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Because that desktop is honestly clearer and faster to understand that today's chromeless trends. Buttons look like buttons, and text boxes are obvious.
And there is just enough whitespace. Not waaayyyyy toooooo muuuuccchhh. And there’s consistency. Not eight generations of UI redesigns for each control. And you can actually tell which window has the focus.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Both a more efficient use of screen space (at least, compared to the default themes of XFCE, crucially, but also KDE, GNOME, and others), and an aesthetically better visual design. I am surprised to have just written this latter observation, considering this came from Microsoft, but I suppose the era when it was designed demanded it, both as a result of the lower screen resolutions used, and the the contemporary mark…
I wouldn't say marketing so much as Microsoft did a lot of usability testing back then where psychologists threw people in a room and took notes while they interact with the UI. I don't think any OSS projects have this luxury (or money needed to throw around for that sort of thing). Raymond Chen vaguely references it here https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20120126-00/?p=84... Also, back then, you had to make…
...while somehow being even less graphically complex.
It won't convincingly look like Windows 95 to me without a ton of Invalid Page Faults in kernel32.dll. (Can somebody give me a basic explanation of what that was??)
(I used this for a while in rotation with others ... cow-orkers would occasionally tell my my laptop had crashed. I'd enter my password and continue working...)
I'll be the first to say the unpopular take on HN: I don't think Windows 95 looks that good (compared to today). I personally find more modern (like MacOS 10) styles to look the best, and flat designs to be just as usable as more skeumorphic ones. It seems to me that preference for UI styles is completely personal, probably being influenced by what OS we initially used. As someone (potentially a lot) younger than man…
I have used themes like this on Linux and also some to make it look like MacOS. What I really want on Linux are tools that are written to be exactly like Windows, no more no less. Why? Well in addition to the numerous OS related problems I seem to encounter every time I go back and do a clean install of a distro like Ubuntu I am also annoyed by how poorly designed many of the basic tools like the calculator is. The W…