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

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

#91

Post by cosmic_cheese »

bri3d wrote: post #85
cosmic_cheese wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a completely predictable result if you think about it. Old style UI was developed with the findings of countless man-hours of UX research performed by field experts, while branded UI is typically whipped together purely based on trends and vibes in an evening by a visual designer who’s probably never performed an ounce of serious research or user trials. It’s natural that the latter is only going to be good at t…

I think it’s worse from a time wasting standpoint, really - a lot of modern UX does have thousands of hours of UX research dumped into it, but with faulty metrics driven goal seeking and internal politics bolted on. I agree that Vibe Branding killed UX in the way you describe in the 2000s (remember when every company had some abominable Flash site?!), but now, we’ve come full circle: from the ashes we’ve allowed warr…

I don’t think we’re quite back to where we were, because branded UI widgets are almost always devoid of functionality compared to their traditional UI toolkit counterparts. If a feature is even slightly “power user”, branded UI widgets probably don’t implement it, even in tools made for technical users.

One of my favorite examples is tree-style lists (“outline views” in AppKit nomenclature). On macOS these have a very convenient functionality where holding down option while expanding/collapsing a section performs that action on all children as well, and it’s practically never implemented in custom-built tree widgets even in cases where the primary audience skews Mac-heavy.

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

#92

Post by ThinkingGuy »

emidln wrote: post #8

This looks neat. I remember the various fvwm95 and icewm themes doing a similar number in the late 90s and early 2000s. It would be fun to pair this with Gambas[0], a free VB6 clone that works with GTK. [0] https://gambaswiki.org/website/en/main.html

qvwm was another window manager that sought to emulate the look and feel of Windows:

https://qvwm.sourceforge.net/index_en.html

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

#93

Post by baq »

diggan wrote: post #37
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.

> 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…

One thing that is weird is that you’re expected to look around the menu bar holding the option key as the menu contents change when that is pressed (also applies to tray icon menus, e.g. WiFi icon shows a lot of stuff when option-clicked.) IIRC some of what you say can be toggled with option menu items.

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

#94

Post by floundy »

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…

Have you used Windows 11? When right clicking, there's now a context menu within the right click context menu. To see what you could see in Win10, you have to right click, then select "See more options" or something. Which just opens up the "old" Win10 context menu with a totally different visual appearance than the Win11 one. Talk about jank and bloat.

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

#95

Post by hnthrowaway0315 »

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

For modern Windows operating system, i.e. >= Windows 10, getting rid of ads, weather, auto-update and search bar can improve UI usability significantly.

Windows 95 was not stable enough back then. I believe Windows 2000 was the first OS that was easy to use and relatively stable. XP and 7 are both solid options too.

I have used both MacOS X and modern MacOS (15) and the UI of X is definitely way better than the UI of 15. It is more clean cut.

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

#96

Post by MarkusWandel »

Three modern desktop environments that I use:

- Windows 10/11. Especially in 11, it's easiest just to type the start of an app's name into the search box. As opposed to the two clicks it takes to get to the "traditional" menu where you still have to scroll to find it.

- Gnome (only on fresh Linux installs, usually replaced with Mate pretty soon). Has a smartphone-style app grid, but here, too, its quickest just to type the start of the app's name.

- Mate: Modern, but still has the Windows 95 paradigm (easy enough to collapse the two toolbars into just one bottom one). Still my favourite desktop environment.

Not all fancy graphic stuff is good. And don't even get me started on how hard it is to drag an app window to another screen these days - on Windows. You really have to find the 2% or so of the top bar that's still draggable and not cluttered up by other stuff.

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

#97

Post by geor9e »

I remember a couple kids with Windows 95 PCs at home. They seemed like such richie rich's. We'd all play Wolfenstein when we'd sleep over at their houses. My childhood computer was a WebTV, hacked to get dialup internet for free, on a 100 lb CRT TV from Goodwill. I finally scraped up the money for an actual PC some time in highschool.

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

#98

Post by leonidasv »

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

When I used XFCE as my daily driver, I once tried installing Chicago95 just for nostalgia and it stick as my daily driver for almost a year! The UI is less distracting than modern UIs and there's something to it that makes it easier to just know which window is open over which window that's lacking in modern UIs (I think it's the over-reliance on soft shadows and the borderless windows).

Eventually, I stopped using it because: 1- it was always annoying to send an screenshot to someone and have to explain that no, I wasn't using Windows 95, and why; 2- the grey-ish look of everything started to bother me over time; 3- I wanted a more integrated desktop experience and moved to KDE Plasma. Still, I configured my Plasma to work like old Windows: window titles on taskbar, zero to none animations, etc.

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

#99

Post by cogman10 »

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #59
exiguus wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

WSL2 works fine, but that's merely because it's a linux VM with a little polish.

I'd kill to do dev on a linux machine, but alas it's not company policy :(

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

#100

Post by hnthrowaway0315 »

cenamus wrote: post #84
hyperbrainer wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting especially because it seems like companies today pour tens of millions into "accessibility", but I never see a thing's usability in terms of simple and easy-to-do-what-I-want UX fall in to the same category.

Even just simple UX testing with people that have never seen or used your software seems to be a lost art.

Companies are outsourcing testing. I'm not surprised that they get rid of UI testing. Back in the day companies used to invite people to sit down and use their software. Nowadays they just push out whatever they have and then start collecting bug tickets. Then they let the community to vote on the tickets. It's basically a huge "pay for being a beta tester" scheme.
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