Well, you've successfully made me nostalgic for the year 2000.
Mac(OS)talgia
21–30 of 82 posts
Re: Mac(OS)talgia
#22I get the nostalgia, but boy are computers so much better than back then. MacOS 7-8 (not sure about 9, never used it) would crash constantly. There was no protected memory, so as soon as one app started misbehaving, you'd have to reboot the computer and it would take forever and you'd lose your work. My recollection was that this would typically happen 3-4 times a day. Apple's project to make a new MacOS that didn't…
I think it used to be that the back end (hardware, kernel, services, libraries) was in many ways worse, but the front end (UI/UX) was largely better. And today we have the reverse; amazingly fast and mostly reliable hardware, solid underlying components, and ugly, hostile interfaces on top. Hence the number of folks wishing for the Windows 2k GUI on a modern NT OS, a slightly more robust version of some OS X (I think I usually hear Snow Leopard?), or those of us running CDE on bleeding edge Linux.
Re: Mac(OS)talgia
#23There’s something about the Platinum UI that makes it timeless. I have been running XFCE with a Platinum theme on several of my machines/VMs for a while (https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2022/04/12/2330) and I’m a bit sad that the XFCE top-level app menu plugin seems to have been deprecated in recent releases, since it really adds to the experience.
Re: Mac(OS)talgia
#24I get the nostalgia, but boy are computers so much better than back then. MacOS 7-8 (not sure about 9, never used it) would crash constantly. There was no protected memory, so as soon as one app started misbehaving, you'd have to reboot the computer and it would take forever and you'd lose your work. My recollection was that this would typically happen 3-4 times a day. Apple's project to make a new MacOS that didn't…
I think it depended on your workload, and how often you rebooted them. But yes, macOS reliability has come a long way since then.
UX I'm less sure about - I now use a 4K monitor to do a bunch of things I used to do quite successfully on 1024x768.
Performance of a bunch of basic apps has also taken a few hits here and there (at least in part due to that big resolution bump, and despite massive hardware improvements).
I definitely have some nostalgia for that era, but it's possibly more nostalgia for the age before the internet consumed all of computing...
Re: Mac(OS)talgia
#25All we ever needed was in Snow Leopard. Everything since then (ok except maybe for SIP and XProtect) is bloatware.
10.6.8 was solid (people often forget that 10.6 and the intermediate patches were a bit of a mess) but when I use it I definitely feel a few spots where some polish and QoL improvements would be welcome. Its theme’s dominant gray is also a bit too dark.
I don’t mind SIP personally. It always unnerved me that any random executable was just a single admin password entry away from doing whatever it pleased.
My ideal desktop OS environment would be something like a polished-up Snow Leopard using the brighter, more refined theme from 10.9 Mavericks (except with the flat scrollbars de-flattened). If I had that I don’t think I could use anything else.
Re: Mac(OS)talgia
#26Re: Mac(OS)talgia
#27I get the nostalgia, but boy are computers so much better than back then. MacOS 7-8 (not sure about 9, never used it) would crash constantly. There was no protected memory, so as soon as one app started misbehaving, you'd have to reboot the computer and it would take forever and you'd lose your work. My recollection was that this would typically happen 3-4 times a day. Apple's project to make a new MacOS that didn't…
That’s true. The nostalgia nerds can rightly criticise the ever-spiralling bloat and inefficiency of modern systems. But modern macOS can go for months without a crash/reboot! Almost unimaginable in the Mac OS 9 / Win95 era.
This is what pushed me to get my parents on NT4 in 1997: the system would run until you wanted to reboot it, rather than crashing twice a day because Netscape decided to have a conniption like Win9x did. Never looked back. Win2000 was absolutely awesome for them, WinXP was twice the size and half the speed but fine and very long-lived, Vista was extremely reliable despite all the hate heaped on it...and we're approaching the modern era.
Meanwhile, I was running IRIX (for which my record was 4 years without a reboot, and that only due to a power outage) and Linux; and when I got some money, macOS X: all rock solid.
edit: I just remembered that Netcraft used to have a server uptime leaderboard, and for quite a while in the 1990s, Lamborghini was at the top of the list with their IRIX servers. The earliest archive I can find of the list is from 2001, with ONLY FreeBSD and IRIX occupying the top 29 places: https://web.archive.org/web/20010226190549/http://uptime.net...
Re: Mac(OS)talgia
#28There’s something about the Platinum UI that makes it timeless. I have been running XFCE with a Platinum theme on several of my machines/VMs for a while ( https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2022/04/12/2330 ) and I’m a bit sad that the XFCE top-level app menu plugin seems to have been deprecated in recent releases, since it really adds to the experience.
The XFCE global menubar plugin being deprecated likely happened because there’s no standardized way for applications on Linux to surface their menus to the environment for display (or to power a Unity-style HUD or whatever), which means that hackery via plugins for GTK and Qt are required to make a global menubar work. Keeping that hackery functional probably is a constant battle.
There’s also how GTK apps have been on a crusade against menubars since GTK3 which doesn’t help matters. Same goes for Linux builds of Electron apps, which don’t offer the user the option to display a menubar even though all the menu work is already done for macOS builds.
Whatever the case it bums me out too. I know a lot of people hate global menubars but I’ve always loved them and it kills me that they’re not a practical option on the Linux desktop, despite ultimate customizability being one of the most frequently-cited reasons to use Linux as a desktop OS. You can do anything you want, as long as what you want falls within the boxes of Win9X-like, tablet-like, or "trendy minimal tiling window manager"…
Re: Mac(OS)talgia
#29The big loss for me was when many apps took over the windows 3.0 MDI interface style. (Specifically thinking of code here). I was doing some hacking in codwarrior on Mac OS 9 a few weeks ago and it was such a joy to have 5 source code windows open any once - and a separate window with build or find results that weren’t wrapped in a miserable column. There’s actually a lot about Xcode I do like - but treating content panels like the old Puzzle desk accessory was never an improvement.
Re: Mac(OS)talgia
#30There’s something about the Platinum UI that makes it timeless. I have been running XFCE with a Platinum theme on several of my machines/VMs for a while ( https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2022/04/12/2330 ) and I’m a bit sad that the XFCE top-level app menu plugin seems to have been deprecated in recent releases, since it really adds to the experience.
The XFCE global menubar plugin being deprecated likely happened because there’s no standardized way for applications on Linux to surface their menus to the environment for display (or to power a Unity-style HUD or whatever), which means that hackery via plugins for GTK and Qt are required to make a global menubar work. Keeping that hackery functional probably is a constant battle. There’s also how GTK apps have been…
Funnily enough it works on Ubuntu but there seems to be no Fedora package.