While neat, I would love to see a desktop that has similar design to either Windows XP/2000, classic Mac OS, or mac OS x cheetah.
Turns out they do have Windows XP: https://github.com/winblues/bluexp
Blue95: a desktop for your childhood home's computer room
221–230 of 316 posts
Re: Blue95: a desktop for your childhood home's computer room
#222Earlier 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…
Even on gnome, I regularly have applications stealing focus when they decide they're the most important thing. As well as being really annoying, it's a security risk if an application steals focus while you're typing your password or otp key
> if an application steals focus while you're typing your password
Definitely. Bitwarden does this ironically. It will pop-up "UPDATE AVAILABLE!" half way through typing a passphrase. Why not suppress the pop-up if the user is typing, or make it non-modal? Every few days I am interrupted just trying to unlock a vault.
Re: Blue95: a desktop for your childhood home's computer room
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I see it as one of the consequences of freedom, but perhaps also a gap in packaging where they can't bundle up their changes in a form to be applied onto another base. That 'base' is one issue I've been thinking about with linux, I have similar concerns about the cost of everyone being able to make their own distro for their own slight variation on something else. It's not that I think it's a bad thing to pathfind in…
I agree. I've gone down the "make Linux look like Windows 95" path a couple times and while it's a fun yak shave, it's tough to get all the little changes and details right on one system, let alone your friend's system who want to play with the same DE for a day.
Re: Blue95: a desktop for your childhood home's computer room
#224This 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…
> Actions buried deep within menus.
Maybe they are though in CS school that every layer of abstraction is better. I don't see other explanation for this level of stupidity.
Re: Blue95: a desktop for your childhood home's computer room
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
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!
Google Android phones do so freaking much of this too. Open the Google app (or swipe left from the home screen on the Pixel Launcher), gone are the days where it's a copy of their original homepage and is just a search bar, now it has news... Go to the search bar, and it shows trending searches. Die in a tucking fire!
You can definitely disable the "swipe left" thing on the launcher.
Re: Blue95: a desktop for your childhood home's computer room
#226My childhood home's computer said 38911 BYTES FREE.
Mine said C:\>, because I was cool enough to have a 34MB hard drive.
Re: Blue95: a desktop for your childhood home's computer room
#227Earlier 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…
Apple has kind of made things worse in the recent macOS, where my phone's notifications show up on the desktop now. Like, man, I was already drowning in them before anyway, I don't want them on two screens now.
Microsoft has a similar thing on Windows with Phone Link.
Re: Blue95: a desktop for your childhood home's computer room
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 mor…
We did standardize a lot of keyboard shortcuts and layouts. And it was fairly widespread, even, with both Windows and macOS retaining some bits of it (sadly, fewer and fewer with each new update).
Re: Blue95: a desktop for your childhood home's computer room
#229Earlier 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…
Even on gnome, I regularly have applications stealing focus when they decide they're the most important thing. As well as being really annoying, it's a security risk if an application steals focus while you're typing your password or otp key
Did you install an extension for that ? By default Gnome prevents this and shows a notification instead. It's extensions like Steal my focus that allows focus stealing
Re: Blue95: a desktop for your childhood home's computer room
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Win32 would buffer keystrokes so that a sequence of commands wouldn't be lost even if the UI took long to respond (e.g. if a dialog took long to open), but that has mostly been lost in the era of web apps and other similar bullshit.
Modern web (and web-like) apps all too often don't even bother supporting keyboard for anything other than text field input. What I find especially infuriating are the dialog boxes where the only thing you have is a textbox and a button, and yet you cannot press Enter to submit the dialog once you finish typing - nope, you have to reach out for the mouse and click that button.