Seeing this brings me so much joy. If only they had it for Windows 11 as an add-on pack I would buy it!
Chicago95 – Windows 95 Theme for Linux
131–140 of 226 posts
Re: Chicago95 – Windows 95 Theme for Linux
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Windows 9x was slow because hard drives. Now we have SSDs and the desktop is slower than ever still.
Desktop became slow when windows and widgets became objects, as in the OOP sense. The transition from hardcoded primitives to objects that would be created and destroyed on the fly slowed things down a lot, but that is the price to pay to have code that runs on very different platforms, also adapting itself to different screen sizes and resolutions, dynamic objects, etc.
Has there ever been a non Oop GUI toolkit in those days? Even Win32 was kinda "c with objects".
Re: Chicago95 – Windows 95 Theme for Linux
#133This is really nice. I may try it soon.
I tested Windows 11 recently and I was really shocked. Apparently, it has two basic themes: my-eyeballs-hurt white and what-is-the-point-of-living black.
Re: Chicago95 – Windows 95 Theme for Linux
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Hard to believe that a few system crashes per day was the norm. You just hoped you hadn’t lost too much, would re-boot and go get a drink while you waited. Due to that “training” I still hit CTRL-S obsessively even when it hasn’t been needed for years.
I still hit CTRL-S obsessively
You better keep that habit when working in big MS Word files. It still randomly crashes and I've lost some amount of work several times due to this shit.
Re: Chicago95 – Windows 95 Theme for Linux
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
bottom-end (600-900) dollar range in 2001-2002ish got you between 128mb and 256mb of ram. my bottom end pentium 4 presario came with 128 mb and the slowest hard drive in the world. Office XP/2002 and Windows XP both called for 128mb minimum as far as I remember, so a lot of the machines were targetting that number.
Ah, the wonderful world of balanced and effective configurations from the bottom of the barrel PCs... So much time, money and CO2 could be saved by another/bigger atick of RAM.
> So much time, money and CO2 could be saved by another/bigger atick of RAM.
I did eventually get a 256 MB stick of RAM. iirc I was already out of high school at that point.
One point I don't hear being talked about too much is how hopeful and stupid we were in the late nineties and early two thousands. We were supposed to have 10GHz processors by 2005, or I mean mass market for consumers by the end of the decade, at the latest?
https://www.anandtech.com/show/680/6
https://old.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/5sqw20/the_future...
To put things in perspective, my parents practically never used the computer. For all intents and purposes, the computer was for a child to learn by parents who were not very computer savvy in a time when computers were advancing (or at least so we thought) very rapidly.
Re: Chicago95 – Windows 95 Theme for Linux
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, to worse. On Windows XP, beside the childish theme, the window buttons were very usable. Ditto with XFCE with some xfwm4 with a round-surface squared buttons on yellow, green and red, you can find it under the last items of the list. Let's talk about the icons and usability. On overy modern Gnome3/XP icon theme, the icons seem contrastless and very hard to see. Meanwhile, the Tango icons are still standing a lo…
People hate on the default blue Luna theme, but there was a perfectly professional Silver version, and the later (black with orange accents) Zune Theme was one of the most attractive UIs I ever got to use.
I can't find the xfwm theme, but it had a good balance between usability and "fun". That with some GTK theme such as the default for XFCE 4.6 looked fun to use without looking very childish.
Altough I must 'konfess' that the Keramik theme with the Noia icons and some handwritting font made reading advanced man pages in Konqueror a lot less "dramatic" and careless, thus, keeping the stress down.
Re: Chicago95 – Windows 95 Theme for Linux
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hard to believe that a few system crashes per day was the norm. You just hoped you hadn’t lost too much, would re-boot and go get a drink while you waited. Due to that “training” I still hit CTRL-S obsessively even when it hasn’t been needed for years.
>Hard to believe that a few system crashes per day was the norm. It certainly wasn't for me! At the time I had my first it job in a local pc repair shop and we had a series of 24h burn in tests. If the newly installed pc crashed during it, there was something wrong with the hw. My personal windows 95 definitely didn't crash more than once every few weeks of heavy use. Programs did crash, explorer did crash, but the a…
It was definitely the norm, but it seemed to have more to do with hardware and drivers and certain programs, so people's experiences varied dramatically.
Sounds like you just happened to luck into reliable hardware with well-written drivers.
For me, something about using CorelDraw with my video card led it to crash probably about once every twenty minutes of use.
On the other hand, if I just stuck to working in Word and wasn't trying to simultaneously play MP3's while also downloading files, I'd be fine.
Re: Chicago95 – Windows 95 Theme for Linux
#138I used this theme for awhile but I kept running into visual bugs that caused certain applications to not render at all, and as a recent parent I just decided that tinkering with desktop / window manager constantly just wasn't worth it anymore.
What it did do however is remind me just how much space can actually fit on a 1920x1080 screen, and that was very special for the experience and applications that did work (which was most of them).
Re: Chicago95 – Windows 95 Theme for Linux
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
That's excellent. I wonder how deeply the UI elements go. Like can I produce a UI from Windows 3 or 2000 on Windows 11 if I make the right Win32 calls? Is the classic theme really gone, or just aggressively hidden? The new Windows 11 taskbar is definitely new code and doesn't behave like the old one, so I imagine you can't have a true classic taskbar on 11.
Re: Chicago95 – Windows 95 Theme for Linux
#140Anyone know if there's an os/2 warp theme? I recall being quite pleased with it.
Back then about just anything was better looking than Windows 95. OS/2 was slick. Mac computers had a very enjoyable UI. SGI machines had a very good looking UI. But people mostly only knew Windows 95, so that's what they remember.
I thought they were all similarly ugly. Thought so then and still do now. Drab grays and muted colors for miles. (Ignoring utility here.) Uglier stuff could be found off the beaten path, though.