331–340 of 407 posts
I really wish Windows 11 had a Windows 2000 mode. I want a grey, boxy UI, but I also want al the modern technologies Windows has introduced since—DirectStorage, D3D12, fast SSDs, device-independent pixels and vector UIs, all written directly against a Windows API that is modernised, safe, and easy to use. No React, no ads in my weather app; the only browser on my computer will be the browser itself.
Win2K was peak windows.
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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.
You might be looking at these old Unix GUIs thinking they're shit compared to now, but actually, at the time, they were shit too.
I used RISC OS at home. Was wonderful to come back to that.
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Even xterm on a sun sparcstation running openlook was sluggish at the time. cde made it hopeless.
Yeah some of them just ran bad even on fully speced systems. The vision of the software was far beyond the hardware for a long while.
I remember using some kind of software around the time of windows xp i think, that could replace the chrome/shell so you could design your own GUI entirely – but I can't remember what it was called! I spent a lot of time iterating and experimenting back then, replacing iexplore.exe or whatever the main process was called.
System76's COSMIC DE has been a real life-changer for me in making tiling accessible.
There's a lot of nostalgia in the comments here. I wonder if any reader under say 25 is willing to comment; do you think OS's today are a regression? do those look better? To me they look unwieldy, heavy and overwhelming and I can't help but think the love for them is just the love for youth or whatever
I'm 23 and IMO, the Windows desktop style peaked somewhere in Windows 95-2000. The first Windows I ever used was XP, so I'm mostly making that decision based off screenshots and emulators. UIs back then were dense, didn't waste large amounts of space in a misguided attempt to be "minimalist", and had affordances for ease of use. There was no scrollbar hiding, no animations that made the user wait for no reason other…
I'll never understand who in their right mind would think that in a save dialog, if I start typing, I mean to search for something instead of trying to change the name of the file. It's really baffling.
It is strange to me that tiling windows have never become a norm. I really don't understand how people live with all these windows piled on top of each other! System76's COSMIC DE has been a real life-changer for me in making tiling accessible.