A better modern middle ground imo is the KD3 continuation project https://www.trinitydesktop.org/
*KDE3
Blue95: a desktop for your childhood home's computer room
171–180 of 316 posts
Re: Blue95: a desktop for your childhood home's computer room
#172This 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
Give today's XFCE4 a try, on debian stable or testing. It's a remarkably no bullshit GUI for use with xorg. You can of course still install all the gnome and kde libraries and run all the gnome and kde applications, though things will look a little bit mismatched.
Re: Blue95: a desktop for your childhood home's computer room
#173What are the benefits/drawbacks of using this vs. actually running Windows 95 or XP? I'm assuming the PC will be mostly used for "educational software" (games), which you would want to run on XP. What benefit is there to running Fedora?
Fedora is a modern Linux desktop distribution with active development and support for modern softwares. While using an old OS such as Windows XP is a huge security risk, with very minimal possibilities of running modern softwares. Even major browsers like Firefox and Chrome won't run on XP anymore.
Re: Blue95: a desktop for your childhood home's computer room
#174This 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 upgr…
Humans hate being bored but only dick-around and learn things like this when they're bored. Speaking personally, I guess.
Since the 90s we've found "better" ways at "curing" our boredom. Put this UI on a modern OS in front of a kid today and they would just download Steam, Chrome and Discord. And be assured, they're very proficient at the in-and-outs of those platforms.
Just some random thoughts I had, not sure any of it tracks...
Re: Blue95: a desktop for your childhood home's computer room
#175Sweet! I have a very similar desktop that I’ve shoehorned support for i3 into as well. Will do likewise with this.
Re: Blue95: a desktop for your childhood home's computer room
#176This 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 upgr…
> I learned so much, eventually being able to replace hardware
As a young teenager in the early-mid 2000s, I learned the hard way what the little standoffs are for by killing a motherboard by screwing it directly into the steel case :')
Never made that mistake again, that's for sure. And I share all the same experiences as yourself
Re: Blue95: a desktop for your childhood home's computer room
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. This is caused by a change in who is hired as UI/UX developers. In days past it was HCI experts and engineers, now it's graphic designers. "Pretty" is the order of the day, not "useful". "There are too many menu items" is now answered with "So let's hide them" when it used to be "How can we organize them in the UI us a simple, discoverable manner?" But th…
Having worked with amazing HCI experts over the years, you've hit the nail on the head. It's wild how much design is done for designs sake at my work, with nary a nod to HCI given. The a11y team try to patch over it as best as possible, but we end up with a mess, and I'm treated like a pariah for pushing back on some of it
Re: Blue95: a desktop for your childhood home's computer room
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
UX testing is not UI testing and it is not QA.
Quite, but lots of companies jam them all together these days.
Re: Blue95: a desktop for your childhood home's computer room
#179I like themes like this. The only thing that hampers the authenticity for me, and this isn't the fault of the author really, is the super high resolution fonts compared to what was available back then. There's just something charming about low resolution fonts that are readable enough on screen, probably nostalgia. I think any type of pixel font authentic to a couple decades ago won't look good on a 4K monitor, unfor…
Pixel fonts don't accurately represent the 90's UIs because we don't use CRTs anymore. The poor souls buying the very first terrible flat screen monitors may have used computers like that, but most of that era was experienced using smudgy, edge blurring CRTs.
You could probably create a CRT-filter-based font for high resolution screens (though you'd probably still need to optimise for subpixel layout for accuracy, even on 4k monitors).
Re: Blue95: a desktop for your childhood home's computer room
#180Earlier 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.
Fuck telemetry. Don't spy on me while telling me it's in my best interest. Don't spy on me at all.