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Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

hisham.hm

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Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#161

Post by jcelerier »

forgetfulness wrote: post #85
selfhoster11 wrote: post #36

Unpopular opinion: optimising for "branding" is what killed theming. Everyone wants to have their own custom colour theme, brand-associated font or button style, which clashes with uniformity of system controls. If everyone renders buttons in a custom way, they bypass the native, theming-capable, accessible-by-default system controls. As long as product managers are happy, it doesn't matter that users aren't.

Theming was HUGE in Linux back in 2005-2010, consistency was paramount, adherence to toolkit was extremely important just like Apple claimed. For Apple it was about delivering a consistent branded experience, for the GNOME and KDE communities it was about being able to consistently customize the experience. In Windows? Always a free-for-all of such heavy customization on the side of the third-party applications that…

> Theming was HUGE in Linux back in 2005-2010, consistency was paramount, adherence to toolkit was extremely important just like Apple claimed.

it still is, just look at how neat things in https://reddit.com/r/unixporn/ look

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#162

Post by nitrogen »

grawprog wrote: post #127
forgetfulness wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Theming was HUGE in Linux back in 2005-2010, consistency was paramount, adherence to toolkit was extremely important just like Apple claimed. For Apple it was about delivering a consistent branded experience, for the GNOME and KDE communities it was about being able to consistently customize the experience. In Windows? Always a free-for-all of such heavy customization on the side of the third-party applications that…

Reading this discussion got me thinking. I've been using KDE now for years specifically because every part of it can be customized, but for the most part, i've used the same theme and configurations now for pretty much the entire time i've been using kde. I still think it comes down to branding though, even with those totally customizable environments. The difference is, it's not someone else's brand. I get to turn m…

the ability to remove someone else's brand from my computer and replace it with my own.

In Windows 2000 and earlier, before system file protection, it was possible to use a resource editor and/or a specially crafted BMP file to change system icons, boot animations, start menu imagery, login screen, etc. With a hex editor you could change any UI text, too. I had a heavily customized W2K alongside my heavily customized Linux (even started working on my own graphical boot animations and graphical login for the text console as part of a media-focused distro project I had joined).

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#163

Post by gambiting »

Joker_vD wrote: post #94
gambiting wrote: post #84

It's truly shocking to me how few people even change their wallpaper. I work in a video games studio and like 90% of people have the default windows logo on blue background wallpaper. Don't get me wrong, it's a nice wallpaper, but people have their custom figurines and personal trinkets on the desks, but won't bother to change the wallpaper on their desktop.

For how long, approximately, can you see your desktop's wallpaper during a day? I see mine for about 5 seconds during the boot, after that Chrome auto-launches, and I never see the desktop until the next reboot (all the non-browser apps I use are pinned on my taskbar). So what's the point to change it? Instead, I always change my mouse cursors to the Garfield theme from defunct Microsoft Plus! -- they are of pretty n…

I have 3 monitors, I very frequently have one monitor empty so it's nice to have something pretty on it.

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#164

Post by grishka »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #118
grishka wrote: post #30

Themeability doesn't rule out consistency. As long as all UIs use the system theme, they look consistent, no matter what that theme is. A good example of that was Windows XP and all the funny and atrocious themes you could put on it with WindowBlinds.

> As long as all UIs use the system theme That's the root problem, though, isn't it? It's a business/people problem. You won't have consistent UIs as long as software vendors consider look&feel as something to exploit for branding or competitive advantage. Since user feedback is rarely sought and routinely ignored in computing, you'd need the OS vendor to either disallow UIs not conforming to system theme, or make th…

Back in the XP days, there were generally two kinds of UIs: the ones that used the system theme, sometimes as much as trying their best to apply it to their custom controls, and the ones that disregarded the system appearance altogether and drew everything themselves, including the window borders.

> Since user feedback is rarely sought and routinely ignored in computing

This needs to change, too. I collect user feedback and act on it and my users love me more often than not. The world would be a better place if everyone was doing this.

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#165

Post by coliveira »

The reason desktops were customizable in the 90s is that they followed strict GUI rules and used the same toolkits. Nowadays, apps want to have control of their UI to a higher degree, which makes it difficult to provide customization. The same applies to the web: since every app wants to have it own UI, there is no space for user-level customization.

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#166

Post by godshatter »

I'm irrationally missing the hotdog stand Windows 3.1 theme.

I use KDE at home and will occasionally try a different theme or cursor set when the mood strikes me. But that's the linux way. You're free to customize to a crazy extent. Once you get it setup the way you like it, you can achieve some nice workflow enhancements.

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#167

Post by MayeulC »

flohofwoe wrote: post #110
MayeulC wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> of course there's 99% trash I'm offended. 99% of the number of desktop environments, or the installation, or the stylized installations? As with everything artistic, the last is a matter of taste, and the more opinionated a visual design is, the more you are likely to disagree with it. For the rest, please give names.. I've seen magnificients {i3, sway, KDE, GNOME, XFCE, cinnamon, etc}. ricing is a popular sport.

When you look through the themes on sites like https://www.gnome-look.org/browse/cat/135/ord/rating/ , sort by rating and then skip the first few result pages, most of those themes don't look that "great". I don't understand how that's offending though, it's a normal quality distribution (also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law )

> the most slick and stylish desktops are now on Linux (of course there's 99% trash

I read that as 99% of the Linux desktops being trash.

There are a number of desktop environments, but calling any of these "trash" is pretty harsh and subjective, even for something as barebones as weston.

For theme, icon, color packs, etc, for any desktop environment, I agree. That's always been the case for most user-generated content anyway.

But you do see a lot of subjectively great styles on reddit.com/r/unixporn, even for environments such as windowmaker or fluxbox!

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#168

Post by cgrealy »

marwis wrote: post #132
squiggleblaz wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> On the Windows side, isn't it a side-effect of the shift from standardized common controls to WPF that happened around the vista time-frame? It's much harder to provide consistent user theming against non-standard controls. Not directly. If you code in Win32 on modern Windows, you pretty much have to enable themed widgets. Once you've enabled themed widgets, you give up the ability for the user to control the appea…

Most native desktop development in Windows is nowadays based on WPF and as parent mentioned WPF broke the consistency with the rest of Win32. WPF does it's own vector-based drawing that completely ignores legacy Win32 API except for some basics such as control colors. Even its standard Windows theme is a poor imitation of actual Windows style - you can easily spot WPF apps with default theme because they stick out li…

Is WPF actually that popular though? Honest question... last time I did any WPF dev was 2008 and I haven’t really seen it used much since. MS certainly aren’t hyping it much (although that could just be the decline of the desktop app in general).

My impression was that it wasn’t worth it for small apps and not performant enough for things like CAD, etc.

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#169

Post by ravi-delia »

jcelerier wrote: post #161
forgetfulness wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Theming was HUGE in Linux back in 2005-2010, consistency was paramount, adherence to toolkit was extremely important just like Apple claimed. For Apple it was about delivering a consistent branded experience, for the GNOME and KDE communities it was about being able to consistently customize the experience. In Windows? Always a free-for-all of such heavy customization on the side of the third-party applications that…

> Theming was HUGE in Linux back in 2005-2010, consistency was paramount, adherence to toolkit was extremely important just like Apple claimed. it still is, just look at how neat things in https://reddit.com/r/unixporn/ look

But none of that was configured in one place, with every other program taking its lead from that central configuration. Instead, effort must be made to work through every program individually, customizing its color scheme.

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#170

Post by sildur »

> But then I realized how much I struggled to get my Android UI the way I wanted, until I installed Nova Launcher that gave me Linux-levels of tweaking. The average user does not do this.

No. Stop, please stop with the paternalism. I cringe every time someone talks about "the user" in third person, like they were laboratory specimens. We all are mostly average users. There is not really any difference between your father and you. My mother wants to play with things like everyone else. But we, the developers, don't allow them, and we put them into walled gardens without ever giving them a choice. Because we are smarter and we known better, and we are doing it for their own good. Apparently. And all of this reeks of paternalism and elitism.

The silver lining will be when all those developers receive the same treatment in 30 years. Sadly, it will be too late by then.

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