a triple
| take when I screenshare in meetings.
| netbioserror wrote:
| Contrary to what many are saying, I want the LOOK but not the
| usability. We've made some good leaps since then and Cinnamon
| desktop represents just about the cutting edge in usability and
| familiarity. But that squared look with high-contrast and
| clearly-interactable elements was lost along the way. Now
| everything has to be flat, flat, flat with disappearing controls.
| Take me back.
| TillE wrote:
| > with high-contrast and clearly-interactable elements
|
| Yeah, I miss that a lot. My favorite example is the iTunes
| sidebar icons going from clearly distinguishable different
| colors to flat uniform monochrome.
|
| Why? Because someone decided it made the interface look
| "better" as an art object, rather than being a better user
| experience.
| mrabcx wrote:
| Some of these old style themes are interesting for nostalgic
| reasons but then after a while you do realize that there are
| reasons why the world has moved on.
| mountaineagle wrote:
| Can you name a few of them?
| Sakos wrote:
| I'm not sure I agree. I used the Chicago95 theme (with some
| added 98 icons) for a good 2 years. The only reason I stopped
| was because I left the job I was at and couldn't be bothered to
| replicate the experience on my private device and haven't
| really been using Linux as my main driver. My team found it
| hilarious and I thought the theme was quite usable. I find
| modern Windows windowing far more egregious and unusable. I
| can't even think of anything you might mean that would justify
| moving away from the 90s themes or UI concepts.
|
| edit: I've recently been using Chromafiler
| (https://github.com/vanjac/chromafiler) and I'm realizing we've
| gone off in completely the _wrong_ direction since the 90s.
| Pannoniae wrote:
| I dunno but there's only a few things missing from those old-
| style UIs. (Notably, hiDPI support for example)
|
| This is probably a niche opinion but I think we have been
| steadily devolving and going backwards in terms of user design.
| We waste so much space, require so many clicks for worse
| usability than we started with. With the death of skeumorphism
| and textual UIs we regularly have to guess or hover buttons to
| find out what they are. Even scrollbars are starting to be
| unusable - I can barely see some of them because they are
| small, low-contrast and auto-hiding.
| drougge wrote:
| These modern useless scrollbars really anger me.
|
| I can theme some things (unless some modern packaging tech
| makes the app ignore my theme), I can make the ones in
| Firefox usable but ugly (with widget.gtk.overlay-
| scrollbars.enabled and widget.non-native-
| theme.scrollbar.style), and so on. But I can see where we are
| heading. Scrollbars are one of many UI features that were too
| useful, so they must be destroyed.
|
| I did not expect to feel so old at such a young age.
| xp84 wrote:
| 100%. And _all_ of this regression is either in the name of
| pure vapid trendiness, or an attempt to supposedly make
| things "easier for non-technical people" -- and yet these
| people _still_ have no idea how to use their devices any more
| expertly than they could Windows 95. The only difference is
| back then people knew what a file was and where it was
| located. Now there are a _lot_ of people who don't.
|
| TL;DR millennial shakes fist at cloud
| anthk wrote:
| Yeah, to worse.
|
| On Windows XP, beside the childish theme, the window buttons
| were very usable.
|
| Ditto with XFCE with some xfwm4 with a round-surface squared
| buttons on yellow, green and red, you can find it under the
| last items of the list.
|
| Let's talk about the icons and usability. On overy modern
| Gnome3/XP icon theme, the icons seem contrastless and very hard
| to see.
|
| Meanwhile, the Tango icons are still standing a lot on the file
| manager's white background, with clear outlines.
| xp84 wrote:
| People hate on the default blue Luna theme, but there was a
| perfectly professional Silver version, and the later (black
| with orange accents) Zune Theme was one of the most
| attractive UIs I ever got to use.
| anthk wrote:
| I can't find the xfwm theme, but it had a good balance
| between usability and "fun". That with some GTK theme such
| as the default for XFCE 4.6 looked fun to use without
| looking very childish.
|
| Altough I must 'konfess' that the Keramik theme with the
| Noia icons and some handwritting font made reading advanced
| man pages in Konqueror a lot less "dramatic" and careless,
| thus, keeping the stress down.
| CalRobert wrote:
| Moved on to dark patterns and dumbed down interfaces.
| Personally, I really miss mnemonics. Alt+underlined letter
| for_everything_. But having an underlined letter for everything
| died out and keyboard nav means a lot more memorization.
| accrual wrote:
| I'm going to miss when the ability to double-click the top-
| left corner of a window will close it (and right-click brings
| up the window menu). This has been around since the Windows 3
| days and still persists in 11, but it's going away in some
| places - e.g. you can't do this in most browsers, and the new
| file Explorer in 11 dropped it to support tabs.
| _dain_ wrote:
| Office still has this.
| antegamisou wrote:
| Personally Windows 8 UI and after is the reason I'm never going
| to touch this specific OS again. In fact, I find it an even
| bigger hindrance than the monstrosity Windows Updates is.
| Paul-Craft wrote:
| I agree. I think Windows XP is where the windows UI peaked.
| pluijzer wrote:
| Seriously wonder what you think the reasons the world moved on
| is? Everything was so clear, neat and discoverable back then.
| Now everything needs to be hidden behind labels that may of may
| not be a button. And that is on a good day because many times I
| need to learn a new language where a rocket means pipeline and
| to download an artifact from it you obviously need to press the
| pinkish two squares thingy. But that is actually still a good
| day because nobody knew that to do [useful feature] you need to
| click the triangle next to the lightning bolt so nobody used
| it. Next update it will be removed. This update will also make
| the now remaining three buttons two times bigger because our
| CAD software needs to be mobile first.
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| I can name only one thing that has been massively popularised
| since then in "professional" tools and which I wouldn't mind
| the older software had: command palette.
|
| Press some hot key, and then type the name of your command in
| a pop up window with full-text search, autocomplete and a
| hint what the hot key and toolbar icon for that particular
| command is. Probably single most useful thing that became
| mainstream roughly after the ubiquitous CLI-phobia mostly
| went away.
| KnobbleMcKnees wrote:
| I kind of agree with this in that WIMP is a good philosophy
| for desktop UI design, and I feel that mobile has never
| really had the equivalent (hamburger menus falling out of
| fashion being the apotheosis of chasing rainbows IMHO)
|
| But I feel we need only point to Microsoft Word as an example
| of how the statement.
|
| >Everything was so clear, neat, and discoverable back then
|
| just isn't true. The only difference now is that we have
| dozens of pieces of software in our lives now instead of the
| half dozen we used in the 90s, and we don't have one company
| monopolistically decreeing what the status quo of UI design
| is.
|
| Meaningful competition is also why I think there is no WIMP
| in mobile. And that's a double-edged sword.
| jtode wrote:
| I wish I could have a very long discussion of this. It is my
| belief that people think they want new stuff because marketing
| has told them that. The corporate internet is like someone took
| that process and welded their finger to the fast forward
| button, endless iterations of pointless redesigns, galaxies of
| UXes that only a few people in Boise Iowa ever visited, it's
| nuts.
|
| I want the internet back where everything looked like that
| phpbb stuff. You just got the information then. Now you have to
| solve the CCS/JS puzzle first.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| Phpbb had a very windowsxp style. Im always trying to
| pinpoint what that is.
|
| I think it includes smaller, denser text.
|
| And something about the borders. Chunkier, more ornate, or
| griadients/light or something.
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| Remember how everyone was complaining how "heavy" all that
| glitz was? Images this, heavy HTML that, garishness this,
| load times that? I remember.
|
| And then Windows 8 aesthetic came in, suddenly flat and a
| few colors with very reduced palette of available widgets
| became en vogue, but at the same time somehow the load and
| render times of sites bragging to be "simple" and
| "minimalistic" and "lightweight" soared with megabytes of
| assets none of your old sites sporting image borders and
| marble backgrounds ever had.
| notorandit wrote:
| It Is not a "theme for Linux". It is a theme for GTK-based DEs.
| charles_f wrote:
| This is so beautiful it brings tears to my eyes! Reproductions
| like this somehow always end up feeling just a bit off, like
| being so close but something is wrong. But this one seems
| spotless.
|
| Pure UI that works from before the word "ux" was invented.
| Luctct wrote:
| This is really nice. I may try it soon.
|
| I tested Windows 11 recently and I was really shocked.
| Apparently, it has two basic themes: my-eyeballs-hurt white and
| what-is-the-point-of-living black.
| cies wrote:
| > for Linux
|
| Linux is a kernel and does have a graphical interface. This theme
| is for XFCE, one of the many "desktop environments" that can run
| on the Linux kernel.
|
| Other being: Gnome, Plasma (KDE), LXQt, and many more.
|
| To make it more interesting, XFCE also runs on FreeBSD (another
| open source kernel/OS).
| reacharavindh wrote:
| Not that I want the UX To _look_ like Windows 95, but I sure do
| feel nostalgic how fast and responsive the desktop "felt" back in
| those days. These days, it is a rarity to see a native app that
| is as responsive. It feels like all native apps burn through CPU
| cycles in cosmetic things and animations that it feels sluggish
| in comparison.
| treve wrote:
| KDE Plasma in my opinion comes closest to this. It's stayed
| very snappy over the years and I'm mainly a laptop user.
|
| I'm on Gnome because I prefer the design, but if you want fast
| it might be worth a shot.
| thrtythreeforty wrote:
| Initial releases of KDE 4 were absolute pigs. They spent
| several years trimming fat from those until it started to be
| useful for me around KDE 4.9 or so. Plasma 5 and onward have
| been excellent.
| hknapp wrote:
| http://copy.sh/v86/?profile=windows95
| Roark66 wrote:
| One of the biggest things that contribute to the feeling of
| slowness today are all the animations /transitions etc. The
| very first thing I do when installing a new version of gnome is
| disable all of it. It suddenly feels 5x faster.
| rpastuszak wrote:
| My experience was different as my first Windows PC was already
| quite old when I got it, so I was used to random delays in UI
| feedback. My current M1 feels like what you've just described.
|
| I tried to run DSL (damn small linux) on my P60 around 2003-4
| and felt what you've just described. The UI seemed to respond
| before the interaction!
|
| Then, a few months ago I spent a an evening or two messing with
| Microsoft Bob (Win 3.11) then Win 95 trying to code a simple
| website compatible with the tech of the time, using the tools
| available at the time. Everything felt so snappy.
|
| I don't mind animations applied thoughtfully (e.g. short UI
| transitions emphasising the state change), but what annoys me
| the most is animation jank, drops in frame rate, unpredictable
| delays. Older Windows versions weren't that great in that
| regard either (do you remember how much time it used to take
| for the "Open With" dialog, or event file context menu to show
| up on Win, when you right clicked on a file in Win9x-7?)
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| >for the "Open With" dialog, or event file context menu to
| show up on Win, when you right clicked on a file in Win9x-7?)
|
| That's because you installed a ton of 3rd party shit which
| were registered as a handler for this/all filetypes so when
| the Explorer needed to show that menu it had to query every
| registered handler, extract an icon and if those .dlls
| weren't in the RAM, then you waited for the slow disk access.
| xp84 wrote:
| I miss, when I had a jailbroken phone, briefly being able to
| set the animation time to zero. Everything is so much faster,
| even with hardware that can more than handle the GPU stuff.
| It's now (on fast hardware) the actual animation frames
| themselves that are literally wasting my time.
|
| I wish Apple would let me watch each of their oh-so-clever
| animations one time to give these "designers" their
| satisfaction, and just jump-cut to the final state from that
| point on.
| accrual wrote:
| I think Android KitKat 4.4 had an animation time slider
| hidden in some "Developer" menu that could be trivally
| enabled. It made my phone feel so much faster.
| pjerem wrote:
| https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT202655
| soraminazuki wrote:
| That's not how I remember it. Windows 9x was slow and
| constantly crashing. Booting and launching programs took ages.
| To be fair, the performance problems had more to do with the
| available hardware back then, but still.
| seabass-labrax wrote:
| My Intel Pentium 4 machine usually runs reliably and
| responsively, but you have to be careful: the default Windows
| picture viewer instantly freezes the PC if you click 'next
| image' before the current one has finished loading!
| ekianjo wrote:
| > Windows 9x was slow
|
| because hard drives. Now we have SSDs and the desktop is
| slower than ever still.
| squarefoot wrote:
| Desktop became slow when windows and widgets became
| objects, as in the OOP sense. The transition from hardcoded
| primitives to objects that would be created and destroyed
| on the fly slowed things down a lot, but that is the price
| to pay to have code that runs on very different platforms,
| also adapting itself to different screen sizes and
| resolutions, dynamic objects, etc.
| nvm0n1 wrote:
| Has there ever been a non Oop GUI toolkit in those days?
| Even Win32 was kinda "c with objects".
| bitwize wrote:
| One of the interesting things about Apple vs. Microsoft
| in the early days was how differently the two companies
| handled the mindblow that was the GUI work at Xerox PARC.
|
| Apple adopted the UI conventions, and refined, polished,
| and extended them to create first the Lisa system and
| then the Mac. But early Mac OS ("System" in those days)
| was very much based on a procedural, Pascal-based API
| without much in the way of object orientation. Your app
| had to handle the close button and the resize grabber
| itself, for instance -- actually listen for mouse events,
| determine if there was a click in the appropriate region,
| and close the window or buzz in a loop drawing the resize
| rectangle. Utility functions were provided to help with
| this process, but it still had to be part of your main
| loop. Dialog boxes were defined with Pascal records.
|
| Microsoft, by contrast, hired some of the Xerox PARC
| engineers away -- guys like Charles Simonyi. The design
| of Windows reflects this, as Windows more closely
| reflects the Xerox PARC work at an _architectural_ level.
| It had from the very earliest days something like an
| object system. A window belonged to a window class, which
| contained a single method (the window procedure or
| WndProc), that processed messages from a flexible and
| extensible message system. Windows could even be
| "subclassed" by substituting a different window
| procedure. This more flexible design allowed the system
| to provide the necessary decorations (minimize and
| maximize buttons, a system menu, resize grips and even
| scrollbars) and the client window would receive messages
| from them to let it know that, for example, it had been
| resized or scrolled. The actual mechanics of how these
| decorations worked could be delegated to the system. The
| API was still in C, not OO like we know it today, and was
| a bit cumbersome to use -- but it had more of those
| object-oriented ideas than early Mac did.
|
| Of course, Steve Jobs didn't make the same mistake twice,
| and for his first post-Mac system, NeXT, he had it based
| all around object orientation.
| circuit10 wrote:
| I doubt it makes much difference. At least in C++ objects
| are just structs unless you're using polymorphism, and
| tracking a few things like the position of a window can't
| be very intensive anyway. It's probably more things like
| loading assets and rendering effects and background tasks
| that slow it down
| regularfry wrote:
| So we should expect the introduction of MFC in 1992 to
| draw the dividing line between the halcyon "fast desktop"
| days and modern slowness?
| safety1st wrote:
| Chicago95 is a theme for XFCE. I run XFCE with i3wm on a
| SSD and it is insanely, perversely fast. Most of the
| default apps bundled with XFCE start instantly. The system
| boots within seconds, no need to consider any type of fast
| boot, hibernation etc. Native apps boot within seconds.
| Electron apps are slower, because Electron.
|
| A typical XFCE system on startup will allocate around 500MB
| of RAM, but with the way memory management works on Linux I
| think it doesn't really need all of that and lets go of it
| if something else does.
|
| It is kind of a barebones desktop environment, but
| certainly has a lot more stuff packed in than Win9x did and
| for a little extra disk space you can cherry pick whatever
| Gnome and KDE utilities you want anyway.
|
| So I think this phenomenon of slow modern desktops is a
| Windows/Mac problem, if you want one that's lightning fast,
| they're out there.
| stavros wrote:
| I do want one that's lightning fast, thank you. If it
| launches a terminal and a browser, I'm good.
|
| I'll try this for my new NUC, thanks for the tip!
| pocketarc wrote:
| I'll second the parent's experience, it's actually kind
| of insane how fast XFCE is. With the Chicago95 theme, the
| feeling you end up with is:
|
| "how fast would Windows 95 be if you ran it on modern
| hardware"
|
| It is actually just astounding, to the point that you end
| up feeling "jesus is my hardware really that fast?".
| stavros wrote:
| Is it stock XFCE, or do I need anything else? Can I just
| install xubuntu-desktop and that's it?
| safety1st wrote:
| I install the system using the Xubuntu ISO. Presumably if
| you install the xubuntu-desktop package on some other
| flavor it will be similar but if for instance you
| installed it on top of e.g. Kubuntu you might still be
| getting KDE services loading when you log in.
| dharmab wrote:
| I use i3wm + kitty abd it's instantly responsive. Such a
| refreshing experience.
| stavros wrote:
| Thanks, I also use kitty as my main terminal. I'll give
| i3wm a go, even though I'm not a huge fan of tiling
| window managers (but maybe I should be).
| raffraffraff wrote:
| I had a carefully crafted 98SE CD that was created using a
| tool called (I think) 98lite. It let you remove components
| and set defaults. That was rock solid _for me_ , and used so
| few resources. Boot times were very quick considering the
| hardware at the time. The all-important post-install defrag
| made a difference.
|
| I didn't switch away from 98SE on my home computer until XP
| SP2 (which I immediately theme to look like 98 because I
| hated the primary colour nonsense).
|
| Actually, every Windows installation from then until I
| switched to Linux was "shrunk" and tweaked (can't remember
| what tool I used, but it wasn't an official MS thing). Having
| a full licenced copy of InstallShield at work was extremely
| handy too - every app was repackaged into a fully automatic
| installer and bundled with the OS. It almost felt like a
| cloned PC. In fact when I got a job managing fleets of PCs,
| that XPCD Builder script was like a superpower.
| accrual wrote:
| Maybe you used nLite? I credit this tool for making me into
| a Windows power user. Taking the OS apart checkbox-by-
| checkbox gave me a good understanding of how the pieces fit
| together and what is required vs optional.
|
| https://www.nliteos.com/
| andrepd wrote:
| Ohh man, nlite! The memory you just unlocked for me
| ahahaha
| raffraffraff wrote:
| Same! That was the one!
| wanderingstan wrote:
| Hard to believe that a few system crashes per day was the
| norm. You just hoped you hadn't lost too much, would re-boot
| and go get a drink while you waited.
|
| Due to that "training" I still hit CTRL-S obsessively even
| when it hasn't been needed for years.
| LoganDark wrote:
| > I still hit CTRL-S obsessively
|
| Same here, but because I used to forget to save before
| tabbing over to something else that depended on the changes
| I made. Now I never forget to save...
| wanderingstan wrote:
| Ah yes, I've had that too: I still wish editors would
| make it more visually apparent when you had unsaved
| changes.
| accrual wrote:
| Initial versions of Windows 95 would crash if uptime
| exceeded 49.7 days. :)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28340101
| mbwgh wrote:
| For me, my Ctrl+S moment was with Apple's Writer, on my
| first Macbook back in 2005 or so. Lost a whole evening's
| worth of work due to a crash.
|
| I'm mostly in the `:w` camp now, but still...
| stavros wrote:
| <Esc>:w is muscle memory by now, and it'll never change.
| gcoakes wrote:
| A quirk in my config that I haven't bothered to fix makes
| it so my formatter runs post write. I've unfortunately
| picked up the habit of <esc>:w<cr>:w<cr> in rapid
| succession.
| stavros wrote:
| Oof, my condolences. At least you make doubly sure it's
| saved.
| ptidhomme wrote:
| _I still hit CTRL-S obsessively_
|
| You better keep that habit when working in big MS Word
| files. It still randomly crashes and I've lost some amount
| of work several times due to this shit.
| Roark66 wrote:
| >Hard to believe that a few system crashes per day was the
| norm.
|
| It certainly wasn't for me! At the time I had my first it
| job in a local pc repair shop and we had a series of 24h
| burn in tests. If the newly installed pc crashed during it,
| there was something wrong with the hw. My personal windows
| 95 definitely didn't crash more than once every few weeks
| of heavy use. Programs did crash, explorer did crash, but
| the actual BSOD was quite rare.
| crazygringo wrote:
| It was definitely the norm, but it seemed to have more to
| do with hardware and drivers and certain programs, so
| people's experiences varied dramatically.
|
| Sounds like you just happened to luck into reliable
| hardware with well-written drivers.
|
| For me, something about using CorelDraw with my video
| card led it to crash probably about once every twenty
| minutes of use.
|
| On the other hand, if I just stuck to working in Word and
| _wasn 't_ trying to simultaneously play MP3's while also
| downloading files, I'd be fine.
| bitwize wrote:
| Indeed. It took nearly a full decade for Windows to match the
| responsiveness of, say, an Amiga 2000.
| MrBuddyCasino wrote:
| IO was slow. Once stuff was in RAM, it was quite fast.
| mrighele wrote:
| At least at the beginning not everybody had hardware that
| supported DMA for disk access (and those that had it, not
| always had it configured properly).
|
| That meant burning CPU cycles just for doing IO.
| cout wrote:
| Drawing to the screen was also slow until accelerated 2D
| cards came along.
| JD557 wrote:
| This. I was recently backing up some stuff from an old Mac
| OS 8 machine and it was amazing how snappy a lot of things
| feel. But if something is not on RAM you can clearly notice
| it.
| ben_w wrote:
| Ah, I remember those days. Around that era, dragging
| windows around the screen was switching from "draw
| outline" to "draw the actual window".
| [deleted]
| dehrmann wrote:
| If you're bored, you should see how Windows 9x does on a
| Vortex86 CPU with an SD card.
| moron4hire wrote:
| My Windows 11 laptop at home is quite snappy. My Windows 10
| laptop at work with more RAM, a better SSD, and a newer, faster
| CPU, is not. It's because they virus scan and authorization
| check every single file access, every time. Even starting small
| programs like Notepad takes at least 2 seconds at work whereas
| it's instantaneous at home.
|
| Same story at my previous job. Actually, my work laptop _had_
| been faster than my personal one for a while because I had
| gotten a special purchase due to the nature of my work and IT
| didn 't know what to do with it (we contracted IT services out
| to a 3rd party. We were a small non-tech company). But then
| someone caught wind and I was made to figure out how to get
| IT's tracking software installed for them. And that's when I
| started working from home all the time (a situation I could
| manage as the non-tech company wanted me to own the code
| personally. Yes, a little weird, but it was all a tiny sure
| other for the company).
|
| It's not the tech, it's the bureaucracy.
| throwaway2990 wrote:
| I got a dell XPS 15 for work, 2022 one. 32gb 12700h. It's
| slow and loud. Especially compared to my personal laptop. Not
| enough to be annoying tho. But then IT decided they want some
| software installed to make sure they can monitor for bad
| processes. Wow it's annoyingly slow now for development
| because every process is analysised.
| accrual wrote:
| > It's because they virus scan and authorization check every
| single file access, every time.
|
| Haha, I know this. I could be doing absolutely nothing and my
| 10th Gen work laptop CPU is chugging along at 40%
| utilization.
| backendanon wrote:
| Windows and Microsoft are the bureaucracy.
| KirillPanov wrote:
| WHATWG has joined the chat
| treve wrote:
| KDE Plasma in my opinion comes closest to this. It's stayed
| very snappy over the years and I'm mainly a laptop user.
| backendanon wrote:
| Agreed, I use KDE on both my desktop and personal laptop.
| mati365 wrote:
| [flagged]
| BaculumMeumEst wrote:
| If you're curious about Gentoo, sure. But you're not going to
| get a perceptible advantage for the substantial time
| investment.
| BasedAnon wrote:
| [flagged]
| overgard wrote:
| I think nostalgia might have rewritten your memory. Spinning
| rust disks meant apps would take 5-10 seconds to load, moving
| and resizing windows was laggy and left behind repaint
| artifacts, and anything network related took approximately
| forever
| bitwize wrote:
| Windows 9x feels snappy and responsive -- on a VM on _modern_
| hardware. On the hardware of the day... yeah, it chugged. You
| needed about 16 MiB of RAM and a graphics accelerator for
| _acceptable_ performance in 1995, and that was quite a beefy
| system for that year.
| gattilorenz wrote:
| Related: is there any "high resolution" version of setup.bmp
| (https://raw.githubusercontent.com/grassmunk/Chicago95/5670fd...)
| that does not kill the spirit of it? I tried upscaling it, but
| it's like upscaling pixel art...
|
| I guess my best bet would be retaking the original pictures (the
| OG MS Natural Keyboard, CDs, etc.) and recreating it, but it
| sounds like plenty of work
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| How about scaling with Midjourney's img2img (if it will do a
| wallpaper size image?).
| post-it wrote:
| You could scale it without interpolation, giving you a crisper
| image at larger resolutions without blurring or smoothing.
| gattilorenz wrote:
| yes, technically that is possible, but it would give you an
| image with... big square blocks instead of tiny pixels.
|
| I'm thinking of achieving something like
| https://github.com/nestoris/win98wallpapers, and maybe
| Midjourney's img2img (as the other commenter suggested) might
| be able to do something like that, I don't know.
| troad wrote:
| I'm a big fan of this aesthetic. If you appreciate the usability
| of W95 without needing a pixel perfect copy, it's very easy to
| theme KDE to strike a really good balance.
|
| As your global theme, use 'Reactionary'. Set your application
| style to 'MS Windows 9x'. For your icons, use 'Memphis98'. For
| cursors, 'Hackneyed (scaleable)'. Your Plasma style, colours, and
| window decorations should all follow your global theme
| (Reactionary). I keep the default Noto fonts because I find them
| quite easy on the eyes, but this is easy to change if you yearn
| for classic fonts.
|
| My task bar (bottom bar) is set to use full names and not combine
| apps; I also use the application menu that looks like W95, and
| I've got it set to use a little W95 Start icon for that touch of
| nostalgia. Otherwise it's all very minimalist.
|
| I've used this set-up for years and it works really well for me.
| I find it very conducive to being productive - it's stable,
| unchanging, and respectful of my attention and focus. I also
| don't need to hack away at anything or worry about updates - KDE
| officially supports theming and handles all of this really
| seamlessly.
| ilyt wrote:
| I don't like how it looks (prefer a bit flatter buttons, but
| that are still buttons), but windows didn't really get any more
| usable after that...
| mcny wrote:
| > windows didn't really get any more usable after that...
|
| The old UI is good but I am not a fan of the everything is
| folders and files idea of the start menu. Maybe I'm
| misremembering but iirc as a child I used to forget which sub
| menu inside the thing I needed was except for the ones I used
| frequently.
|
| I like being able to just type obs and press enter in the new
| windows. I preferred the old theme better than windows XP
| Luna theme. I had a copy of tune up software and it said the
| old theme is somehow easier on my ram? iirc I only had 128MB
| on my pentium 4 computer.
| ptx wrote:
| > _I used to forget which sub menu inside the thing I
| needed was except for the ones I used frequently_
|
| The trick was to create your own folders to flatten the
| hierarchy, so you never have to look inside the "Programs"
| sub menu. You could even move your most frequently used
| items to the top level, with no folders at all, so they're
| available with a single click.
|
| This got a lot easier with Windows 98 (or with the IE
| version that included the shell update) where you could
| just drag and drop to rearrange the menus.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| > _everything is folders and files idea of the start menu_
|
| Your comment is Ribbon/magic-search-bar vs hierarchical-
| organization preference in a nutshell.
|
| I've decided there are two mutually-exclusive sorts of
| people: (a) those who want search to surface things for
| them, and hate having to remember where to find things &
| (b) those who want to remember where/how to find things,
| and hate relying on fuzzy search to surface them.
|
| IMHO, there's enough of each type that any given UI should
| support both.
|
| Ribbon would have gotten less flak if they hadn't _also_
| simultaneously made a mess of the organizational hierarchy
| behind the scenes. (MS Office-style "select things to show
| from a giant list in a tiny scrollbox" is terrible)
| tomxor wrote:
| > I've decided there are two mutually-exclusive sorts of
| people: (a) those who want search to surface things for
| them, and hate having to remember where to find things &
| (b) those who want to remember where/how to find things,
| and hate relying on fuzzy search to surface them.
|
| Funny because I belong in both camps, but for different
| things.
|
| I prefer fuzzy, flat search for launching applications (I
| mean we basically do the same on the CLI right? Hierarchy
| for apps seem more like arbitrary labels. Some things
| don't neatly fit into one label.
|
| And prefer to locate files by hierarchy. With the
| exception of less familiar and very large file systems
| and codebases, where I will resort to either fuzzy
| filename find or grep like tools. I use broot for my file
| manager which caters to all of these modes quite nicely.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| > _fuzzy, flat search for launching applications (I mean
| we basically do the same on the CLI right?_
|
| The first time we each had to debug a $PATH search order
| issue makes this a yes&no answer from me.
|
| There's still a hierarchy and locations... but most of
| the time we can just ignore it and get on with things.
| vxNsr wrote:
| If there was a keyboard shortcut to focus the menu
| searchbar I wouldn't mind ribbon at all, typing
| ctrl+hekwj is just as fast as typing ctrl+/grou+enter
| andrepd wrote:
| You can tack good modern search-launchers (a la spotlight
| or synapse) onto a Windows 95 interface without bringing
| over all the other modern UI cancer. It's an entirely
| orthogonal concern to things like flat icons, excessive
| whitespace, or bad discoverability.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| > iirc I only had 128MB on my pentium 4 computer
|
| Which is quite strange, because even P2 level machines
| already had 64-128MBs of RAM, eg look at Quake 3 sysrq.
| serf wrote:
| bottom-end (600-900) dollar range in 2001-2002ish got you
| between 128mb and 256mb of ram.
|
| my bottom end pentium 4 presario came with 128 mb and the
| slowest hard drive in the world.
|
| Office XP/2002 and Windows XP both called for 128mb
| minimum as far as I remember, so a lot of the machines
| were targetting that number.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| Ah, the wonderful world of _balanced_ and _effective_
| configurations from the bottom of the barrel PCs... So
| much time, money and CO2 could be saved by another
| /bigger atick of RAM.
| mcny wrote:
| > So much time, money and CO2 could be saved by
| another/bigger atick of RAM.
|
| I did eventually get a 256 MB stick of RAM. iirc I was
| already out of high school at that point.
|
| One point I don't hear being talked about too much is how
| hopeful and stupid we were in the late nineties and early
| two thousands. We were supposed to have 10GHz processors
| by 2005, or I mean mass market for consumers by the end
| of the decade, at the latest?
|
| https://www.anandtech.com/show/680/6
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/5sqw20/the_fut
| ure...
|
| To put things in perspective, my parents practically
| never used the computer. For all intents and purposes,
| the computer was for a child to learn by parents who were
| not very computer savvy in a time when computers were
| advancing (or at least so we thought) very rapidly.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| > One point I don't hear being talked about too much is
| how hopeful and stupid we were in the late nineties and
| early two thousands.
|
| If I aould be in tbe mood and stance I would reply again,
| but I for what it gives I'm really grateful for my parent
| who indulged in this thing, despite it being a total
| terra incognita for them.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| > I like being able to just type obs and press enter in the
| new windows.
|
| This might be one of the few useful features that I take
| for granted in modern Windows. That and Win + tab which I
| think GNOME does better. The "Windows" key in GNOME brings
| up the overview but also brings up search where you can
| either click which window you want or type what you want.
| Intuitive
| jsight wrote:
| Search in the start menu and window management improved a lot
| since then. The newer screenshot tools are nice compared to
| 95 too.
|
| They definitely got a lot of things right, though. The basic
| aesthetic was pretty good and very discoverable.
| UncleSlacky wrote:
| You could also just use the "Redmond" theme with the Trinity
| DE:
|
| https://baloo.neocities.org/TheGuide/TheGuide-Part1 (bottom of
| page)
| anthk wrote:
| You can use Chicago 95's icons perfectly under KDE.
| spion wrote:
| Am I the only one that doesn't like the win95 look anymore but
| still appreciates designs that are similarly conservative about
| whitespace? Is there any design system out there that is like
| that?
| ceeam wrote:
| You know the old saying: "BSD is for people who like Unix, Linux
| is for people who hate Windows". I don't think it's hate. I think
| it's "for people who are tsundere about Windows".
| anthk wrote:
| You say that, but jwm was born on Irix I think and plenty of
| people used that instead of MWM/FVWM and similar. In the end,
| you just managed windows, so using XFM/XFE with JWM was more
| than enough.
|
| Also, lots of *BSD people liked IceWM with Metal themes for
| similar reasons. The Windows UI was already peaking at
| usability, so they used that among virtual desktops and the
| power of Unix utilities on shells, tools and services.
| [deleted]
| accrual wrote:
| I also like the old quote "BSD is what you get when a bunch of
| Unix hackers sit down to try to port a Unix system to the PC.
| Linux is what you get when a bunch of PC hackers sit down and
| try to write a Unix system for the PC."
| [deleted]
| jtode wrote:
| Anyone know if there's an os/2 warp theme? I recall being quite
| pleased with it.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| Back then about just anything was better looking than Windows
| 95. OS/2 was slick. Mac computers had a very enjoyable UI. SGI
| machines had a very good looking UI.
|
| But people mostly only knew Windows 95, so that's what they
| remember.
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| I would say that Win95 aesthetics was about someone with an
| actual good taste taking Motif and making it not suck.
| Remember how selecting menu items by hovering was BIG? Coming
| from Windows 3.1/3.11, the usability improvement of this
| alone was massive. Same with mouse wheel becoming ubiquitous,
| courtesy of Microsoft (they weren't the first, but it's
| thanks to them that everyone and their dog could actually
| make use of it).
|
| Another thing about Win95 aesthetics (which peaked at the
| time of Windows 2000) was the extreme consistency which had
| been simply absent before that in the DOS/Win3/PC world.
| Maybe Apple could brag about it too, can't say about SGI (was
| it all like Motif in all applications, with colors/hotkeys
| set platform-wide, or was it the ugly Motif/Xaw/Athena mix
| seen elsewhere and each application having a mind of its
| own?). Man, you can't find it these days, especially since
| Electron.
|
| I'm purposely omitting Qt/GTK, as they have always felt like
| also-ran toolkits, mimicking the conventions of the platforms
| they inhabited, and I can't for the life of me remember when
| it was that they actually set any trends instead of mimicking
| some hotness of the day introduced by the dominant platforms.
| Clamchop wrote:
| I thought they were all similarly ugly. Thought so then and
| still do now. Drab grays and muted colors for miles.
| (Ignoring utility here.) Uglier stuff could be found off the
| beaten path, though.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Reflecting on the comments, I'm surprised - a little - that MS
| don't have backwards compatibility of GUI. Many older users like
| the interface not to change, or to change only superficially. It
| would, I think, be a usability improvement for many.
|
| As a "family admin" I'd want to update for security reasons, or
| if the new version is better optimised or lacks some bugs, but
| for many elders (IME) any significant changes to UI are
| devastating to their comfort in using the OS.
|
| MS just don't seem good at making windows (a DE), IMO.
| LeoNatan25 wrote:
| It's still possible to render similar kinds of controls in
| Windows. It's evident by old software that is still shipped in
| Windows.
|
| But judging by the abysmal state of Microsoft modern UI
| toolkits, and Microsoft's complete inability to adhere to any
| consistency between the different frameworks that render
| toolkits, I just don't see any way Microsoft could offer cross-
| OS theme support that would work in any meaningful way. This
| was possible up to and including Windows 7, but then Microsoft
| just derped in their UI development, and it has been more and
| more embarrassing with every Windows release.
| overgard wrote:
| They did keep classic mode up till Windows 7. After that it
| must have just been too niche
| tyingq wrote:
| It's still there in some places...try <WindowsKey>+r then run
| odbcad32.exe
|
| Click the "System DSN" tab, then "Add", Double-click the top
| entry ("Driver Da Microsoft..."), uncheck "Use Current
| Directory", then click the "Select Directory" button.
|
| Also try the "help" button.
| accrual wrote:
| I love that some of these old UIs are still present in
| current Windows 11 22H2. I was surprised "control
| userpasswords2" still exists.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| With certain programs (in this case Paint Shop Pro 5), you
| can get Windows 11 to render Windows Aero.[1]
|
| [1]: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/747297210613498
| 216/10...
| accrual wrote:
| That's excellent. I wonder how deeply the UI elements go.
| Like can I produce a UI from Windows 3 or 2000 on Windows
| 11 if I make the right Win32 calls? Is the classic theme
| really gone, or just aggressively hidden? The new Windows
| 11 taskbar is definitely new code and doesn't behave like
| the old one, so I imagine you can't have a true classic
| taskbar on 11.
| indigodaddy wrote:
| This might be fun for scambaiting?
| Karellen wrote:
| Such a pity GTK3 and later aren't intended to be themeable, and
| the devs make no release-to-release compatibility guarantees for
| the theme engines.
|
| If this only affected Gnome, I wouldn't mind so much. But so many
| regular non-Gnome apps I use are GTK-based, even if I pick a
| different DE (which I do), I can't personalise my own user
| experience in a way that's consistent. The UX I keep behind a
| password, so I doesn't matter if anyone else would get confused
| if they tried to use it, because they can't.
|
| I can still try to pick QT-based desktop apps where possible. And
| for some fairly simple apps, there are both GTK and QT
| implementations (e.g. calculators), so that's feasible. But a lot
| of apps have one main implementation in their niche, and you
| either have no choice, or if you pick the one with fewer
| developers some features just aren't there.
|
| I really feel like we've lost something significant from where
| things were 15-odd years ago.
| nils-herzig wrote:
| I really like GTK4 / Adwaita and dislike the look and feel of
| QT, but I guess that's just personal preference.
|
| You can change the colors of Adwaita using
| https://github.com/GradienceTeam/Gradience it even has a mode
| to extract colors from your background like current android
| versions
| jeroenhd wrote:
| I love the Gnome design language but the way they made theming
| so difficult has put me off using GTK for anything. Sadly, I
| don't know any better alternatives for my language of choice
| (Rust).
|
| I get that developers don't want their app to be stylized and
| broken by distro maintainers, but now none of them look native
| or good. It's like that time Android apps all started inventing
| their own bad UI themes, nothing feels native anymore and
| everything is a chore to use.
|
| In theory, if every app kept their libadwaita versions and
| modifications up to date, you can still offer themes and
| everything works great. I practice, there's inconsistency
| everywhere and theming is impossible to apply to every
| application.
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