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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

#251

Post by jon_richards »

Andrex wrote: post #174
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…

Humans hate being bored but only dick-around and learn things like this when they're bored. Speaking personally, I guess. Since the 90s we've found "better" ways at "curing" our boredom. Put this UI on a modern OS in front of a kid today and they would just download Steam, Chrome and Discord. And be assured, they're very proficient at the in-and-outs of those platforms. Just some random thoughts I had, not sure any o…

I used to think I watched TV or scrolled Reddit because I didn’t have the energy to pursue more interesting things. I blocked Reddit and TV. Turns out I have plenty of energy, those were just stealing it from me.

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

#252

Post by oarsinsync »

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…

> 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 Mirror episode (Fifteen Million Merits) comes to mind.

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

#254

Post by p_l »

Lammy wrote: post #210
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

It was common in the Windows 9x days for the two Registry Hives (SYSTEM.DAT and USER.DAT) to get corrupted leading to an unbootable system or to get fragmented and/or full of disused values from poorly-uninstalled software leading to increased memory usage. Here are some KB articles to check out for context: - https://helparchive.huntertur.net/document/105563 - https://helparchive.huntertur.net/document/89799 - https…

Been there, know the pain, still not actually a big difference to the question of modifying "unexported" settings

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

#255

Post by zild3d »

mg794613 wrote: post #243

That's just the chicago theme I'va had for years now on my XFCE, I think it's a bit lame to steal that theme (not from Microsoft but the maker of that xfce theme), put it in a repository, give it a different name, and pose it as your own work? The repo literally adds nothing, just a name change.

> a bit lame to steal that theme

Do you mean reuse/copy/redistribute? Which is what the GPL-3.0+/MIT license that the theme uses is meant for?

> Based on Fedora Atomic Xfce with the Chicago95 theme.

The readme has a direct link out to it in the 2nd sentence, that's pretty clear credit

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

#256

Post by LoganDark »

oarsinsync wrote: post #252
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…

> 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 notifications I don't care about, leaving only the ones that I do.

> A well curated set of notifications that only gives you the things you actually need is superb, but incredibly difficult to get right.

Ehh... maybe it's incredibly difficult to fix once you are already drowning in them, but since I immediately nuke anything I don't like from orbit, and have done so my whole life, there are a lot fewer things I don't like than if I hadn't to do that.

> 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.

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

#257

Post by brulard »

hi_hi wrote: post #137
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

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 share your nostalgia. I did learn a lot by exploring Amiga OS and later Windows 98 without anyone to help or an internet connection. It was fun, but we had time to spend back then. Today time feels much more scarce and I no longer appreciate if I have to learn by trial and error. Now it feels like you have to keep up with the tech progress, which is crazy fast. And youth has too many things to do that are more appealing, like social media, youtubes, loads of games etc. For them the exploration of OS or some software is not attractive anymore.

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

#258

Post by txdv »

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…

I installed ubuntu for my mother, she just needs to download pdfs and read pdfs, look at images, use gmail. Sometimes she opens a document with LibreOffice, but no power usage.

Seems to work, the maintenance is also now super easy, ssh, update. Something wrong and she needs support? I ssh, open up a tunnel and connect via remina to her desktop to explain.

I had a situation once when Ubuntu did literally not go into the Desktop Environment anymore, but all I did was update and upgrade packages and it started working again.

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

#259

Post by benrutter »

I love the niche of enthusiasm that exists for the Windows 95 UI. It's not an original point that aside from nostalgia it's a really clear and usable design; but that leads me to wonder, are there any modern UIs/themes/etc that are inspired by (rather than necessarily directly mimicking) Windows 95?

Would be interesting to see what a modern version of Windows 95 would look like, or what general design lessons can be learned from it's niceties.

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

#260

Post by account42 »

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.

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