Earlier quoted context omitted.
My experience was different as my first Windows PC was already quite old when I got it, so I was used to random delays in UI feedback. My current M1 feels like what you've just described. I tried to run DSL (damn small linux) on my P60 around 2003-4 and felt what you've just described. The UI seemed to respond before the interaction! Then, a few months ago I spent a an evening or two messing with Microsoft Bob (Win 3…
I miss, when I had a jailbroken phone, briefly being able to set the animation time to zero. Everything is so much faster, even with hardware that can more than handle the GPU stuff. It’s now (on fast hardware) the actual animation frames themselves that are literally wasting my time. I wish Apple would let me watch each of their oh-so-clever animations one time to give these “designers” their satisfaction, and just…
Chicago95 – Windows 95 Theme for Linux
101–110 of 226 posts
Re: Chicago95 – Windows 95 Theme for Linux
#102Not that I want the UX To _look_ like Windows 95, but I sure do feel nostalgic how fast and responsive the desktop “felt” back in those days. These days, it is a rarity to see a native app that is as responsive. It feels like all native apps burn through CPU cycles in cosmetic things and animations that it feels sluggish in comparison.
KDE Plasma in my opinion comes closest to this. It's stayed very snappy over the years and I'm mainly a laptop user.
Agreed, I use KDE on both my desktop and personal laptop.
Re: Chicago95 – Windows 95 Theme for Linux
#103Not that I want the UX To _look_ like Windows 95, but I sure do feel nostalgic how fast and responsive the desktop “felt” back in those days. These days, it is a rarity to see a native app that is as responsive. It feels like all native apps burn through CPU cycles in cosmetic things and animations that it feels sluggish in comparison.
My Windows 11 laptop at home is quite snappy. My Windows 10 laptop at work with more RAM, a better SSD, and a newer, faster CPU, is not. It's because they virus scan and authorization check every single file access, every time. Even starting small programs like Notepad takes at least 2 seconds at work whereas it's instantaneous at home. Same story at my previous job. Actually, my work laptop had been faster than my p…
Windows and Microsoft are the bureaucracy.
Re: Chicago95 – Windows 95 Theme for Linux
#104Some of these old style themes are interesting for nostalgic reasons but then after a while you do realize that there are reasons why the world has moved on.
Seriously wonder what you think the reasons the world moved on is? Everything was so clear, neat and discoverable back then. Now everything needs to be hidden behind labels that may of may not be a button. And that is on a good day because many times I need to learn a new language where a rocket means pipeline and to download an artifact from it you obviously need to press the pinkish two squares thingy. But that is…
I can name only one thing that has been massively popularised since then in "professional" tools and which I wouldn't mind the older software had: command palette.
Press some hot key, and then type the name of your command in a pop up window with full-text search, autocomplete and a hint what the hot key and toolbar icon for that particular command is. Probably single most useful thing that became mainstream roughly after the ubiquitous CLI-phobia mostly went away.
Re: Chicago95 – Windows 95 Theme for Linux
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?".
Is it stock XFCE, or do I need anything else? Can I just install xubuntu-desktop and that's it?
I install the system using the Xubuntu ISO. Presumably if you install the xubuntu-desktop package on some other flavor it will be similar but if for instance you installed it on top of e.g. Kubuntu you might still be getting KDE services loading when you log in.
Re: Chicago95 – Windows 95 Theme for Linux
#106Some of these old style themes are interesting for nostalgic reasons but then after a while you do realize that there are reasons why the world has moved on.
I dunno but there's only a few things missing from those old-style UIs. (Notably, hiDPI support for example) This is probably a niche opinion but I think we have been steadily devolving and going backwards in terms of user design. We waste so much space, require so many clicks for worse usability than we started with. With the death of skeumorphism and textual UIs we regularly have to guess or hover buttons to find o…
These modern useless scrollbars really anger me.
I can theme some things (unless some modern packaging tech makes the app ignore my theme), I can make the ones in Firefox usable but ugly (with widget.gtk.overlay-scrollbars.enabled and widget.non-native-theme.scrollbar.style), and so on. But I can see where we are heading. Scrollbars are one of many UI features that were too useful, so they must be destroyed.
I did not expect to feel so old at such a young age.
Re: Chicago95 – Windows 95 Theme for Linux
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's still there in some places...try +r then run odbcad32.exe Click the "System DSN" tab, then "Add", Double-click the top entry ("Driver Da Microsoft..."), uncheck "Use Current Directory", then click the "Select Directory" button. Also try the "help" button.
I love that some of these old UIs are still present in current Windows 11 22H2. I was surprised "control userpasswords2" still exists.
With certain programs (in this case Paint Shop Pro 5), you can get Windows 11 to render Windows Aero.[1]
[1]: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/747297210613498216/10...
Re: Chicago95 – Windows 95 Theme for Linux
#108Windows 95 "theme" was very nice for the CRT monitors and their resolutions of back in the day (1024x768 etc). Running it on a modern display?... I don't get it.
Re: Chicago95 – Windows 95 Theme for Linux
#109Not that I want the UX To _look_ like Windows 95, but I sure do feel nostalgic how fast and responsive the desktop “felt” back in those days. These days, it is a rarity to see a native app that is as responsive. It feels like all native apps burn through CPU cycles in cosmetic things and animations that it feels sluggish in comparison.
One of the biggest things that contribute to the feeling of slowness today are all the animations /transitions etc. The very first thing I do when installing a new version of gnome is disable all of it. It suddenly feels 5x faster.
Re: Chicago95 – Windows 95 Theme for Linux
#110It Is not a "theme for Linux". It is a theme for GTK-based DEs.