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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

#181

Post by bowlofhummus »

mananaysiempre wrote: post #36
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

> This looks nice These kinds of things almost always give me an uncanny-valley feeling. Here I'm looking at the screenshot and can’t help noticing that the taskbar buttons are too close to the taskbar’s edge, the window titles are too narrow, the folders are too yellow, and so on and so forth. (To its credit, Wine is the one exception that is not susceptible to this, even when configured to use a higher DPI value so…

The text is the worst. The icons are nice and pixely but the fonts are baby butt smooth anti aliased

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

#182

Post by cosmic_cheese »

everdrive wrote: post #147
charcircuit wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

I've had an alternate theory for a while. Prior to verbose metrics, UIs could only be designed by experts and via small samples of feedback sessions. And UIs used to be much, much better. I suspect two things have happened: - With a full set of metrics, we're now designing toward the bottom half of the bell curve, ie, towards the users who struggle the most. Rather than building UIs which are very good, but must be l…

I don’t believe either is the primary driver of modern UI design. Cynical as it may be, I think the only things that get any level of thought are:

1. Which design is most effective at steering the most users to the most lucrative actions

2. What looks good in screenshots, presentations, and marketing

The rest is tertiary or an afterthought at best. Lots of modern UI is actually pretty awful for those mentioned bottom of the bell curve users and not much better for anybody else in terms of being easy to use or serving the user’s needs.

Proper use of analytics might be of assistance here, but those are also primarily used to figure out the most profitable usage patterns, not what makes a program more pleasant or to easy to use. They’re also often twisted or misused to justify whatever course of action the PM in question wants to take, which is often to degrade the user experience in some way.

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

#184

Post by protocolture »

arcmechanica wrote: post #161
MarkusWandel wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they drank the Macintosh kool-aid and expect you to have all your commonly used apps pinned. In Win11 this even looks sort of like a Mac dock. Still made no sense to ruin the usability of the start menu which they invented.

What happens when you are no longer the darling. And PMs need to ship something new to get noticed, so they screw it all up

I am 99% sure that this is the result of academic GUI design and focus testing.

I read all the Windows 8 development blogs, and everything they wrote about seemed absolutely justified. Then you actually use the thing and it was a nightmare.

Same with their approach to hardware, the Duke Xbox controller tested really well, but then someone with daintier hands went to use it and uh actually its great for like 15% of the user base.

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

#185

Post by haswell »

ianmcgowan wrote: post #167
haswell wrote: post #141

Lately I've been strongly considering helping migrate my parents to Linux. Their needs are primarily web-based with some basic productivity tools mixed in, and Windows has just been getting more and more hostile. On top of this, they're at an age where they're now more susceptible than ever to various scams/attacks, and shutting down an entire category of problems by removing Windows from the picture is increasingly…

A chromebox mounted behind the monitor did the trick for me. Haven't had an emergency wipe/reinstall in years. Also, a tablet with keyboard takes some of the pressure off having a "computer" and you can go with iOS or Android depending on what phone they use.

I've been evaluating a Lenovo ThinkCentre m920q tiny I picked up for not very much money on eBay (the m720q models are even cheaper) and they seem like perfect machines for the task.

My parents use some tools and hardware that require a full OS so the tablet route isn't an option, but I'm starting to really like the idea of deploying a couple of these micro PCs.

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

#186

Post by crims0n »

underlipton wrote: post #153
hi_hi wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There're also performance issues. Building muscle memory (which means offloading tasks from working memory, leaving it open for learning) can't happen if you're constantly trying to figure out when the system is going to actually respond to your input.

This is so true. The most frustrating thing in the world to me is waiting for the UI to catch up to my actions… that should just never happen in 2025. Not only is it frustrating to wait, but as you elegantly stated it forces the menial task to enter working memory.

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

#187

Post by booleandilemma »

fragmede wrote: post #168
accrual wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Things popping up This is one of my biggest frustrations with modern GUI computing. It's especially bad with Windows and Office, but it happens on iOS and macOS too to an extent. Even though I've had Office installed for weeks I still get a "look over here at this new button!" pop-up while I'm in the middle of some Excel task. Pop-up here, pop-up there. It's insane the number of little bubbles and pop-ups and noise…

Omfg I do not need national political news shoved into my face in on the left side of my taskbar while I'm trying to focus on work, thank you Microsoft, k thx bye!

Yeah I just wanted to check the weather...

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

#189

Post by titzer »

underlipton wrote: post #153
hi_hi wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There're also performance issues. Building muscle memory (which means offloading tasks from working memory, leaving it open for learning) can't happen if you're constantly trying to figure out when the system is going to actually respond to your input.

We largely abandoned an unbelievably efficient form of human input in favor of big fat dumb slow touchscreens. Can you imagine where we'd be as a species if we got our shit together 25 years ago and standardized a few of the most important keyboard shortcuts and layouts and that was the default everywhere? I won't advocate terminal-only, but even classical GUIs with windows and icons and all could have been much more efficient if keyboard input and navigation was given priority instead of the comedy of using a pixel-precise indirect pointer to fart around a virtual screen select some button when...there are buttons under my fingers.

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

#190

Post by _carbyau_ »

Andrex wrote: post #174
hi_hi wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

I think part of it is that ubiquitous internet access.

Take that away so you have a standalone computer that you "run programs on" and it becomes simpler.

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