Lifestreams was also an interesting take on a desktop UI back in the day
Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes
321–330 of 407 posts
Re: Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes
#322You might be looking at these old Unix GUIs thinking they're shit compared to now, but actually, at the time, they were shit too.
No bloat was good! Snappy responsiveness on early CPUs.
Even xterm on a sun sparcstation running openlook was sluggish at the time. cde made it hopeless.
Re: Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes
#323The aspect ratios were much "taller" back then, which was kind of better for editing code. All these late 90s designs were near NTSC at the time - aspect ratios like 1.25:1 (1280x1024) or 1024x768 (1.33:1). Monitors have always followed TVs, since displays now are the "HD" ratio of 16:9 (1.77:1), or 16:10 if we're lucky. But we do get way more pixels now anyway.
Use portrait displays! You'll never complain about the height again. Use 1440p (or scaled equivalent) and the width won't be an issue either. Many displays make this easy (all the Dells I've had can rotate), and adequate rotating stands aren't necessarily expensive.
There's even maybe some Actual Scientific Evidence to justify the switch: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47638928
Re: Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes
#324Earlier quoted context omitted.
Go with Win 10 LTSC or use Win Server as a daily. Both are crap-less and can be fully debloated in minutes.
Windows 10 doesn’t have the UI that the parent is asking for. Windows 7 was the last one that had that. Windows 11 isn’t much different in terms of UI from Windows 10 after tweaking a couple of things.
Re: Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes
#325Earlier quoted context omitted.
We also lost clearly identifiable buttons, loading bars (replaced with throbbers), status bars that tell you what you're hovering over and what the program is doing, stable UIs to develop muscle memory, etc. But we did gain some nice things! - Tabs. - Titlebar buttons and other space-saving measures. - Document editors remembering unsaved changes. - Forms that validate on focus lost, instead of submission. - Ctrl+P m…
Titlebar buttons are actually bad. The titlebar exists (or existed) for a reason, so you'd have somewhere you could grab to manipulate the window. Now it's kind of a guessing game with every app on where you can grab without causing the app to do something you didn't want.
If they do it correctly there's plenty of free space in the titlebar for grabbing. That's how it works in GTK+3 and later for example.
Re: Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes
#326Lifestreams was also an interesting take on a desktop UI back in the day
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Re: Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes
#327I can't help thinking about how much we have lost. Just finding the scrollbar nowadays can be a challenge. Not to mention if you want to resize a pane - in some applications they seem to have taken extra steps to make it difficult to find the line to grab.
I agree. There's something about those 80s and 90s interfaces with their visible affordances, grab points, etc., that just makes them instantly comprehensible. Many of them are also beautiful. The absolute peak, for me, though are those early releases of MacOS X. Cheetah and Puma were both incredible, both in appearance, and in use. They looked fantastic but they still had all the affordances and comprehensibility of…
In Mac I use:
defaults write -g NSWindowShouldDragOnGesture -bool true
Re: Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes
#328Earlier quoted context omitted.
My pet peeve is spacing. My usual resolution is 1920x1080 (scaled or not) and it feels I could cram more information in an old 1024x768 desktop. You have to maximize most windows to get it to show enough information.
This drives me crazy. Even looking at these old screenshots you just know that these systems we outputting a display resolution lower than 1024x768. When I was checking out the MacBook Neo a while back I was disappointed that the resolution is not natively x2 scaled. It uses fractional scaling when macOS handles fractional scaling quite poorly. I've set the resolution on my M1 MBP to 1280x800 so it was x2 scaled and…
Over 75% (well... just...) of the screenshots are 1024x768 or greater - though admittedly typically not by much. Over half (well, again: just!) are 1152x864 or larger.
Re: Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes
#329Earlier quoted context omitted.
The UI wouldn't be cluttered if the keys on the...keyboard...did stuff. Now that vibe-coding has broken me out of my decades-long irrational fear of GUI programming, I've recently been circling back on all the UI patterns I have just accepted. One missing one is all those F1...F12 keys. I remember those doing stuff in the DOS days. I fantasize about a computer where the menus are at the bottom of the screen and line…
Arguably the trend to touchscreens could have given a lot of help to the novice user by having labeled buttons - onscreen FKeys if you will. But we seem to have used touchscreens to show pictures fullscreen, with controls that disappear until you swipe or touch something just the right way. Fkeys are arguably a huge tragedy, here we have keys, twelve of them, that could have been used for simple one-fingered operatio…
Touchscreen UIs definitely could be made a lot better. For example, long-press has always annoyed me. Why isn't there a modifier button that allows selecting the interaction mode before touching (e.g. a mode button separate from the thing being clicked on, that can also be clicked on with one finger)? Similarly, wouldn't it be nice if there was a way to know, before clicking, what a button might do, and whether that could be undone? Steep, steep asks, I know.
Re: Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes
#330Earlier quoted context omitted.
Windows 10 doesn’t have the UI that the parent is asking for. Windows 7 was the last one that had that. Windows 11 isn’t much different in terms of UI from Windows 10 after tweaking a couple of things.
https://techsanjeetyt.com/make-windows-10-look-like-windows-...
You can’t get back the Classic Windows look in Windows 10 that was still fully supported in Windows 7.