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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

#281

Post by cosmic_cheese »

p_l wrote: post #276
cosmic_cheese wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It’s not a database, they’re individual files. Most are even plain XML that can be hand written and edited with a text editor.

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

#282

Post by zestyping »

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…

Ouch. That screenshot is uncomfortable to look at. The window title bars are painfully narrow, the frame borders have inconsistent thicknesses, the Start menu overlaps the taskbar, the vertical centering of text is wrong.

The answer to your question is that these replicas are of low quality. This one looks like the whole thing was made by someone (or a committee of people) lacking attention to detail.

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

#283

Post by LoganDark »

nkrisc wrote: post #263
LoganDark wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ca…

That sounds like a lot of work. Alternatively, I can just ignore them all. I don’t care if there’s a red circle with a number in it. I don’t notice it and it doesn’t bother me.

> That sounds like a lot of work.

Again, it is a lot of work if you have to do it at once. If you've done it naturally over the course of your life, you would never have had a big pile of things to take care of at once.

> Alternatively, I can just ignore them all. I don’t care if there’s a red circle with a number in it. I don’t notice it and it doesn’t bother me.

Suit yourself. Personally, I care about responding promptly to certain things, like instant messages or emails, but I don't appreciate unwelcome distractions.

See: https://vxtwitter.com/AutisticCallum_/status/190533113360614... & https://vxtwitter.com/AutisticCallum_/status/190533113707064...

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

#284

Post by overgard »

LoganDark wrote: post #239
ascagnel_ wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ca…

It's not really a matter of not knowing it can be done, it's that the mental effort of curating it is not really worth it (short term, anyway), because then I have to decide what's a worthwhile notification and what isn't.

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

#285

Post by dpflug »

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…

IMHO, Fedora's Atomic Desktops[^1] are the way to go for that. Automatic upgrades you can roll back if something breaks? Yes, please.

Universal Blue[^2] has some spins that got a glow up, but their dev team gives a bit of the "everything old is bad" vibe.

OpenSUSE's MicroOS[^3] desktops aren't ready for nontechnical people, but their atomic upgrade strategy is much faster and simpler (btrfs snapshots). I'm keeping an eye on it.

^1: https://fedoraproject.org/atomic-desktops/

^2: https://universal-blue.org

^3: https://microos.opensuse.org

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

#286

Post by zozbot234 »

Gormo wrote: post #269
jeroenhd wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, ev…

Most people vastly overstate the effect that CRT displays had on the appearance of legacy software. Yes, very early on, when people used TVs or cheap composite monitors as the display devices for their computers, there were blurry pixel edges, bloom effects, dot crawl, color artifacting, and all the rest. But by the '90s, we had high-quality monitors designed for high-resolution graphics with fast refresh rates, with…

CRT monitors did not have "crisp pixel boundaries". A CRT pixel is a Gaussian-blurred dot, not a "crisp" square as it is on modern displays. What "high-quality" CRT monitors did have was higher resolutions, even as high as 1600x1200, where individual pixels are basically not distinguishable.

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

#287

Post by oarsinsync »

LoganDark wrote: post #256
oarsinsync wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Instead of doing that they just learned to ignore everything Leading to notifications being ignored, and not mattering at all. A well curated set of notifications that only gives you the things you actually need is superb, but incredibly difficult to get right. Learning how to ignore all of the noise is probably a more valuable skill for a future where control is slowly wrestled away from the user. A certain Black…

> Leading to notifications being ignored, and not mattering at all. You found my point! Some notifications may be important, but if one has learned to ignore all notifications, then they won't catch the important ones anymore. When I get important notifications, I can act on them immediately, because I have not learned to ignore all my notifications, because I don't need to. I have taken care to block any notificatio…

> > Learning how to ignore all of the noise is probably a more valuable skill for a future where control is slowly wrestled away from the user. A certain Black Mirror episode (Fifteen Million Merits) comes to mind.

> I have a really hard time ignoring noise. I think that is because of my autism. Ignoring noise would be a nice skill, I guess, but I feel significantly better when the noise is simply not there in the first place. I'd imagine most would, but for some reason I seem to break a lot more easily when uncomfortable.

I share this discomfort, but only in physical space. I struggle with visual and audible noise in the real world, but my screen I’ve become very adept at ignoring. Giving up on inbox-zero in my personal life and ending up with 2000+ unread emails in my personal mailbox is where that started.

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

#288

Post by happyopossum »

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

> My hypothesis is today's "modern" OS user interfaces are objectively worse from a usability perspective, obfuscating key functionality behind layers of confusing menus.

I think if you went back and actually tried to use these old UIs you would realize that one of the reasons stuff isn't hidden behind layers of menus is that in a lot of cases the 'hidden' features just didn't exist back then.

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

#289

Post by LoganDark »

oarsinsync wrote: post #287
LoganDark wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Leading to notifications being ignored, and not mattering at all. You found my point! Some notifications may be important, but if one has learned to ignore all notifications, then they won't catch the important ones anymore. When I get important notifications, I can act on them immediately, because I have not learned to ignore all my notifications, because I don't need to. I have taken care to block any notificatio…

> > Learning how to ignore all of the noise is probably a more valuable skill for a future where control is slowly wrestled away from the user. A certain Black Mirror episode (Fifteen Million Merits) comes to mind. > I have a really hard time ignoring noise. I think that is because of my autism. Ignoring noise would be a nice skill, I guess, but I feel significantly better when the noise is simply not there in the fi…

> my screen I’ve become very adept at ignoring.

I unfortunately don't share this ease. As an example, I have to use custom CSS to completely remove blocked messages from Discord, because once I know a blocked message exists I can not seem to ignore it. The only way to properly protect myself from blocked users is to ensure that I can never even know they're there.

I do a similar thing for muted DMs. Once I know that someone has sent a message, I cannot seem to avoid checking the message. The only way for me to properly take a break is to ensure that there's no way for me to accidentally discover the existence of new messages. So I have some JavaScript that completely removes muted DMs from the list so that I won't even see them jumping back up to the top every new message.

I don't know what causes this to happen or how to fix it, but I do know that ignoring things has always been nearly impossible for me. Whenever there is anything I need to protect myself from, I need to also protect myself from ever noticing any related activity.

Maybe this is some sort of OCD, I'm not sure. Pretty sure it would meet the criteria, I guess.

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

#290

Post by nkrisc »

LoganDark wrote: post #283
nkrisc wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds like a lot of work. Alternatively, I can just ignore them all. I don’t care if there’s a red circle with a number in it. I don’t notice it and it doesn’t bother me.

> That sounds like a lot of work. Again, it is a lot of work if you have to do it at once. If you've done it naturally over the course of your life, you would never have had a big pile of things to take care of at once. > Alternatively, I can just ignore them all. I don’t care if there’s a red circle with a number in it. I don’t notice it and it doesn’t bother me. Suit yourself. Personally, I care about responding pr…

> Personally, I care about responding promptly to certain things, like instant messages or emails, but I don't appreciate unwelcome distractions.

Sure, if I’m being paid to respond right away then I will. The “instant” in “instant message” describes the delivery time, not the required response time. Email, IM are things I all treat asynchronous communications. Anything urgent should be a phone call, ideally. If there’s a particular email address I consider important I’ll make a separate inbox for it.

Otherwise, I find sort of fun to see how big the number can get.

On my work email I just mark everything as read at the end of the day so the number starts over each day.

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