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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

#301

Post by mixmastamyk »

acyou wrote: post #236
mixmastamyk wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

Why tie up a whole machine/desk-space for something so niche? Probably a big 90s/2k sized desktop at that.

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

#302

Post by wpm »

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…

Right click the window title and you get a drop down navigation menu of every folder in the hierarchy up to the "/Volumes/$VOLUME" the folder is on.

I'd kill for this on Windows or any mainstream Linux DE.

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

#303

Post by wpm »

diggan wrote: post #52
cosmic_cheese wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Toggling hidden file visibility in Finder and open/save dialogs has been doable with the key shortcut Command-Shift-. for quite some time now.

Is that permanent across reboots and all? I think that was the main issue I had with it, but was a long time ago now.

There is a checkbox for file extensions and a View menu item for full paths. Hidden files is still not surfaced in the GUI, but is persistent.

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

#304

Post by wpm »

bbqfog wrote: post #25
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.

MacOS is pretty cursed. The equivalent to registry fiddling is doing anything in ~/Library/Application Support It still has "Services" as a hold over from Next that is completely broken and unused (but still present in every app for some reason). Now you also have the joy of diving deep into the Settings every time an app needs some sort of permission. I'd say something about .DS_Store files, but that's not really UI…

I'd much rather work with plain-text human readable property list files with straightforward `defaults` commands than the hive of Hell called the registry.

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

#305

Post by askvictor »

boudin wrote: post #229
askvictor wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'm using PopOS, so there's a chance that it's related to that, but no I haven't. And I've tried the gsetting that supposedly helps prevent it. I've only ever seen Zoom and VSCode do this; I get the feeling that they don't quite follow the same conventions that 'native' Linux applications use, or use some trickery (as they see themselves as the most important thing on your computer).

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

#306

Post by julik »

p_l wrote: post #191
cosmic_cheese wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really, defaults are stored in per-application plist files rather than in a singular database.

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

There is - removing a wonk preference namespace is as easy as `rm ~/Library/Preferences/com.cheapskatesoftware.wonko.plist`. Whereas the Windows Registry is a monolithic piece of gunk you need a Microsoft editor for to zap something

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

#307

Post by ivan_gammel »

burnte wrote: post #294
ivan_gammel wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This is caused by a change in who is hired as UI/UX developers. „UX/UI developers“ is a strange name for it. In 2000s the web enabled more sophisticated presentation designs and there was a push from client-server to web-based applications using incredibly strange technologies for building UIs — HTML, CSS and JavaScript, which gave the rise to UX design as a interdisciplinary job (HCI+digital graphics design). By 20…

> „UX/UI developers“ is a strange name for it. I agree. It's a UI Engineer. User Experience is just the fluffification of the title to something that sounds expansive and nebulous when it's actually pretty focused and critical.

Then you don’t understand it too. Software solves user problems by offering experience, not UI. Not every solution requires UI, but every solution creates user experience.

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

#308

Post by p_l »

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #281
p_l wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is not a gotcha, really. An XML file can be considered database just as well (similarly, part of registry on NT is portable between machines).

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

#309

Post by p_l »

julik wrote: post #306
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

There is - removing a wonk preference namespace is as easy as `rm ~/Library/Preferences/com.cheapskatesoftware.wonko.plist`. Whereas the Windows Registry is a monolithic piece of gunk you need a Microsoft editor for to zap something

Considering the day I once spent hunting for all possible plist locations of a single program, I'd rate it about same for registry and plists

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

#310

Post by Gormo »

zozbot234 wrote: post #286
Gormo wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

By the early '90s, high-quality CRT displays had low dot pitches or very precise aperture grilles in addition to supporting a wider range of refresh rates, and better clarity of display was a major selling point.

People were typically using 640x480 or 800x600 in GUI enviroments, and most DOS games were at 320x200. 1600x1200 was incredibly uncommon, even where the video hardware and monitors supported it -- people were usually using 14" or 15" 4:3 displays, and that resolution was way too high to be usable on displays that size, and the necessarily lower refresh rates made flicker unbearable at higher resolutions.

At the common resolutions and with purpose-built CRT monitors, pixel boundaries were quite clear and distinguishable.

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