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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

#131

Post by keyringlight »

leonidasv wrote: post #98
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 i…

>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).

I think this started with Vista, I remember watching a video criticizing the new love of glass effects on UI chrome as it got rid of or minimized the color/shading difference between focused/unfocused windows. The example the video used was 6 notepad windows and pick which one was focused, and the main cue you'd need to look for is that the window with focus had a close button colored red.

Thin borders and minimalist/hiding scrollbars is another one that annoys me, give me something graphical for my gaze to grasp.

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

#132

Post by WarOnPrivacy »

voidfunc wrote: post #13
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

I got in an argument with an accessibility engineer about this recently... The whole UI as branding thing has utterly killed usability.

> The whole UI as branding thing has utterly killed usability.

Imagine if Active Desktop had taken over.

I eventually came up with a not-awful use for AD but that was a few years after it went away.

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

#133

Post by II2II »

charcircuit wrote: post #107
mouse_ wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Computing is largely a cargo cult thing these days. The problem is that the interfaces these bootleg skins draw "inspiration" from were designed on the back of millions of pre-inflationary dollars' R&D from only the best at Golden-Age IBM, Microsoft, Apple, etc.. BeOS, OS/2, Windows 95-2000 do not look the way they do because it looks good, they look the way they do because it works good, countless man hours went int…

>they look the way they do because it works good In modern times telemetry can show how well new designs work. The industry never forgot how to measure and do user research for ui changes. We've only gotten better at it.

Telemetry may tell you the "what" but, at best, it will only allow you to infer the "why". It may provide insights into how people do things, yet it will say nothing about how they feel about it. Most of all, telemetry will only answer the questions it is designed to answer. The only surprises will be in the answers (sometimes). There is no opportunity to be surprised by how the end user responds.

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

#134

Post by vanschelven »

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,…

> However, most people were still novices at using computers

It has (to my surprise, initially) been my experience that "kids these days" are more novice at (desktop) computer-usage than the people of the 90s

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

#135

Post by flas9sd »

seen the win32 aesthetic used for higher-order reasons: separating "work mode" from playtime. An extra user to do so on the same machine helps.

Connect the dots reading https://www.marginalia.nu/log/99_context/ and seeing the ui change in old vs new screencasts https://www.youtube.com/@ViktorLofgren/videos

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

#136

Post by foobarchu »

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.

The last time I was setting up a system, it's still very difficult to find in the menus. If it's not discoverable and I have to know the incantation/shortcut to do it, then that's bad UI.

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

#137

Post by hi_hi »

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

As a kid, the OS's supported me in learning. They were simple, intuitive and rewarding. I'd click around and explore, and discover cool things like a Wheezer music video, or engaging puzzle games.

There was no one who could help me when I got stuck, beyond maybe an instruction manual. I just had to figure it out, mostly by trial and error. I learned so much, eventually being able to replace hardware, install and upgrade drivers, re-install the entire OS and partition the hard drive, figure out networking and filesystems. It built confidence.

Now my kid sits infront of an OS (Windows, Mac, it doesn't really matter) and there's so much noise. Things popping up, demanding attention. Scary looking warnings. So much choice. There's so many ways to do simple things. Actions buried deep within menus. They have no hope of building up a mental model or understanding how the OS connects them to the foundations of computing.

Even I'm mostly lost now if there's a problem. I need to search the internet, find a useful source, filter out the things that are similar to my problem but not the same. It isn't rewarding any more, it's frustrating. How is a young child meant to navigate that by themselves?

This looks like a step in the right direction. I look forward to testing it out.

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

#138

Post by immibis »

charcircuit wrote: post #109
grayhatter wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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!

This attitude is why Linux based operating systems have such poor market share on the desktop. Opportunity costs are real. Friction is real. You don't see Windows creating a new OS for a single theme. You don't see macOS do it either.

You don't see Windows themes at all.

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

#139

Post by epolanski »

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

Mobile too, I'm sick of those OSs updating every 18 months because some product person along marketing decides the wheel has to be reinvented otherwise there will be no buzz.

I have a harder and harder time navigating both iOS and Android as time goes, should be the opposite.

Same for Windows or MacOs.

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

#140

Post by epolanski »

hnthrowaway0315 wrote: post #95
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…

98 was a very good os. I don't think many got 2000, XP was the major windows for millennials.
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