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Make Linux look like Windows 95

lunduke.substack.com

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Re: Make Linux look like Windows 95

#131

Post by anthk »

HDMI_Cable wrote: post #18

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…

Well, Mac OS Tiger and Windows 95 are perfectly usable, but anything newer than Snow Leopard looks unusable.

To me Amiga OS looks weird and "chaotic", but Windows 95 it's the perfect OS on usability, on par on Mac OS 6 and 7.

Re: Make Linux look like Windows 95

#133

Post by anthk »

rbanffy wrote: post #125
lewiscollard wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My brain believes two things simultaneously: * that Windows 95 was the first GUI I used for any extended period of time and that I will naturally think it's the best one for this reason, for the same reason people tend to think things they liked when they were teenagers peaked when they were teenagers; and * that Windows 95 really did rule - to repurpose Hoare, "not only an improvement on its predecessors but also on…

> but I definitely don't miss how unstable it was We had NT4 with that same look and it was much better.

2000 was pretty much Windows 95 alike with the classic theme and the window colors to an ungradiented one, buch much more stable and compatible.

Re: Make Linux look like Windows 95

#134

Post by anthk »

theandrewbailey wrote: post #25
HDMI_Cable wrote: post #18

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…

The default Windows 95 didn't look that great, but almost everyone agrees that 98 or 2000 are much better (at least they have gradients). But I'm not 100% old school, and I think that Windows 7 Aero looked good, too. I'm sad that someone decided that glassy transparent windows were an abomination and broke them all :(

I hated gradients on Windows. They looked as if the "stepped out" from the GUI. They broke the "3D layering" illusion.

Re: Make Linux look like Windows 95

#135

Post by anthk »

eyelidlessness wrote: post #32
HDMI_Cable wrote: post #18

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’m a greybeard, my first OS was either DOS or some OtherDOS, my first GUI environment was System 7 (Mac). The latter was mostly flat other than some dithered shading mostly on icons, significantly flatter than macOS is today. Even with MacOS 8 which gained more depth in its design I always found Windows’ hard bevels through 2k/ME overstated, and when I did use Windows I’d do my best to configure it to be as flat as…

System7 had clear widgets over flat menus.

Re: Make Linux look like Windows 95

#136

Post by rbanffy »

kitsunesoba wrote: post #55
theandrewbailey wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The default Windows 95 didn't look that great, but almost everyone agrees that 98 or 2000 are much better (at least they have gradients). But I'm not 100% old school, and I think that Windows 7 Aero looked good, too. I'm sad that someone decided that glassy transparent windows were an abomination and broke them all :(

To me the biggest improvement that 2000 makes to the 9x look are the move to a lighter base gray, as well as changing the default desktop color from that funky teal to a much nicer blue. As minor as those two things may seem they made the OS feel more pleasant. But that may just be the classic Mac OS fanboy in me speaking. Mac OS never used particularly dark grays, so the almost-perfectly-middle-gray seen in 95/98 fe…

95 copied more the NeXT than the Mac look. The grey is much closer, as are the button corners, an explicit rejection of the Windows 3 rounded corners. The NeXT greys made sense for the original cube, which was limited to black, white and two greys.

Re: Make Linux look like Windows 95

#139

Post by Falkon1313 »

qbasic_forever wrote: post #56

I really like the Chicago95 theme here, it's great with XFCE/xubuntu on low spec devices. I also like installing the Window Maker and OpenBox WMs with a bunch of retro unix backgrounds--they kind of have the feel of CDE and old Solaris systems. I haven't used it but apparently someone is working on a more modern retro feel CDE-inspired thing here: https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE Depending on my mood I can log in to a…

Just a tip, JWZ doesn't like direct links from here to his site. Copy and paste the link into a new tab for it to work. I don't even remember why, but it's been tradition for years now.

Re: Make Linux look like Windows 95

#140

Post by _abox »

JimDabell wrote: post #88

It was actually fairly popular at the end of the 90s to run FVWM95, which was basically FVWM 2 skinned to look like Windows 95. It looked pretty similar to this project, for obvious reasons. http://fvwm95.sourceforge.net

Yeah I remember we used to run it as a joke.. On our HP-UX systems with VUE at the time.

The sysadmins hated it when we made our terminals look like what they viewed as an inferior system (which to be honest it was, at the time with its DOS underpinnings)

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