71–80 of 226 posts
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 wi…
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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.
Ah, I remember those days. Around that era, dragging windows around the screen was switching from "draw outline" to "draw the actual window".
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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...
> 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 window…
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)
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> 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 window…
> 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…
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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.
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…
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> 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 window…
> 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…
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.
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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…
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!
"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?".
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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!
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?".