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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

#231

Post by int_19h »

goosedragons wrote: post #198
mananaysiempre wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

It can look better. This is basically a distro with Chicago95 out of the box and not well configured. If you take the time it can look more like 95. The Chicago95 screenshots IMO look better: https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95

Fonts make the biggest difference here. Tahoma would also be decent (if not quite right).

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

#232

Post by int_19h »

mananaysiempre wrote: post #88
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…

I’m less inclined to attribute it to “these days”, as I remember the contemporary copycat themes in e.g. KDE and Tk looking off as well. Even Swing with the native look-and-feel didn’t quite look or feel right, IIRC. As a (weak) counterpoint to supplicating ourselves to the old UI masters, I submit Raymond Chen’s observations from 2004[1] that the flat/3D/flat cycle is largely fashion, e.g. how the toolbars in Office…

> I’ll never get tired of mentioning that the futuristic UI of the in-game computers of the original Deus Ex, from 2000, supported not only Tab to go between controls and Enter and Esc to submit and dismiss, but also Alt accelerators, complete with underlined letters in the labels

I think that's because they used the stock UI toolkit of the original Unreal Engine, which also had all these things. If you recall, UT'99 actually had a UI more like a desktop app at the time, complete with a menu bar and tabbed dialogs:

http://hw-museum.cz/data/article/VGA-Benchmarks/Benchmark-VG...

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

#233

Post by LoganDark »

int_19h wrote: post #230
LoganDark wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is why I commonly have a trackpad in addition to a mouse when I use Windows. Literally, mouse on right, trackpad on left. It's much faster to use the trackpad for annoyances like these. I also find that trackpads are ten times better for scrolling.

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

#234

Post by int_19h »

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #49
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.

It’s not a 1:1 mapping, but much power user functionality in macOS is designed to progressively reveal itself as the user becomes more technically capable, a type of design known as progressive disclosure. This allows newbies to not feel overwhelmed while also allowing power users to feel at home. The problem is that way too many people approach macOS with the Windows way of doing things firmly planted in their minds…

One thing that I always hated about macOS is the menu bar placement.

Ironically, in the long run, it has proven to be an asset for the simple reason that any macOS app has to have a main menu with commands in it, if it doesn't want to look silly. So this whole modern trend of replacing everything with "hamburger" menus that don't have the functionality isn't killing UX quite so bad there.

Although some apps - Electron ones, especially - stick a few token options there, and then the rest still has to be pixel-hunted in the window. Some don't even put "Settings" where it's supposed to be (under the application menu). Ugh.

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

#236

Post by acyou »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #200
acyou wrote: post #145

What 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?

95 and XP are different in terms of software selection. Linux Benefits: Security patches (safety), software updates (convenience), hardware support, freedom, and privacy. Not to mention a modern browser, terminal, TLS, and filesystems like exfat. Fedora runs Wine as well. Maybe not every 95/XP program will run, but I'd guess a lot of them do. You could also run the others in Virtual Box when needed.

Ok, but you don't need any of that if you're just running 1990s/2000s Windows educational software on an air gapped OS with no Internet access, which is what you would want for this application.

Why would you want to mess around trying to get programs to half work on Wine when you can just have the real thing?

If you want your kid to have a web browser for educational purposes, I feel like you had probably might as well just hand them the iPad.

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

#237

Post by interludead »

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

The Windows dominance really puts things in perspective... Even with the rise of mobile and Macs making some headway, it's amazing how entrenched it still is on the desktop.

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

#238

Post by interludead »

girvo wrote: post #176
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…

> 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

I did the exact same thing - mounted a shiny new board straight onto the case, powered it on, and… nothing. Spent hours troubleshooting before realizing I'd basically shorted the whole thing

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

#239

Post by LoganDark »

ascagnel_ wrote: post #209
LoganDark wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You probably already know this if it was bothering you, but just in case: System Settings -> Notifications -> toggle off "Allow notifications from iPhone".

I would also argue, regardless of what mobile OS you're on, quieting, delaying, or disabling notifications on a regular basis (and taking stock of what you let through) is prudent.

I'm always shocked whenever I see someone having hundreds or even thousands of unread notifications. It pains me to see that instead of controlling their feed to only what interests them, they've just let everything pile up forever, completely unread.

For example, on Discord, I sometimes see people with unreads for every server, and dozens to hundreds of completely unread DMs, just because they don't know that you can turn notifications off for the stuff you don't care about. Instead of doing that they just learned to ignore everything, leading to a disorganized mess.

I'm somewhat familiar with what typically leads to this (usually something like ADHD), but when you let it go for so many years it's such a big task to fix it that the fixing never happens and you're just kind of screwed for eternity.

In Discord, I have no unread servers and no unread DMs, despite being at the server limit. This is because all my servers are completely silenced and all my DMs are read immediately. My only unread email is one I marked as such because I still plan to reply to it soon. I have the attention for every single notification because I aggressively optimize the notifications I receive to the point where they all are typically things I care about. Back in the day I would instantly report every email to SpamCop, typically in under one minute, but I eventually stopped doing that because there's no point.

I simultaneously do and don't understand people who just submit to a flood of irrelevant garbage. Control it!!

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

#240

Post by interludead »

doright wrote: post #19

I 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…

I love that you went all-in with a 1024x768 monitor
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