[HN Gopher] Blue95: a desktop for your childhood home's computer...
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Blue95: a desktop for your childhood home's computer room
Author : elvis70
Score : 340 points
Date : 2025-03-30 15:30 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| esafak wrote:
| I'm trying to forget that horror show and you want to put it
| under a spotlight! If I never see a bsod or windows registry
| again it'll be too soon.
| stavros wrote:
| Well, at least buttons looked like buttons.
| rbanffy wrote:
| How cute... imagine my childhood home would have a computer with
| a graphical desktop...
|
| I feel so old now...
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Yeah as far as GUIs go, Win95 isn't in the "nostalgia" category
| for me, I was already well into adulthood.
|
| I _kind_ of get the appeal, but it 's also unnecessarily
| skeumorphic/fake-3d and there were some UX things that made
| little sense especially lumping all the window controls all
| together (including the destructive "close" X) where MacOS
| smartly separated them.
| abraxas wrote:
| The fake 3d is actually very useful in communicating what is
| a button or another interactive piece of the interface and
| what's not. The modern clean uis where everything is a thin
| rectangle or just text that you are supposed to click are a
| nightmare.
| alabastervlog wrote:
| Old screen caps of UIs with depth feel so _relaxing_ to
| look at, and I don't think it's just a nostalgia effect.
|
| It's like there's always just a _little_ extra brain power
| and attention being used by modern flat UIs, and you get to
| shut that off when you look at a depth-enhanced UI.
| rbanffy wrote:
| The most important part is that controls are consistent
| across applications. In that regard, tools and libraries
| that implement some look and feel rather than deferring
| it to the underlying environment are a disservice to
| users.
|
| Windows, for instance, has dozens of ways to do that, and
| you can find parts of Windows that use an archeological
| version of the controls. Nobody, it seems, bothered to
| reimplement the older APIs on top of the new ones.
| rbanffy wrote:
| I agree. Early Macs had to give buttons a 2D distinctive
| look. A good thing was that the look and feel were part of
| the OS and not the application, so everything would be
| consistent.
| mrweasel wrote:
| > where MacOS smartly separated them.
|
| Interesting that modern macOS now have them next to each
| other, like Windows.
|
| You'd be hard pressed to call the Window 95 UI pretty, but it
| is really functional. I'm still a firm believe that the
| majority of the work we do with computers today could be done
| within the Windows 95 shell. We need 64bit, more memory,
| faster CPUs, GPUs all that, but the modern UI aren't really
| "better", if anything many of them are more confusing. I
| think a lot of office works would be happy to just have kept
| the Window 95 era UI for Windows and Office.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > You'd be hard pressed to call the Window 95 UI pretty,
| but it is really functional.
|
| Ironically, the Windows 95 look seems a lot like a copy of
| the NeXT look, which is the OS all modern Macs are kind of
| running.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Yeah frankly I'd take the NeXT UI over any of them,
| including Mac OS X, which felt like a huge step backwards
| to me compared to NeXTstep
|
| EDIT: Sun's OpenLook is the other one from that era that
| was fantastic
| chuckadams wrote:
| The window decorations in Win95 are in fact pixel-for-
| pixel copies of the ones in NeXTSTEP.
| fallsoffbikes wrote:
| Though Apple has forgotten or ignored this in products like
| the Apple tv where restart and factory reset are right next
| to each other.
| pwython wrote:
| Especially when you're using that tiny trackpad remote.
| Overall, Apple TV works, but most of the apps UX suck, and
| that's not Apple's fault.
| spacedcowboy wrote:
| Yeah. My first computer I soldered the
| chips/resistors/capacitors/etc to the PCB... It had 1K of RAM,
| and the screen memory had to come out of that too...
|
| Someone wrote chess for it.
|
| [aside] It was a Sinclair ZX-81, and I was 11 at the time. My
| parents bought the kit and a second-hand black & white TV with
| a dial-tuner (no pushbuttons to change the channel) as an Xmas
| present ...
|
| I loved the _TV_ , it was _my_ TV when we only had one other in
| the house. I watched everything on that TV (even snooker and
| swore I could tell which ball was which)... After a couple of
| months, my dad started to get annoyed I 'd not bothered to
| build the computer, so I was dispatched to the shed to build
| it.
|
| A few days later (hey, I was in school), the thing worked and I
| was working my way through the (rather excellent) manual that
| came with it, getting to know it. One of the logic chapters had
| an example:
|
| [P]RINT 1+1=2
|
| (It was tokenised input, so you just pressed P and PRINT would
| come up in the built-in BASIC). Anyone here can see that the
| answer would be logical-true because 1+1 does equal 2, and
| indeed the computer printed "1" on the next line.
|
| Anyway, flush with this futuristic knowledge, I set it all up
| using the family TV in the lounge, and we went through the same
| thing, just to prove to everyone that it worked...
|
| [P]RINT 1+1=2
|
| 1
|
| "I knew it. You've buggered it", said my dad in disgust as he
| got up and walked out the room. I tried to explain the (new to
| me) concept of logical truth to him and how the computer
| represented it, but I don't think he ever really believed me...
|
| [/aside]
|
| Anyway, that Sinclair ZX81 fundamentally changed my life.
| Computers and computing opened up a whole new world. Some 45
| years later I'm about to retire from Apple as one of their most
| senior engineers, having been here for the last 20 years.
| Anyone with any Apple device is running some of the software
| I've written over the years which is kind of cool, but it's
| time to bow out.
| metadat wrote:
| This looks nice and easy to use.
|
| My hypothesis is today's "modern" OS user interfaces are
| objectively worse from a usability perspective, obfuscating key
| functionality behind layers of confusing menus.
|
| It reminds me of these "OS popularity since the 70s" time lapse
| views:
|
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=cTKhqtll5cQ
|
| The dominance of Windows is crazy, even today, Mac desktops and
| laptops are comparatively niche
| voidfunc wrote:
| I got in an argument with an accessibility engineer about this
| recently...
|
| The whole UI as branding thing has utterly killed usability.
| pwg wrote:
| "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when
| his salary depends on his not understanding it."
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/21810-it-is-difficult-to-
| ge...
| hyperbrainer wrote:
| It's interesting especially because it seems like companies
| today pour tens of millions into "accessibility", but I never
| see a thing's usability in terms of simple and easy-to-do-
| what-I-want UX fall in to the same category.
| rafram wrote:
| One is required by law and/or contract terms, the other is
| just nice to have.
| layer8 wrote:
| And that is why we can't have nice things, apparently.
| cenamus wrote:
| Even just simple UX testing with people that have never
| seen or used your software seems to be a lost art.
| hnthrowaway0315 wrote:
| Companies are outsourcing testing. I'm not surprised that
| they get rid of UI testing. Back in the day companies
| used to invite people to sit down and use their software.
| Nowadays they just push out whatever they have and then
| start collecting bug tickets. Then they let the community
| to vote on the tickets. It's basically a huge "pay for
| being a beta tester" scheme.
| ivan_gammel wrote:
| UX testing is not UI testing and it is not QA.
| girvo wrote:
| Quite, but lots of companies jam them all together these
| days.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| It's a completely predictable result if you think about it.
|
| Old style UI was developed with the findings of countless
| man-hours of UX research performed by field experts, while
| branded UI is typically whipped together purely based on
| trends and vibes in an evening by a visual designer who's
| probably never performed an ounce of serious research or user
| trials. It's natural that the latter is only going to be good
| at the most superficial of purposes. UI as branding is the
| McMansion of UX.
| bri3d wrote:
| I think it's worse from a time wasting standpoint, really -
| a lot of modern UX does have thousands of hours of UX
| research dumped into it, but with faulty metrics driven
| goal seeking and internal politics bolted on. I agree that
| Vibe Branding killed UX in the way you describe in the
| 2000s (remember when every company had some abominable
| Flash site?!), but now, we've come full circle: from the
| ashes we've allowed warring factions of UX researchers to
| return to create hundreds of carefully constructed
| disparate systems with no consistency.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| I don't think we're quite back to where we were, because
| branded UI widgets are almost always devoid of
| functionality compared to their traditional UI toolkit
| counterparts. If a feature is even slightly "power user",
| branded UI widgets probably don't implement it, even in
| tools made for technical users.
|
| One of my favorite examples is tree-style lists ("outline
| views" in AppKit nomenclature). On macOS these have a
| very convenient functionality where holding down option
| while expanding/collapsing a section performs that action
| on all children as well, and it's practically never
| implemented in custom-built tree widgets even in cases
| where the primary audience skews Mac-heavy.
| burnte wrote:
| > The whole UI as branding thing has utterly killed
| usability.
|
| This is caused by a change in who is hired as UI/UX
| developers. In days past it was HCI experts and engineers,
| now it's graphic designers. "Pretty" is the order of the day,
| not "useful". "There are too many menu items" is now answered
| with "So let's hide them" when it used to be "How can we
| organize them in the UI us a simple, discoverable manner?"
| But then that "overflow" menu (really? Needed menu commands
| are now OVERFLOW?) gets crowded so they start just removing
| features so the UI is nice.
| ivan_gammel wrote:
| >This is caused by a change in who is hired as UI/UX
| developers.
|
| ,,UX/UI developers" is a strange name for it.
|
| In 2000s the web enabled more sophisticated presentation
| designs and there was a push from client-server to web-
| based applications using incredibly strange technologies
| for building UIs -- HTML, CSS and JavaScript, which gave
| the rise to UX design as a interdisciplinary job
| (HCI+digital graphics design). By 2010 the internet of
| applications kicked off and in mid-2010s moved to mobile,
| dramatically increasing the demand for UX designers. By
| then it actually mattered more who is _hiring_ designers,
| not who is hired. Since only relatively small fraction of
| hiring managers does understand the scope of this job even
| now, they even started calling it ,,UX /UI designers" or
| ,,Product designers" as if that name change could help,
| still judging design work by often-fake screenshots on
| Behance rather than by case studies in the portfolio. Even
| HCI professionals are often reduced to mere graphic
| designers by those managers who skip research and apply
| ,,taste" to a science-based discipline. At the same time,
| since UX design is one of the most well-paid and less
| stressful creative jobs, a lot of people switched to it
| without proper education or experience, having no idea what
| is statistical significance or how to design a survey. And
| voila, we are here.
| girvo wrote:
| Having worked with amazing HCI experts over the years,
| you've hit the nail on the head. It's wild how much design
| is done for designs sake at my work, with nary a nod to HCI
| given. The a11y team try to patch over it as best as
| possible, but we end up with a mess, and I'm treated like a
| pariah for pushing back on some of it
| Lorkki wrote:
| It's also repeating what the hellscape of inconsistent
| skinned UIs did in the late 90s and early 2000s. People are
| looking back at those times with a rather selective memory.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > The whole UI as branding thing has utterly killed
| usability.
|
| Imagine if Active Desktop had taken over.
|
| I eventually came up with a not-awful use for AD but that was
| a few years after it went away.
| anthk wrote:
| It did under several ways since w98SE and Explorer with IE
| merged on.
| esafak wrote:
| Microsoft Windows programs hid functionality under layers of
| menus and the registry. MacOS, at least, surfaces much less
| functionality, because it offers sensible defaults. I never had
| to do anything akin to fiddling with the Windows Registry.
|
| I did like some Windows things, though, like the ribbon, and
| reconfigurable UIs. Today's UIs are more immutable, for the
| worse.
| bbqfog wrote:
| MacOS is pretty cursed. The equivalent to registry fiddling
| is doing anything in ~/Library/Application Support
|
| It still has "Services" as a hold over from Next that is
| completely broken and unused (but still present in every app
| for some reason). Now you also have the joy of diving deep
| into the Settings every time an app needs some sort of
| permission.
|
| I'd say something about .DS_Store files, but that's not
| really UI.
| anthk wrote:
| NeXTStep/GNUStep/Cocoa 'defaults' commands.
| brandon272 wrote:
| There is an entire ecosystem of free and paid Mac apps meant
| to augment the Mac experience because MacOS does not provide
| functionality or configuration needed for a sensible
| computing experience out of the box.
| exiguus wrote:
| I think, the main difference of MacOS and Windows is, that
| Windows allow drivers from 3rd-party. MacOS does not.
| Drivers means also hardware. So you can build your own PC.
| Same as with Linux.
|
| This is the Apple secret of success IMO. No 3rd-party
| drivers and hardware, means, it will just work and no one
| will blame you for stuff 3rd-parties messed up.
|
| But its also like: There is only a red and blue t-shirt.
| Choose. No gray, no white, no yellow, no printings.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| macOS allows third-party drivers too, Apple just wants
| vendors to write them in userspace rather than
| kernelspace. That's probably not the worst thing, because
| proprietary driver code is notoriously shoddy and should
| be run somewhere that limits the blast radius.
| exiguus wrote:
| Sure, i think the userspace restriction is also the
| reason, that nearly no 3rd-party hardware for Mac exist.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| That's mainly restricted to graphics cards. Audio cards
| like used for production as well as I/O (USB, etc) and
| networking cards have drivers and work fine given you
| have a PCI-E slot to plug them into, and of course almost
| anything external connected via USB or Thunderbolt works
| fine. For GPUs, it's only a specific subset of users that
| needs a discrete GPU, especially as the GPU built into
| M-series SoCs has become powerful enough for most uses
| outside of high-end gaming.
| zamadatix wrote:
| I'd agree macOS surfaces much less functionality but I feel
| like it's more "because they don't want you to feel like
| there is a choice to make in the first place" rather than
| "because the defaults are ideal for everyone". Over time it
| feels like "layers of menus" have definitely made their way
| into Apple's software anyways.
|
| The replacement to the registry seems to half be "magic CLI
| incantations for settings which can't be found in the GUI for
| some reason" and half "here's a $4.99 app to 3 finger tap to
| close tabs".
| p_l wrote:
| And the defaults system is just registry by another name
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| Not really, defaults are stored in per-application plist
| files rather than in a singular database.
| diggan wrote:
| > I never had to do anything akin to fiddling with the
| Windows Registry
|
| If I recall correctly, when I got my first Macbook, I had to
| edit plist files or something similar in order to do basic
| things like permanently showing hidden files, showing the
| full path in Finder, show file extensions for all file types,
| increase the animation speed so the computer didn't feel slow
| as molasses, etc, etc.
|
| Maybe these things are now easier to configure via GUI on
| macOS?
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| Toggling hidden file visibility in Finder and open/save
| dialogs has been doable with the key shortcut Command-
| Shift-. for quite some time now.
| diggan wrote:
| Is that permanent across reboots and all? I think that
| was the main issue I had with it, but was a long time ago
| now.
| foobarchu wrote:
| The last time I was setting up a system, it's still very
| difficult to find in the menus. If it's not discoverable
| and I have to know the incantation/shortcut to do it,
| then that's bad UI.
| baq wrote:
| One thing that is weird is that you're expected to look
| around the menu bar holding the option key as the menu
| contents change when that is pressed (also applies to tray
| icon menus, e.g. WiFi icon shows a lot of stuff when
| option-clicked.) IIRC some of what you say can be toggled
| with option menu items.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| It's not a 1:1 mapping, but much power user functionality in
| macOS is designed to progressively reveal itself as the user
| becomes more technically capable, a type of design known as
| progressive disclosure. This allows newbies to not feel
| overwhelmed while also allowing power users to feel at home.
|
| The problem is that way too many people approach macOS with
| the Windows way of doing things firmly planted in their minds
| as "correct", which interferes with this process. For
| example, over the years I've encountered numerous posters
| complaining about how macOS can't do X thing, after which I
| point out that X thing is _right there_ as an easy to find
| top level menu item, but the poster in question never
| bothered to take a look around and just assumed the
| functionality didn't exist since it wasn't surfaced the same
| way as under Windows or KDE or whatever they were coming
| from.
|
| Of course there are things macOS just doesn't do, but there's
| plenty that it _does_ if users are willing to set their
| preconceptions aside for a moment.
| exiguus wrote:
| If you approach macOS the Linux or BSD way, it feels like
| Windows Powershell. Of course you can use brew and stuff,
| setup you dev enviroments etc. But when it comes to system
| settings, its bad, very bad. Also stuff like docker, k8s
| suffer performance and usability.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| Docker, etc are going to suffer on anything that's not
| Linux due to how coupled they are to Linux. Even WSL
| isn't as good as bare metal Linux in that regard. To me
| it speaks to a need for return to platform agnosticism in
| dev tooling more than anything.
| cogman10 wrote:
| WSL2 works fine, but that's merely because it's a linux
| VM with a little polish.
|
| I'd kill to do dev on a linux machine, but alas it's not
| company policy :(
| exiguus wrote:
| Selecting the appropriate tool for the task at hand is
| crucial, in my opinion. However, I believe the choice is
| often influenced by companies mandating the use of Microsoft
| and Mac systems due to cost and maintenance considerations,
| rather than allowing employees to choose between Mac,
| Windows, or Linux based on their preferences. Proprietary
| software that only runs on Mac or Windows, never was an
| argument, because you can just RDP stream remote desktop apps
| or use the browser.
| burnte wrote:
| > I never had to do anything akin to fiddling with the
| Windows Registry.
|
| I don't believe you. You have never, EVER, NOT ONCE run a
| terminal command to change an option on MacOS? I just refuse
| to believe anyone on HN hasn't altered preferences in the
| terminal on MacOS.
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| > This looks nice
|
| These kinds of things almost always give me an uncanny-valley
| feeling. Here I'm looking at the screenshot and can't help
| noticing that the taskbar buttons are too close to the
| taskbar's edge, the window titles are too narrow, the folders
| are too yellow, and so on and so forth. (To its credit, Wine is
| the one exception that is not susceptible to this, even when
| configured to use a higher DPI value so the proportions aren't
| actually the ones I'm used to.) I'm not so much criticizing the
| theme's authors as wondering why this is so universal across
| the many replicas.
| mouse_ wrote:
| Computing is largely a cargo cult thing these days.
|
| The problem is that the interfaces these bootleg skins draw
| "inspiration" from were designed on the back of millions of
| pre-inflationary dollars' R&D from only the best at Golden-
| Age IBM, Microsoft, Apple, etc.. BeOS, OS/2, Windows 95-2000
| do not look the way they do because it looks good, they look
| the way they do because it works good, countless man hours
| went into ensuring that. Simply designing an interface that
| looks similar is not going to bring back the engineering
| prowess of those Old Masters.
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| I'm less inclined to attribute it to "these days", as I
| remember the contemporary copycat themes in e.g. KDE and Tk
| looking off as well. Even Swing with the native look-and-
| feel didn't quite look or feel right, IIRC.
|
| As a (weak) counterpoint to supplicating ourselves to the
| old UI masters, I submit Raymond Chen's observations from
| 2004[1] that the flat/3D/flat cycle is largely fashion,
| e.g. how the toolbars in Office 97 (and subsequent
| "coolbars") had buttons that did _not_ look like buttons
| until you hovered over them, in defiance of the Windows 95
| UI standard. (Despite Chen's characteristic confident tone,
| he doesn't at all acknowledge the influence of the limited
| palettes of baseline graphics adapters on the pre-Win95
| "flat" origins of that cycle.)
|
| Also worth noting are the scathing critiques of some
| Windows 95 designs[2,3] in the Interface Hall of Shame
| (2000). I don't necessarily agree with all of them (having
| spent the earlier part of my childhood with Norton
| Commander, the separate folder/file selectors in Windows
| 3.x felt contrived to me even at the time) but it helps
| clear up some of the fog of "it has always been this way"
| and remember some things that fit badly at first and never
| felt quite right (e.g. the faux clipboard in file
| management). And yes, it didn't fail to mention the Office
| 97 UI, either[4,5]. (Did you realize Access, VB, Word, and
| IE used something like three or four different forks of the
| same UI toolkit, "Forms3", among them--a toolkit that
| looked mostly native but was in fact unavailable outside of
| Microsoft?..)
|
| None of that is meant to disagree with the point that
| submitting to the idea of UI as branding is where it all
| went wrong. (I'll never get tired of mentioning that the
| futuristic UI of the in-game computers of the original Deus
| Ex, from 2000, supported not only Tab to go between
| controls and Enter and Esc to submit and dismiss, but also
| Alt accelerators, complete with underlined letters in the
| labels.)
|
| [1] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20040728-00/
| ?p=38...
|
| [2] http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/file95.htm
|
| [3] http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/explore.htm
|
| [4] http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/visual.html#VISUAL36
|
| [5] http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/visual.html#VISUAL38
| Uvix wrote:
| > Despite Chen's characteristic confident tone, he
| doesn't at all acknowledge the influence of the limited
| palettes of baseline graphics adapters on the pre-Win95
| "flat" origins of that cycle.
|
| It's right in the second sentence: "...Windows 1.0, which
| looked very flat because... color depth was practically
| non-existent."
| charcircuit wrote:
| >they look the way they do because it works good
|
| In modern times telemetry can show how well new designs
| work. The industry never forgot how to measure and do user
| research for ui changes. We've only gotten better at it.
| hakfoo wrote:
| Just because they're measuring doesn't mean they're
| measuring the same things as before.
|
| The goal in 1995 might be "The user can launch the text
| editor, add three lines to a file, and save it from a
| fresh booted desktop within 2 minutes".
|
| The goal in 2015 might be "we can get them from a bare
| desktop to signing up for a value-add service within 2
| minutes"
|
| I'd actually be interested if there's a lot of
| "regression testing" for usability-- if they re-run old
| tests on new user cohorts or if they assume "we solved
| XYZ UI problem in 1999" and don't revisit it in spite of
| changes around the problem.
| wlesieutre wrote:
| With so many things being ad-funded, I always wonder if
| what they're optimizing for is "it took the user 50%
| longer to complete a task"
| Narishma wrote:
| That assumes that they are using the telemetry to create
| a better product for the user rather than the developer.
| II2II wrote:
| Telemetry may tell you the "what" but, at best, it will
| only allow you to infer the "why". It may provide
| insights into how people do things, yet it will say
| nothing about how they feel about it. Most of all,
| telemetry will only answer the questions it is designed
| to answer. The only surprises will be in the answers
| (sometimes). There is no opportunity to be surprised by
| how the end user responds.
| everdrive wrote:
| I've had an alternate theory for a while. Prior to
| verbose metrics, UIs could only be designed by experts
| and via small samples of feedback sessions. And UIs used
| to be much, much better. I suspect two things have
| happened:
|
| - With a full set of metrics, we're now designing toward
| the bottom half of the bell curve, ie, towards the users
| who struggle the most. Rather than building UIs which are
| very good, but must be learned, we're now building UIs
| which must suit the weakest users. This might seem like a
| good thing, but it's really not. It's a race to the
| bottom, and robs those novice users from ever having the
| chance of becoming experts.
|
| - Worse, because UIs must always serve the interests of
| the bottom of the bell curve, this actually is why we
| have constant UI churn. What's worse than a bad UI? 1,000
| bad UIs which each change every 1-6 months. No one can
| really learn the UIs if they're always churning, and the
| metrics and the novice users falsely encourage teams to
| constantly churn their UIs.
|
| I strongly believe that you'd see better UIs either with
| far fewer metrics, or with products that have smaller,
| expert-level user bases.
| cyberax wrote:
| There's a much simpler explanation. At some point, the UI
| becomes about as good as it can be. It can't really be
| improved any further without changing the whole paradigm,
| and just needs to be maintained.
|
| But product managers inside the large corporations can't
| get promoted for merely maintaining the status quo. So
| they push for "reimagining" projects, like Google's
| "Material Screw You" UI.
|
| And we get a constant treadmill of UI updates that don't
| really make anything better.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| I don't believe either is the primary driver of modern UI
| design. Cynical as it may be, I think the only things
| that get any level of thought are:
|
| 1. Which design is most effective at steering the most
| users to the most lucrative actions
|
| 2. What looks good in screenshots, presentations, and
| marketing
|
| The rest is tertiary or an afterthought at best. Lots of
| modern UI is actually pretty awful for those mentioned
| bottom of the bell curve users and not much better for
| anybody else in terms of being easy to use or serving the
| user's needs.
|
| Proper use of analytics might be of assistance here, but
| those are also primarily used to figure out the most
| profitable usage patterns, not what makes a program more
| pleasant or to easy to use. They're also often twisted or
| misused to justify whatever course of action the PM in
| question wants to take, which is often to degrade the
| user experience in some way.
| Lammy wrote:
| Fuck telemetry. Don't spy on me while telling me it's in
| my best interest. Don't spy on me at all.
| j45 wrote:
| Someone having spend too much time using the original
| replicating it would likely notice these things.
|
| Still it is hopefully a nice introduction for some.
| Tade0 wrote:
| To be fair at least the title bar height was configurable and
| I recall at least one original Windows theme taking advantage
| of that.
| bowlofhummus wrote:
| The text is the worst. The icons are nice and pixely but the
| fonts are baby butt smooth anti aliased
| toast0 wrote:
| Honestly, I don't think anyone has done real user research on
| basic interfaces since Microsoft did it for Windows 95. I'm
| pretty sure that was the last publication I've seen.
|
| It's a lot of time, effort, and expense to run user research,
| but the potential benefits to the users are big.
| exiguus wrote:
| What do you mean exactly? Like the Menu-Issues in Windows 10?
| Because from a UX perspective, basically nothing has change. UI
| of course, but UX is the same like in the 90's following "The
| Design of Everyday Things" by Donald A.
|
| I think its more about the change management, expectations. For
| example in Win XP you had the option to use the NT theme. As a
| user: "I can decide when to move on to the new design."
|
| Usually around 50% of your users are conservative about change.
| You have to keep this in mind when u change design. On the
| other hand, if you sell a product with subscription, you have
| to introduce new feature, else user will move to another
| product. But, when you introduce new feature, UI gets more
| complicated and user will blame you for that.
| myself248 wrote:
| Like making window borders 1px wide, even as screen pixel
| density increases. It's darn near impossible to resize a
| window anymore.
|
| Like making buttons auto-hide unless you mouse-over them. I
| don't remember when this came in, but the default PDF viewer
| in something did this, and I spent _weeks_ being baffled that
| some jerk made a PDF viewer that couldn't zoom in on the
| page, until I randomly waggled the mouse for some reason and
| the missing buttons magically appeared. I have no words for
| how upsetting this was.
|
| Like having icons-only for many functions, with no text-and-
| icons or text-only option to replace them. I'm sure some
| people are fine with that, but other people can scan a screen
| for a desired word MUCH faster than they can scan for a
| desired icon, and removal of text labels is just an insult to
| that segment of the userbase.
|
| Like no longer highlighting, or even having, hotkeys for many
| menus. I can alt-space or alt-menukey my way through a
| late-90s menu tree _way_ faster than I can mouse through it,
| even with today's better mice, but that simply doesn't work
| anymore in a great many programs.
|
| It's one thing for people who've never known a different UI
| to just be slow in this one and that's all they've known, and
| that's fine for them I guess, if it's pretty and they prefer
| that, or if keyboards frighten them.
|
| But for people who have DECADES of reflexes invested in these
| shortcuts to suddenly find that they don't work anymore, and
| we're forced to SLOW DOWN and be less productive than in the
| past, that's a high insult.
|
| Microsoft spilled tankers of ink in the 90s talking about how
| their new GUI patterns would make people more productive by
| unifying these things across programs (which was true; in the
| DOS era every program made up its own shortcuts and ways to
| access them), and folks who learned them are now being
| punished for trusting MS with our loyalty.
|
| "Basically nothing has changed" my ass.
| exiguus wrote:
| I agree, thats bad. And for example the "icon only" thing
| follows a bad but hip UI pattern where designers assume the
| knowledge of the icon meaning of the user. They should not
| in my opinion. I mean, in the end, you can decide. 1. To
| learn all this new patterns in windows. or 2. Move on to
| another, more stable window environment like gnome or KDE
| or whatever. In the end, its all about the effort for now
| and on the long run. And you get forced to calculate that
| because of the introduced change.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| The 'icon only' thing is less of a problem when you can
| hover your mouse pointer on the icon and get a tooltip
| that tells you what it's for.
| exiguus wrote:
| No no no. That's bad, relay bad because this involves at
| minimum 2 unnecessary steps:
|
| 1. touch the mouse (if not already) 2. move the mouse to
| the button 3. wait until the tool tip appears
| exiguus wrote:
| There is also a very good example about this in The
| Design of Everyday Things - the one with the revolver
| doors.
| 4k93n2 wrote:
| > Like making window borders 1px wide, even as screen pixel
| density increases. It's darn near impossible to resize a
| window anymore.
|
| check out altDrag if youre on windows (its discontinued now
| but i think i remember seeing newer forks)
|
| it lets you hold down a key and then drag the cursor in one
| of the 4 quarters of a window to resize it.
|
| a lot of the ubuntu based distros ive tried have had this
| feature built in for a while now and its far superior
| myself248 wrote:
| Thank you for the recommendation, I'll look at installing
| that.
|
| But the problem with add-ons is that every machine you
| use will have a different combination of them installed.
| Maybe you're at work and don't have privileges to install
| them. Maybe you forgot to install one on your desktop
| even if it's on your laptop, etc.
|
| And building it into "a lot" of Ubuntu-based distros
| lacks discoverability. I might have that now on the
| machine I'm typing this on, but it does me no good if I
| don't know it's there. (Everything in Linux has worse-
| than-terrible discoverability, but that's another rant
| entirely.)
|
| MS's dominant position meant their defaults Just Worked
| everywhere, and when those defaults were good, they were
| really, really good, by virtue of their ubiquity. Then
| they fucked us by using their dominant position to
| just... I don't know... completely lose the plot? Aside
| from HiDPI fractional scaling and support for large
| monitor "maximize to a quadrant" and stuff, I can't point
| to a single MS UI improvement since the XP days.
| Everything else has just gotten worse, fragmented, and
| for no good reason.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| I'm sorry, but absolutely no. Fuck no. Nothing from Microsoft
| has even been in the same building as a copy of "The Design
| of Everyday Things", or as a copy of any old-school UX book
| from before UX meant "Electron". UX is just as much about the
| "how" as it is about the "what", and Microsoft has been
| failing everyone lately on this count.
| exiguus wrote:
| Thats not true. For example simple stuff like Toggles to
| the hole Windows management is derived from that. IMO the
| huge change in Windows 11 is how the Menu, App Starter and
| so on works (if you use the mouse).
| floundy wrote:
| Have you used Windows 11? When right clicking, there's now a
| context menu within the right click context menu. To see what
| you could see in Win10, you have to right click, then select
| "See more options" or something. Which just opens up the
| "old" Win10 context menu with a totally different visual
| appearance than the Win11 one. Talk about jank and bloat.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > The dominance of Windows is crazy, even today, Mac desktops
| and laptops are comparatively niche
|
| But for whom and to do what? People around me, like my wife and
| mother in law, are happy with an Android phone. If they use a
| computer, the only thing they need is a browser.
|
| I wouldn't be surprised if 90%+ of all Windows users would use
| Windows for one thing: click on a browser icon.
|
| That's why after one malware too many I confiscated my mother-
| in-law's Windows laptop and got her a Chromebook.
|
| I'd say that's why the shit UI/UX doesn't even matter anymore
| for most users: the only use a browser anyway.
| breadwinner wrote:
| Agree that "modern" OS user interfaces are objectively worse
| from a usability perspective. That's thanks to Flat UI, mostly.
|
| In my opinion, nothing beats the 35-year-old NeXTSTEP interface
| (which W95 is a weak imitation of):
|
| https://www.gnustep.org/carousel/PC_1300x650.png
| hnthrowaway0315 wrote:
| For modern Windows operating system, i.e. >= Windows 10,
| getting rid of ads, weather, auto-update and search bar can
| improve UI usability significantly.
|
| Windows 95 was not stable enough back then. I believe Windows
| 2000 was the first OS that was easy to use and relatively
| stable. XP and 7 are both solid options too.
|
| I have used both MacOS X and modern MacOS (15) and the UI of X
| is definitely way better than the UI of 15. It is more clean
| cut.
| epolanski wrote:
| 98 was a very good os. I don't think many got 2000, XP was
| the major windows for millennials.
| anthk wrote:
| XP was almost a re-skinned 2000. Most drivers for XP worked
| under 2000 and viceversa.
| leonidasv wrote:
| When I used XFCE as my daily driver, I once tried installing
| Chicago95 just for nostalgia and it stick as my daily driver
| for almost a year! The UI is less distracting than modern UIs
| and there's something to it that makes it easier to just know
| which window is open over which window that's lacking in modern
| UIs (I think it's the over-reliance on soft shadows and the
| borderless windows).
|
| Eventually, I stopped using it because: 1- it was always
| annoying to send an screenshot to someone and have to explain
| that no, I wasn't using Windows 95, and why; 2- the grey-ish
| look of everything started to bother me over time; 3- I wanted
| a more integrated desktop experience and moved to KDE Plasma.
| Still, I configured my Plasma to work like old Windows: window
| titles on taskbar, zero to none animations, etc.
| caseyy wrote:
| I also dailied it on XFCE. The UI was very utilitarian and
| purposeful. I suppose aesthetically it is unimpressive and
| not streamlined, but it serves the purpose of being a good
| _interface_ to _do_ a _task_.
|
| Same as you say, people have asked me a lot about it and even
| asked me if I could set it up for them. The theme is
| evangelizing Linux a little bit, and that is interesting. In
| the right hands, these UI principles could convert many
| people to some product.
|
| P.S. You can now change the grey-ish look with Win95-style
| theming support. I've not used it, but here's more info: http
| s://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95/blob/master/Plus/READ...
| keyringlight wrote:
| >and there's something to it that makes it easier to just
| know which window is open over which window that's lacking in
| modern UIs (I think it's the over-reliance on soft shadows
| and the borderless windows).
|
| I think this started with Vista, I remember watching a video
| criticizing the new love of glass effects on UI chrome as it
| got rid of or minimized the color/shading difference between
| focused/unfocused windows. The example the video used was 6
| notepad windows and pick which one was focused, and the main
| cue you'd need to look for is that the window with focus had
| a close button colored red.
|
| Thin borders and minimalist/hiding scrollbars is another one
| that annoys me, give me something graphical for my gaze to
| grasp.
| trbutler wrote:
| Yes. I'd love to see someone take the basic design of Windows
| 95 or even early OS X and reimplement it not so much visually,
| but tactilely. Make something that works as well, is as simple
| but isn't nostalgia.
|
| In any case though, this particular attempt at giving a
| complete Windows 95 experience is quite cool.
| hx8 wrote:
| > The dominance of Windows is crazy, even today, Mac desktops
| and laptops are comparatively niche
|
| I was actually surprised that macOS/Linux/ChromeOS together are
| >20% of all desktop/laptops. I would have expected Microsoft
| machines to be closer to 90% than 80%.
| everdrive wrote:
| I'm surprised by the breakdown as well. At least according to
| these two citations in Wikipedia, the breakdown is:
|
| ---
|
| For desktop computers and laptops, Microsoft Windows has 71%,
| followed by Apple's macOS at 16%, unknown operating systems
| at 8%, desktop Linux at 4%, then Google's ChromeOS at
| 2%.[3][4]
|
| ---
|
| [3] "Now more than ever, ChromeOS is Linux with Google's
| desktop environment". About Chromebooks. 1 August 2023.
| Retrieved 25 September 2024.
|
| [4]"Desktop Operating System Market Share Worldwide".
| StatCounter Global Stats. Retrieved 9 March 2025.
| hi_hi wrote:
| As a kid, the OS's supported me in learning. They were simple,
| intuitive and rewarding. I'd click around and explore, and
| discover cool things like a Wheezer music video, or engaging
| puzzle games.
|
| There was no one who could help me when I got stuck, beyond
| maybe an instruction manual. I just had to figure it out,
| mostly by trial and error. I learned so much, eventually being
| able to replace hardware, install and upgrade drivers, re-
| install the entire OS and partition the hard drive, figure out
| networking and filesystems. It built confidence.
|
| Now my kid sits infront of an OS (Windows, Mac, it doesn't
| really matter) and there's so much noise. Things popping up,
| demanding attention. Scary looking warnings. So much choice.
| There's so many ways to do simple things. Actions buried deep
| within menus. They have no hope of building up a mental model
| or understanding how the OS connects them to the foundations of
| computing.
|
| Even I'm mostly lost now if there's a problem. I need to search
| the internet, find a useful source, filter out the things that
| are similar to my problem but not the same. It isn't rewarding
| any more, it's frustrating. How is a young child meant to
| navigate that by themselves?
|
| This looks like a step in the right direction. I look forward
| to testing it out.
| underlipton wrote:
| There're also performance issues. Building muscle memory
| (which means offloading tasks from working memory, leaving it
| open for learning) can't happen if you're constantly trying
| to figure out when the system is going to actually respond to
| your input.
| accrual wrote:
| > Things popping up
|
| This is one of my biggest frustrations with modern GUI
| computing. It's especially bad with Windows and Office, but
| it happens on iOS and macOS too to an extent. Even though
| I've had Office installed for weeks I _still_ get a "look
| over here at this new button!" pop-up while I'm in the middle
| of some Excel task. Pop-up here, pop-up there. It's insane
| the number of little bubbles and pop-ups and noise we
| experience in modern computing.
| fragmede wrote:
| Omfg I do not need national political news shoved into my
| face in on the left side of my taskbar while I'm trying to
| focus on work, thank you Microsoft, k thx bye!
| Andrex wrote:
| Humans hate being bored but only dick-around and learn things
| like this when they're bored. Speaking personally, I guess.
|
| Since the 90s we've found "better" ways at "curing" our
| boredom. Put this UI on a modern OS in front of a kid today
| and they would just download Steam, Chrome and Discord. And
| be assured, they're very proficient at the in-and-outs of
| _those_ platforms.
|
| Just some random thoughts I had, not sure any of it tracks...
| girvo wrote:
| > I learned so much, eventually being able to replace
| hardware
|
| As a young teenager in the early-mid 2000s, I learned the
| hard way what the little standoffs are for by killing a
| motherboard by screwing it directly into the steel case :')
|
| Never made that mistake again, that's for sure. And I share
| all the same experiences as yourself
| epolanski wrote:
| Mobile too, I'm sick of those OSs updating every 18 months
| because some product person along marketing decides the wheel
| has to be reinvented otherwise there will be no buzz.
|
| I have a harder and harder time navigating both iOS and Android
| as time goes, should be the opposite.
|
| Same for Windows or MacOs.
| walrus01 wrote:
| Give today's XFCE4 a try, on debian stable or testing. It's a
| remarkably no bullshit GUI for use with xorg. You can of course
| still install all the gnome and kde libraries and run all the
| gnome and kde applications, though things will look a little
| bit mismatched.
| anthk wrote:
| It needs the BSOD screensaver from XScreensaver, for sure. And,
| maybe, DOSBox-X or DOSEmu2.
|
| Also:
|
| - Pan
|
| - Sylpheed
|
| - Audacious with the WinAMP theme
|
| - Hexchat kinda has a MIRC vibe
|
| - Parole looks like WMP from < v9 releases
|
| - You can't simulate a dialer, but with trickle you can mimic a
| 56k/ISDN connection pretty well
|
| - SyncTERM for BBS's
|
| - ScummVM, with just a bilinear filter, because I played tons of
| adventures
|
| - There's an SDL2 reimplementation of Space Cadet Pinball at
| github.
|
| - Trigger Rally would look like a great shareware game
|
| - Pidgin, hands down. Either you were an AOL user in America, or
| a MSN user in Europe. It has emoticons, not emojis. Add that
| annoying notification theme with a sound and that would be the
| very late 90's/early 00's (my early teen years)
| esafak wrote:
| Trillian > Pidgin. What's Pan?
| anthk wrote:
| A news reader (NNTP). OFC, geek people would use SLRN, but we
| are mimicking Windows.
| brandon272 wrote:
| Emoticons! I completely forgot about that term.
| emidln wrote:
| This looks neat. I remember the various fvwm95 and icewm themes
| doing a similar number in the late 90s and early 2000s.
|
| It would be fun to pair this with Gambas[0], a free VB6 clone
| that works with GTK.
|
| [0] https://gambaswiki.org/website/en/main.html
| ThinkingGuy wrote:
| qvwm was another window manager that sought to emulate the look
| and feel of Windows:
|
| https://qvwm.sourceforge.net/index_en.html
| bsnnkv wrote:
| This still remains the absolute pinnacle of cohesive desktop
| environment design in my books.
| InsideOutSanta wrote:
| I think the desktop operating systems of that era were at a
| sweet spot. They were technically advanced enough to render
| good-looking, crisp color user interfaces. However, most people
| were still novices at using computers, so OS designers
| consciously designed their operating systems to be as clear as
| possible. Applications tended to be written for each individual
| platform and to follow its UI guidelines.
|
| Windows 95, NT, System 7 and System 8, BeOS, and NextSTEP all
| had really clear UX. You always knew where to drag a window,
| what was clickable, where to find settings, etc.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| An aspect of System 7/Mac OS 8/9 that I find criminally
| underrated is how flexible it is.
|
| For those versions, a good bulk of the "system" isn't part of
| the system proper but instead implemented by way of
| extensions and control panels loaded at startup. The OS
| itself is extremely minimal, basically just enough to provide
| a barebones desktop and act as a substrate for apps to run
| on. Everything else, including "core" functionality like
| audio and networking, was implemented in an extension.
|
| This meant that you could pare back the OS to be extremely
| lean and only have the exact functionality you personally
| needed at that precise moment and nothing else, and doing so
| didn't require you to recompile a kernel or anything like
| that -- just create an extension set that only loaded what
| you needed. This was excellent for use cases like games and
| emulators where you wanted every last ounce of resources to
| go to those, and nice for single purpose machines too (no
| point in loading game controller support on a box that only
| ever runs Photoshop and Illustrator).
|
| Of course the way it was implemented is awful by modern
| standards, but the concept is golden and I think there should
| be OS projects trying to replicate it.
| InsideOutSanta wrote:
| I remember creating different extension sets using the
| built-in Extension Manager and the third-party tool
| Conflict Catcher. I had sets for gaming, video editing, and
| normal usage. It was a simple matter of selecting the
| correct set and rebooting. Or you could hit shift on
| startup and start into a minimal system without any
| extensions.
|
| There's a good reason the third-party extension manager was
| called "Conflict Catcher," but the power and flexibility
| such a system grants users is unmatched.
| vanschelven wrote:
| > However, most people were still novices at using computers
|
| It has (to my surprise, initially) been my experience that
| "kids these days" are more novice at (desktop) computer-usage
| than the people of the 90s
| stonogo wrote:
| "I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions
| to technologies: 1. Anything that is in the world when you're
| born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the
| way the world works. 2. Anything that's invented between when
| you're fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and
| revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. 3.
| Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the
| natural order of things." -- Douglas Adams
| jemurray wrote:
| My childhood home would need DOS. Maybe deskview for
| multitasking. :)
| esafak wrote:
| DESQview with a Q for Quarterdeck :)
| xtracto wrote:
| Dosshell ha! Or xtree gold . Great times.
| OsrsNeedsf2P wrote:
| Does this project offer anything besides Chicago95's UI pre-
| installed?
| fsiefken wrote:
| would be nice if it would have wine installed so it can run
| most windows apps for where there is no good linux alternative.
| xyplorer, sumatra, irfanview
|
| perhaps a shell where root is mapped to C:\
| doright wrote:
| I like themes like this. The only thing that hampers the
| authenticity for me, and this isn't the fault of the author
| really, is the super high resolution fonts compared to what was
| available back then. There's just something charming about low
| resolution fonts that are readable enough on screen, probably
| nostalgia.
|
| I think any type of pixel font authentic to a couple decades ago
| won't look good on a 4K monitor, unfortunately. It got to the
| point where I ordered a 1024x768 monitor just to play old games
| with a period system.
| wobfan wrote:
| I actually would think less of this as a look back into the
| past but hopefully as a real alternative to the current DEs,
| which obviously then needs to have high res fonts. That would
| be nice.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| I wouldn't say that's so "obvious". I for one would prefer
| the original pixel fonts, but size adjusted to fit my screen
| density. By hand, if required.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| If we're talking Windows 9x, the "original fonts" could
| also be TrueType, hence arbitrarily resized. Yes, the
| original Windows 95 included a pixel font for the UI but
| then TrueType fonts like Verdana and Tahoma were added soon
| after that and were commonly used.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| But didn't they include handcrafted hinting bytecode
| models something like that?
| dfox wrote:
| Another issue with modern recreations of old UIs is that the
| dimensions are usually subtly wrong, which for me ruins the
| feeling. Some of that is related to the fonts having different
| height, but in many cases it is just that something is one-
| pixel off and just looks wrong. For the 95-style UI the common
| issue are control borders (especially the high-light side of
| "3d" controls), of which there is a huge amount of examples on
| the screenshot.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| For 4K monitors, why not just pixel-double? Integer scaling
| will solve many issues introduced by pixel fonts.
| doright wrote:
| You're right in that there's nothing stopping one from doing
| so (I even use an integer scaler for old games on my main
| computer), it's just a tradeoff between "doing what's
| possible" and "having the _most_ authentic experience one can
| ".
|
| If we're talking about the subjective experience of
| recreating "a child's bedroom computer" from the mid
| 90s-early 00s, a widescreen aspect ratio alone would be
| jarring, since my conception of a monitor for such a system
| is a 4:3 CRT. So for me, little else would reach that level
| except a system with the same aspect ratio and a similar DPI.
|
| Not only that, but UI design itself has undergone many shifts
| since that era to account for the types of monitors those UIs
| are being designed for. There's not as much of a need for
| pixel-perfect design when vector-based web UIs dominate the
| desktop application space nowadays, relegating those that go
| back to older UI paradigms to enthusiasts who still remember
| earlier times. Or maybe people who develop for fantasy
| consoles.
|
| I should mention while I'm at it that those sort of faux-
| pixel art shaders used in some games come off as quite
| jarring to me since I expect UIs to be meticulously laid out
| for the original screen size, not just for blowing up
| arbitrary content 2x or 4x on a huge widescreen monitor. I
| sometimes feel those are meant to represent a nostalgic
| feeling of some kind, being pixelated and all, but really it
| just makes me wish there were some alternate reality in which
| people still designed games and desktop applications for
| 800x600 or 1024x768 monitors again.
|
| It's interesting at present how there's stuff like 4K and
| then there's the playdate with a relatively tiny handheld
| resolution, but relatively little interest for new content
| for those types of resolutions in-between.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Pixel fonts don't accurately represent the 90's UIs because we
| don't use CRTs anymore. The poor souls buying the very first
| terrible flat screen monitors may have used computers like
| that, but most of that era was experienced using smudgy, edge
| blurring CRTs.
|
| You could probably create a CRT-filter-based font for high
| resolution screens (though you'd probably still need to
| optimise for subpixel layout for accuracy, even on 4k
| monitors).
| mfro wrote:
| Is it really necessary to spin up an entirely new distro for an
| XFCE+GTK theme?
| grayhatter wrote:
| > Stop spending time on things I don't care about
|
| It's ok for people to waste time building stuff they think is
| cool. Did it need to be a distro? No but it also didn't need to
| exist. I'm glad it exists though, I think it really whips the
| llamas ass!
| charcircuit wrote:
| This attitude is why Linux based operating systems have such
| poor market share on the desktop. Opportunity costs are real.
| Friction is real. You don't see Windows creating a new OS for
| a single theme. You don't see macOS do it either.
| immibis wrote:
| You don't see Windows themes at all.
| keyringlight wrote:
| I see it as one of the consequences of freedom, but perhaps
| also a gap in packaging where they can't bundle up their
| changes in a form to be applied onto another base.
|
| That 'base' is one issue I've been thinking about with
| linux, I have similar concerns about the cost of everyone
| being able to make their own distro for their own slight
| variation on something else. It's not that I think it's a
| bad thing to pathfind in new areas, but the replication in
| building/supporting it all, getting users to pick between 4
| similar variants of the same thing, and accounting for
| "you're using KustomLinux, which is 2 steps removed from
| CommonLinux" and all the little differences between them.
| It's an interesting contrast against standardization, but I
| can't help wondering how it would change the
| approachability of linux if the starting point was limited
| to one of the big distros and then variants are layered on
| top of that.
| bitbasher wrote:
| It's not complete until you have a comet cursor and several IE
| toolbars that were somehow installed.
| hybrid_study wrote:
| Or Microsoft Bob somewhere
| vardump wrote:
| My childhood home's computer said 38911 BYTES FREE.
| myself248 wrote:
| SYS 64738
| jhbadger wrote:
| And mine just said ]# as it waited for you to type an Applesoft
| command. It is always weird when people say something is from
| "your childhood" as opposed to theirs. I remember the 1990s,
| sure, but I was already an adult.
| ipcress_file wrote:
| Was that a C64? My VIC-20 had about a tenth of that!
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| Computers from my childhood wouldn't fit in my bedroom but I
| did bring punchcards home.
| herrherrmann wrote:
| This looks great with some apps that have matching themes, but I
| wonder if it quickly falls apart once you rely on apps with very
| non-consistent UIs (audio/video software, Discord, Spotify,
| Slack, and basically all other Electron-based apps). Although I
| guess there might be some matching CSS injection hacks available
| for the Electron ones?
| haunter wrote:
| A better modern middle ground imo is the KD3 continuation project
| https://www.trinitydesktop.org/
| haunter wrote:
| *KDE3
| ranger_danger wrote:
| Why are recreations of old UIs always differently wrong? Is
| pixel-perfection too much to ask for?
| rikthevik wrote:
| Well, it is difficult and a lot of work.
|
| Maybe _you_ can help.
| ranger_danger wrote:
| I have made pixel-perfect renditions before, but I would be
| worried to release them for fear of legal problems.
| shrx wrote:
| I guess you self-answered your question then.
| wvbdmp wrote:
| Not really, cause these guys don't seem to be afraid to
| use the Windows logo, so why not use historically
| accurate fonts, icons etc.?
| qwertox wrote:
| `/var/home/afidel/`
|
| There are some pretty good desktop environments for Linux which
| emulate the Windows desktop, so that old Windows users would feel
| at home immediately.
|
| But I've never seen them emulate the filesystem, which is what
| took most old Windows users the biggest effort to understand. And
| the Linux filesystem raises it to a new level of complexity,
| which makes every old Windows users want to go back to Windows
| immediately.
|
| With "old" users I don't mean experienced users.
|
| Is there some kind of overlay which does all this
| `C:\User\afidel\Desktop` mapping for those users?
| nostrademons wrote:
| My childhood computer was a Mac. Anyone have a theme that
| emulates System 6.08?
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| Not System 6, but 9:
|
| https://github.com/grassmunk/Platinum9
| MarkusWandel wrote:
| Three modern desktop environments that I use:
|
| - Windows 10/11. Especially in 11, it's easiest just to type the
| start of an app's name into the search box. As opposed to the two
| clicks it takes to get to the "traditional" menu where you still
| have to scroll to find it.
|
| - Gnome (only on fresh Linux installs, usually replaced with Mate
| pretty soon). Has a smartphone-style app grid, but here, too, its
| quickest just to type the start of the app's name.
|
| - Mate: Modern, but still has the Windows 95 paradigm (easy
| enough to collapse the two toolbars into just one bottom one).
| Still my favourite desktop environment.
|
| Not all fancy graphic stuff is good. And don't even get me
| started on how hard it is to drag an app window to another screen
| these days - on Windows. You really have to find the 2% or so of
| the top bar that's still draggable and not cluttered up by other
| stuff.
| teamonkey wrote:
| How do you get Windows to launch an installed app after you
| type the first few letters, instead of searching the web with
| Edge and Bing?
| hn92726819 wrote:
| You can download openshell and it will replace the start menu
| from the start menu from whatever era you want (XP, 7, 8, I
| think 10 too). It's open source as well
| MarkusWandel wrote:
| Type into the search box and when the app icon comes up,
| click on it.
| arcmechanica wrote:
| "I searched bing for you and here's the link to Word on the
| web"
| wavemode wrote:
| The decline in usability and organization of the Windows start
| menu over the years has been frankly staggering.
|
| Whenever I see screenshots of the old menu I get pangs of
| nostalgia.
| MarkusWandel wrote:
| At least you get the right-click menu that has a lot of handy
| stuff in the old format.
| MarkusWandel wrote:
| I think they drank the Macintosh kool-aid and expect you to
| have all your commonly used apps pinned. In Win11 this even
| looks sort of like a Mac dock. Still made no sense to ruin
| the usability of the start menu which _they_ invented.
| arcmechanica wrote:
| What happens when you are no longer the darling. And PMs
| need to ship something _new_ to get noticed, so they screw
| it all up
| protocolture wrote:
| I am 99% sure that this is the result of academic GUI
| design and focus testing.
|
| I read all the Windows 8 development blogs, and
| everything they wrote about seemed absolutely justified.
| Then you actually use the thing and it was a nightmare.
|
| Same with their approach to hardware, the Duke Xbox
| controller tested really well, but then someone with
| daintier hands went to use it and uh actually its great
| for like 15% of the user base.
| leptons wrote:
| I use two free programs to return my computer usability to
| Windows 10 days.
|
| https://open-shell.github.io/Open-Shell-Menu/
|
| https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher
|
| Without these I would probably give up on computers and go
| live under a bridge.
| geor9e wrote:
| I remember a couple kids with Windows 95 PCs at home. They seemed
| like such richie rich's. We'd all play Wolfenstein when we'd
| sleep over at their houses. My childhood computer was a WebTV,
| hacked to get dialup internet for free, on a 100 lb CRT TV from
| Goodwill. I finally scraped up the money for an actual PC some
| time in highschool.
| brundolf wrote:
| Based on the description I was hoping it would include some
| classic DOS and Windows games to play via wine :)
| jwitchel wrote:
| Usually the observation that "a widely used thing is objectively
| bad" is strong market signal for entrepreneurial opportunity in a
| big tam.
|
| I for one would welcome a set of deeply integrated ui
| improvements in a Mac that included a better file manager, better
| window management, better desktop search, a contact manager just
| that worked, a messaging client that just worked, audio and
| camera controls that just worked, a calculator that didn't suck,
| etc.
|
| I'd pay at least $100 a year for that tool set.
| deadbabe wrote:
| This _looks_ neat, but the problem with all these nostalgia
| fueled projects is that if you use it seriously you're basically
| LARPing being in a kinder past. Eventually it just gives an empty
| feeling, and you long for days when interfaces didn't just look
| like this for fun, it's because that's what they simply were, and
| this was the state of the art. But you can never go back to those
| days.
| aantix wrote:
| This looks wonderful to use. Is there video playback?
|
| I've been thinking lots about the YouTube algorithm, how it's
| based on engagement, not educational value, and how it's such a
| huge missed opportunity for our kids.
|
| So I've been building my own YouTube exploration app, for my own
| kids.
|
| Email me if you're interested in testing.
|
| jim.jones1@gmail.com
| flas9sd wrote:
| seen the win32 aesthetic used for higher-order reasons:
| separating "work mode" from playtime. An extra user to do so on
| the same machine helps.
|
| Connect the dots reading
| https://www.marginalia.nu/log/99_context/ and seeing the ui
| change in old vs new screencasts
| https://www.youtube.com/@ViktorLofgren/videos
| haswell wrote:
| Lately I've been strongly considering helping migrate my parents
| to Linux. Their needs are primarily web-based with some basic
| productivity tools mixed in, and Windows has just been getting
| more and more hostile. On top of this, they're at an age where
| they're now more susceptible than ever to various scams/attacks,
| and shutting down an entire category of problems by removing
| Windows from the picture is increasingly attractive.
|
| I had forgotten that Chicago95 exists, but this might be exactly
| the right thing. They'd immediately find it familiar, and while
| the theme isn't the whole story, this would go a long way in
| easing the transition I think.
|
| I miss this era of computing.
| arcmechanica wrote:
| My parents run linux because mom likes coupon websites and I
| can't repair the thing every week
| ianmcgowan wrote:
| A chromebox mounted behind the monitor did the trick for me.
| Haven't had an emergency wipe/reinstall in years. Also, a
| tablet with keyboard takes some of the pressure off having a
| "computer" and you can go with iOS or Android depending on what
| phone they use.
| haswell wrote:
| I've been evaluating a Lenovo ThinkCentre m920q tiny I picked
| up for not very much money on eBay (the m720q models are even
| cheaper) and they seem like perfect machines for the task.
|
| My parents use some tools and hardware that require a full OS
| so the tablet route isn't an option, but I'm starting to
| really like the idea of deploying a couple of these micro
| PCs.
| acyou wrote:
| What are the benefits/drawbacks of using this vs. actually
| running Windows 95 or XP?
|
| I'm assuming the PC will be mostly used for "educational
| software" (games), which you would want to run on XP. What
| benefit is there to running Fedora?
| ha1zum wrote:
| Fedora is a modern Linux desktop distribution with active
| development and support for modern softwares. While using an
| old OS such as Windows XP is a huge security risk, with very
| minimal possibilities of running modern softwares. Even major
| browsers like Firefox and Chrome won't run on XP anymore.
| rauli_ wrote:
| That Git GUI got my attention. Does anyone have an idea what it
| might be? The titlebar says aurora but when I searched for it all
| I got was an commercial product with AI nonsense stuck into it.
| hexmiles wrote:
| From the look i suspect it is gitg: a git frontend for gnome.
|
| https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Gitg
| priteau wrote:
| Looks like it. The aurora title comes from the Git repository
| they are viewing: https://github.com/ublue-os/aurora
| trts wrote:
| anyone remember XPDE? I'm not sure it was ever finished /
| packaged in any major repo but came across someone doing a
| walkthrough of it the other week and it looked pretty complete.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFKx8nCl1Vw
|
| It is hard for me to distinguish between the functional
| simplicity of desktop computing in that era, with the overall
| excitement that the explosion of connectivity brought to the
| world. The internet was a lot of fun and had so many surprising
| corners. Practically all of it was personal, niche, or
| experimental content for awhile.
|
| I wonder if Windows 9X was really all that exceptional, or if it
| was just what people remember driving with as they navigated the
| new world.
|
| The best modern equivalent to that desktop paradigm I've found is
| LXQt, although when I use it I find I kind of miss some of the
| accouterments of the modern desktops.
| grimgrin wrote:
| well this is simply adorable, down to the neocities hosted
| website
|
| this already is my stack, tho I need to get over to the immutable
| variety. i'm on fedora 41 i3-spin, using chicago95. been using it
| for years, with the plymouth bit that gives you a proper win95
| startup background during boot
|
| https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Plymouth
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| Sweet! I have a very similar desktop that I've shoehorned support
| for i3 into as well. Will do likewise with this.
| zeroq wrote:
| This really resonates with me.
|
| Every time I try desktop linux it feels like it's 30 years behind
| in usability.
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