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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

#271

Post by Gormo »

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.

Why would the Linux ecosystem -- a diverse community of lots of different individuals and organizations all pursuing their own particular goals -- be singularly concerned with increasing desktop market share of Linux as a whole, and all pursue that in the exact same way?

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

#272

Post by Gormo »

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?

Well, this is a modern OS capable of running modern software, for starters.

It's just Linux with a Win95-lookalike theme.

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

#273

Post by Gormo »

skissane wrote: post #204

A Windows 3.x UI theme would get the childhood nostalgia going much stronger for me than a 95/NT4/98/2000/Me theme does. Occasionally I boot up Windows 3.1 in a VM and play a game of Solitaire, for old time’s sake - I can run Windows 95 in a VM too, but it just doesn’t have the same pull.

Win3.1 works great in DOSBox, and you can get an even more authentic '80s-'90s IBM-compatible experience using PCEm or 86box, which emulate a wide variety of PC motherboards, graphics cards, and sound cards.

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

#274

Post by Gormo »

mrweasel wrote: post #14
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah as far as GUIs go, Win95 isn't in the "nostalgia" category for me, I was already well into adulthood. I kind of get the appeal, but it's also unnecessarily skeumorphic/fake-3d and there were some UX things that made little sense especially lumping all the window controls all together (including the destructive "close" X) where MacOS smartly separated them.

> where MacOS smartly separated them. Interesting that modern macOS now have them next to each other, like Windows. You'd be hard pressed to call the Window 95 UI pretty, but it is really functional. I'm still a firm believe that the majority of the work we do with computers today could be done within the Windows 95 shell. We need 64bit, more memory, faster CPUs, GPUs all that, but the modern UI aren't really "better…

> I'm still a firm believe that the majority of the work we do with computers today could be done within the Windows 95 shell.

Wasn't that one of the ideas behind SerenityOS?

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

#275

Post by esafak »

burnte wrote: post #106
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.

> I never had to do anything akin to fiddling with the Windows Registry. I don't believe you. You have never, EVER, NOT ONCE run a terminal command to change an option on MacOS? I just refuse to believe anyone on HN hasn't altered preferences in the terminal on MacOS.

Not with anything near the frequency of Windows. The last such thing I remember doing is restarting the locate indexing service with launchctl. I do lots of things in the command line, of course, but not so much to configure MacOS itself.

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

#276

Post by p_l »

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #196
p_l wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what difference to end user it makes where exactly the key/value data is stored? No real difference whether the data is HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\MyAppName or com.my.app when you're trying to coerce some internals whose configuration is not exposed because you're not worthy of it

I’d say that a quick defaults command is probably on the whole more friendly than trawling around in the arcane mess that is the Windows registry. It’s not as friendly as it could be, but at least it’s a somewhat human readable one liner. It’s also reasonable to back up plists and/or sync them between machines like some users do with their dotfiles, because they’re just files.

I have never seen anyone backup defaults database between macs[1], I have seen a lot of scripts calling setting by setting instead.

Which has direct equivalent in "reg" files, to be quite honest.

[1] Other than restoring time machine backup to another system or similar cloning setups

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

#277

Post by qwertox »

account42 wrote: post #260
qwertox wrote: post #78

`/var/home/afidel/` There are some pretty good desktop environments for Linux which emulate the Windows desktop, so that old Windows users would feel at home immediately. But I've never seen them emulate the filesystem, which is what took most old Windows users the biggest effort to understand. And the Linux filesystem raises it to a new level of complexity, which makes every old Windows users want to go back to Wind…

Surely you mean C:\Documents and Settings\afidel\Desktop Or maybe it's not actually a real problem for users if these paths change.

My Windows 11 C:\ no longer has a `Documents and Settings`. It still works, though. Windows 8 has it as a hidden junction targeting C:\Users, so it was already deprecated there.

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

#278

Post by mfro »

corank wrote: post #218
mfro wrote: post #20

Is it really necessary to spin up an entirely new distro for an XFCE+GTK theme?

I wouldn't call it an entirely new distro. It's just an Fedora image bundled with the necessary changes to create the UX. It doesn't provide its own software repositories. It's more like an unofficial Fedora Spin.

I see, it still seems like the kind of project that would be much better suited to a DE packge-group style release. I think very few people will want to reinstall their OS just to try it.

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

#279

Post by cosmic_cheese »

SlackSabbath wrote: post #248
cosmic_cheese wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As somebody who recently had to switch to Mac for work, my experience has been the exact opposite of this. Every other OS I've used since Windows 95 I've been able to get to grips with the same way: start off using the mouse to find my way around the UI, and introduce keyboard shortcuts as and when I find them useful. Eventually I get to the point of being able to use either exclusively keyboard or exclusively mouse…

It helps to keep in mind where the OS and its core user base is coming from.

For the case of the up button for example, prior to OS X the Finder was a spacial file manager where each folder had a single corresponding window that remembered its position on screen, allowing users to rely on spacial memory to quickly navigate filesystems. Its windows didn’t even have toolbars, because they weren’t navigator windows — every time you opened a folder you got a new window (unless that folder’s window was already open, in which case it was foregrounded).

So when OS X rolls around in ~2000 and switches the Finder to navigator windows, they’re looking at what existing users will find familiar. Back/forward is easy since most had used a web browser by that point and map cleanly to most people’s mental models (“I want to go back”), but up? That’s a lot more rare. A handful of folks who’d used an FTP client might’ve been familiar with the concept, but few outside of that few would’ve, and how “up” relates to a filesystem is not in any way obvious. And so, the Finder never got an up button, just a key shortcut because anybody advanced enough to be hunting down shortcuts is going to understand the notion of “up” in a filesystem.

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

#280

Post by cosmic_cheese »

int_19h wrote: post #234
cosmic_cheese wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 - Electro…

On the last paragraph, something is better than nothing, though. It’s always bugged me that Electron doesn’t offer Windows and Linux users a way to enable the menus that’ve been provided for the Mac version.
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