Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Blue95: a desktop for your childhood home's computer room

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 316 posts

Re: Blue95: a desktop for your childhood home's computer room

#51

Post by exiguus »

esafak wrote: post #18
metadat wrote: post #5

This looks nice and easy to use. My hypothesis is today's "modern" OS user interfaces are objectively worse from a usability perspective, obfuscating key functionality behind layers of confusing menus. It reminds me of these "OS popularity since the 70s" time lapse views: https://youtube.com/watch?v=cTKhqtll5cQ The dominance of Windows is crazy, even today, Mac desktops and laptops are comparatively niche

Microsoft Windows programs hid functionality under layers of menus and the registry. MacOS, at least, surfaces much less functionality, because it offers sensible defaults. I never had to do anything akin to fiddling with the Windows Registry. I did like some Windows things, though, like the ribbon, and reconfigurable UIs. Today's UIs are more immutable, for the worse.

Selecting the appropriate tool for the task at hand is crucial, in my opinion. However, I believe the choice is often influenced by companies mandating the use of Microsoft and Mac systems due to cost and maintenance considerations, rather than allowing employees to choose between Mac, Windows, or Linux based on their preferences. Proprietary software that only runs on Mac or Windows, never was an argument, because you can just RDP stream remote desktop apps or use the browser.

Re: Blue95: a desktop for your childhood home's computer room

#52

Post by diggan »

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #50
diggan wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I never had to do anything akin to fiddling with the Windows Registry If I recall correctly, when I got my first Macbook, I had to edit plist files or something similar in order to do basic things like permanently showing hidden files, showing the full path in Finder, show file extensions for all file types, increase the animation speed so the computer didn't feel slow as molasses, etc, etc. Maybe these things are…

Toggling hidden file visibility in Finder and open/save dialogs has been doable with the key shortcut Command-Shift-. for quite some time now.

Is that permanent across reboots and all? I think that was the main issue I had with it, but was a long time ago now.

Re: Blue95: a desktop for your childhood home's computer room

#54

Post by exiguus »

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #49
esafak wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft Windows programs hid functionality under layers of menus and the registry. MacOS, at least, surfaces much less functionality, because it offers sensible defaults. I never had to do anything akin to fiddling with the Windows Registry. I did like some Windows things, though, like the ribbon, and reconfigurable UIs. Today's UIs are more immutable, for the worse.

It’s not a 1:1 mapping, but much power user functionality in macOS is designed to progressively reveal itself as the user becomes more technically capable, a type of design known as progressive disclosure. This allows newbies to not feel overwhelmed while also allowing power users to feel at home. The problem is that way too many people approach macOS with the Windows way of doing things firmly planted in their minds…

If you approach macOS the Linux or BSD way, it feels like Windows Powershell. Of course you can use brew and stuff, setup you dev enviroments etc. But when it comes to system settings, its bad, very bad. Also stuff like docker, k8s suffer performance and usability.

Re: Blue95: a desktop for your childhood home's computer room

#55

Post by grayhatter »

mfro wrote: post #20

Is it really necessary to spin up an entirely new distro for an XFCE+GTK theme?

> Stop spending time on things I don't care about

It's ok for people to waste time building stuff they think is cool. Did it need to be a distro? No but it also didn't need to exist. I'm glad it exists though, I think it really whips the llamas ass!

Re: Blue95: a desktop for your childhood home's computer room

#57

Post by myself248 »

exiguus wrote: post #41
metadat wrote: post #5

This looks nice and easy to use. My hypothesis is today's "modern" OS user interfaces are objectively worse from a usability perspective, obfuscating key functionality behind layers of confusing menus. It reminds me of these "OS popularity since the 70s" time lapse views: https://youtube.com/watch?v=cTKhqtll5cQ The dominance of Windows is crazy, even today, Mac desktops and laptops are comparatively niche

What do you mean exactly? Like the Menu-Issues in Windows 10? Because from a UX perspective, basically nothing has change. UI of course, but UX is the same like in the 90's following "The Design of Everyday Things" by Donald A. I think its more about the change management, expectations. For example in Win XP you had the option to use the NT theme. As a user: "I can decide when to move on to the new design." Usually a…

Like making window borders 1px wide, even as screen pixel density increases. It's darn near impossible to resize a window anymore.

Like making buttons auto-hide unless you mouse-over them. I don't remember when this came in, but the default PDF viewer in something did this, and I spent _weeks_ being baffled that some jerk made a PDF viewer that couldn't zoom in on the page, until I randomly waggled the mouse for some reason and the missing buttons magically appeared. I have no words for how upsetting this was.

Like having icons-only for many functions, with no text-and-icons or text-only option to replace them. I'm sure some people are fine with that, but other people can scan a screen for a desired word MUCH faster than they can scan for a desired icon, and removal of text labels is just an insult to that segment of the userbase.

Like no longer highlighting, or even having, hotkeys for many menus. I can alt-space or alt-menukey my way through a late-90s menu tree _way_ faster than I can mouse through it, even with today's better mice, but that simply doesn't work anymore in a great many programs.

It's one thing for people who've never known a different UI to just be slow in this one and that's all they've known, and that's fine for them I guess, if it's pretty and they prefer that, or if keyboards frighten them.

But for people who have DECADES of reflexes invested in these shortcuts to suddenly find that they don't work anymore, and we're forced to SLOW DOWN and be less productive than in the past, that's a high insult.

Microsoft spilled tankers of ink in the 90s talking about how their new GUI patterns would make people more productive by unifying these things across programs (which was true; in the DOS era every program made up its own shortcuts and ways to access them), and folks who learned them are now being punished for trusting MS with our loyalty.

"Basically nothing has changed" my ass.

Re: Blue95: a desktop for your childhood home's computer room

#58

Post by cosmic_cheese »

InsideOutSanta wrote: post #33
bsnnkv wrote: post #9

This still remains the absolute pinnacle of cohesive desktop environment design in my books.

I think the desktop operating systems of that era were at a sweet spot. They were technically advanced enough to render good-looking, crisp color user interfaces. However, most people were still novices at using computers, so OS designers consciously designed their operating systems to be as clear as possible. Applications tended to be written for each individual platform and to follow its UI guidelines. Windows 95,…

An aspect of System 7/Mac OS 8/9 that I find criminally underrated is how flexible it is.

For those versions, a good bulk of the “system” isn’t part of the system proper but instead implemented by way of extensions and control panels loaded at startup. The OS itself is extremely minimal, basically just enough to provide a barebones desktop and act as a substrate for apps to run on. Everything else, including “core” functionality like audio and networking, was implemented in an extension.

This meant that you could pare back the OS to be extremely lean and only have the exact functionality you personally needed at that precise moment and nothing else, and doing so didn’t require you to recompile a kernel or anything like that — just create an extension set that only loaded what you needed. This was excellent for use cases like games and emulators where you wanted every last ounce of resources to go to those, and nice for single purpose machines too (no point in loading game controller support on a box that only ever runs Photoshop and Illustrator).

Of course the way it was implemented is awful by modern standards, but the concept is golden and I think there should be OS projects trying to replicate it.

Re: Blue95: a desktop for your childhood home's computer room

#59

Post by cosmic_cheese »

exiguus wrote: post #54
cosmic_cheese wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not a 1:1 mapping, but much power user functionality in macOS is designed to progressively reveal itself as the user becomes more technically capable, a type of design known as progressive disclosure. This allows newbies to not feel overwhelmed while also allowing power users to feel at home. The problem is that way too many people approach macOS with the Windows way of doing things firmly planted in their minds…

If you approach macOS the Linux or BSD way, it feels like Windows Powershell. Of course you can use brew and stuff, setup you dev enviroments etc. But when it comes to system settings, its bad, very bad. Also stuff like docker, k8s suffer performance and usability.

Docker, etc are going to suffer on anything that’s not Linux due to how coupled they are to Linux. Even WSL isn’t as good as bare metal Linux in that regard. To me it speaks to a need for return to platform agnosticism in dev tooling more than anything.
Post reply on HN