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

> Things popping up

This is one of my biggest frustrations with modern GUI computing. It's especially bad with Windows and Office, but it happens on iOS and macOS too to an extent. Even though I've had Office installed for weeks I still get a "look over here at this new button!" pop-up while I'm in the middle of some Excel task. Pop-up here, pop-up there. It's insane the number of little bubbles and pop-ups and noise we experience in modern computing.

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 of it tracks...

> I learned so much, eventually being able to replace hardware

As a young teenager in the early-mid 2000s, I learned the hard way what the little standoffs are for by killing a motherboard by screwing it directly into the steel case :')

Never made that mistake again, that's for sure. And I share all the same experiences as yourself

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.

There're also performance issues. Building muscle memory (which means offloading tasks from working memory, leaving it open for learning) can't happen if you're constantly trying to figure out when the system is going to actually respond to your input.

> Actions buried deep within menus.

Maybe they are though in CS school that every layer of abstraction is better. I don't see other explanation for this level of stupidity.

Computing is largely a cargo cult thing these days.

The problem is that the interfaces these bootleg skins draw "inspiration" from were designed on the back of millions of pre-inflationary dollars' R&D from only the best at Golden-Age IBM, Microsoft, Apple, etc.. BeOS, OS/2, Windows 95-2000 do not look the way they do because it looks good, they look the way they do because it works good, countless man hours went into ensuring that. Simply designing an interface that looks similar is not going to bring back the engineering prowess of those Old Masters.

It can look better. This is basically a distro with Chicago95 out of the box and not well configured. If you take the time it can look more like 95. The Chicago95 screenshots IMO look better:

https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95

To be fair at least the title bar height was configurable and I recall at least one original Windows theme taking advantage of that.

Ouch. That screenshot is uncomfortable to look at. The window title bars are painfully narrow, the frame borders have inconsistent thicknesses, the Start menu overlaps the taskbar, the vertical centering of text is wrong.

The answer to your question is that these replicas are of low quality. This one looks like the whole thing was made by someone (or a committee of people) lacking attention to detail.

The text is the worst. The icons are nice and pixely but the fonts are baby butt smooth anti aliased

Someone having spend too much time using the original replicating it would likely notice these things.

Still it is hopefully a nice introduction for some.

> The whole UI as branding thing has utterly killed usability.

This is caused by a change in who is hired as UI/UX developers. In days past it was HCI experts and engineers, now it's graphic designers. "Pretty" is the order of the day, not "useful". "There are too many menu items" is now answered with "So let's hide them" when it used to be "How can we organize them in the UI us a simple, discoverable manner?" But then that "overflow" menu (really? Needed menu commands are now OVERFLOW?) gets crowded so they start just removing features so the UI is nice.

It's interesting especially because it seems like companies today pour tens of millions into "accessibility", but I never see a thing's usability in terms of simple and easy-to-do-what-I-want UX fall in to the same category.

It’s a completely predictable result if you think about it.

Old style UI was developed with the findings of countless man-hours of UX research performed by field experts, while branded UI is typically whipped together purely based on trends and vibes in an evening by a visual designer who’s probably never performed an ounce of serious research or user trials. It’s natural that the latter is only going to be good at the most superficial of purposes. UI as branding is the McMansion of UX.

It's also repeating what the hellscape of inconsistent skinned UIs did in the late 90s and early 2000s. People are looking back at those times with a rather selective memory.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/21810-it-is-difficult-to-ge...

> The whole UI as branding thing has utterly killed usability.

Imagine if Active Desktop had taken over.

I eventually came up with a not-awful use for AD but that was a few years after it went away.

I also dailied it on XFCE. The UI was very utilitarian and purposeful. I suppose aesthetically it is unimpressive and not streamlined, but it serves the purpose of being a good interface to do a task.

Same as you say, people have asked me a lot about it and even asked me if I could set it up for them. The theme is evangelizing Linux a little bit, and that is interesting. In the right hands, these UI principles could convert many people to some product.

P.S. You can now change the grey-ish look with Win95-style theming support. I've not used it, but here's more info: https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95/blob/master/Plus/READ...

>and there's something to it that makes it easier to just know which window is open over which window that's lacking in modern UIs (I think it's the over-reliance on soft shadows and the borderless windows).

I think this started with Vista, I remember watching a video criticizing the new love of glass effects on UI chrome as it got rid of or minimized the color/shading difference between focused/unfocused windows. The example the video used was 6 notepad windows and pick which one was focused, and the main cue you'd need to look for is that the window with focus had a close button colored red.

Thin borders and minimalist/hiding scrollbars is another one that annoys me, give me something graphical for my gaze to grasp.

This entire comment section has me repeatedly thinking to myself "you don't run into that problem with i3-alikes" over and over. My choice not to put up with modern UX bullshit is feeling strongly reaffirmed right now. Not that it needed to be.

> it was always annoying to send an screenshot to someone and have to explain that no, I wasn't using Windows 95

That's not a negative, that's a fringe benefit as an endless source of entertainment.

I'd agree macOS surfaces much less functionality but I feel like it's more "because they don't want you to feel like there is a choice to make in the first place" rather than "because the defaults are ideal for everyone". Over time it feels like "layers of menus" have definitely made their way into Apple's software anyways.

The replacement to the registry seems to half be "magic CLI incantations for settings which can't be found in the GUI for some reason" and half "here's a $4.99 app to 3 finger tap to close tabs".

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 “correct”, which interferes with this process. For example, over the years I’ve encountered numerous posters complaining about how macOS can’t do X thing, after which I point out that X thing is right there as an easy to find top level menu item, but the poster in question never bothered to take a look around and just assumed the functionality didn’t exist since it wasn’t surfaced the same way as under Windows or KDE or whatever they were coming from.

Of course there are things macOS just doesn’t do, but there’s plenty that it does if users are willing to set their preconceptions aside for a moment.

> I never had to do anything akin to fiddling with the Windows Registry

If I recall correctly, when I got my first Macbook, I had to edit plist files or something similar in order to do basic things like permanently showing hidden files, showing the full path in Finder, show file extensions for all file types, increase the animation speed so the computer didn't feel slow as molasses, etc, etc.

Maybe these things are now easier to configure via GUI on macOS?

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 never had to do anything akin to fiddling with the Windows Registry.

I don't believe you. You have never, EVER, NOT ONCE run a terminal command to change an option on MacOS? I just refuse to believe anyone on HN hasn't altered preferences in the terminal on MacOS.

There is an entire ecosystem of free and paid Mac apps meant to augment the Mac experience because MacOS does not provide functionality or configuration needed for a sensible computing experience out of the box.

Selecting the appropriate tool for the task at hand is crucial, in my opinion. However, I believe the choice is often influenced by companies mandating the use of Microsoft and Mac systems due to cost and maintenance considerations, rather than allowing employees to choose between Mac, Windows, or Linux based on their preferences. Proprietary software that only runs on Mac or Windows, never was an argument, because you can just RDP stream remote desktop apps or use the browser.

I've been evaluating a Lenovo ThinkCentre m920q tiny I picked up for not very much money on eBay (the m720q models are even cheaper) and they seem like perfect machines for the task.

My parents use some tools and hardware that require a full OS so the tablet route isn't an option, but I'm starting to really like the idea of deploying a couple of these micro PCs.

Out of the frying pan, into the fire. Exposing your parents to total surveillance (from one corp to another) is not what I'd characterize as safe or friendly. Linux is fine these days if the hardware is supported, and you can use an immutable distro if extra reliability is warranted.

What are coupon websites / you can get free coupons from them(?)

Good call on Fedora's Atomic options.

My daily driver is NixOS and part of me really wants that level of predictability and rollback for them. For a brief period, I had started thinking through what it might look like to remotely manage this for them. But my ultimately goal is to help them achieve autonomy, and only step in when necessary.

I may have understated their needs somewhat. Most of what they do is browsing and document editing, but a few key use cases make a real computer necessary (or at least highly desirable):

- Document scanning

- Label printing (my mom buys/sells stuff on eBay)

- My dad still works and writes proposals/manages invoices/does complex taxes

At a minimum, they need a full desktop environment. Most of these things have decent 1:1 Linux alternatives, but one or two might necessitate a single-purpose Windows VM when all else fails.

Two pretty decent used micro PCs will also cost less than a single iPad.

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 crisp pixel boundaries and minimal artifacting. CRT filters overcompensate for this a lot, and end up making SVGA-era graphics anachronistically look like they're being displayed on composite monitors.

I wouldn't say that's so "obvious". I for one would prefer the original pixel fonts, but size adjusted to fit my screen density. By hand, if required.

You're right in that there's nothing stopping one from doing so (I even use an integer scaler for old games on my main computer), it's just a tradeoff between "doing what's possible" and "having the most authentic experience one can".

If we're talking about the subjective experience of recreating "a child's bedroom computer" from the mid 90s-early 00s, a widescreen aspect ratio alone would be jarring, since my conception of a monitor for such a system is a 4:3 CRT. So for me, little else would reach that level except a system with the same aspect ratio and a similar DPI.

Not only that, but UI design itself has undergone many shifts since that era to account for the types of monitors those UIs are being designed for. There's not as much of a need for pixel-perfect design when vector-based web UIs dominate the desktop application space nowadays, relegating those that go back to older UI paradigms to enthusiasts who still remember earlier times. Or maybe people who develop for fantasy consoles.

I should mention while I'm at it that those sort of faux-pixel art shaders used in some games come off as quite jarring to me since I expect UIs to be meticulously laid out for the original screen size, not just for blowing up arbitrary content 2x or 4x on a huge widescreen monitor. I sometimes feel those are meant to represent a nostalgic feeling of some kind, being pixelated and all, but really it just makes me wish there were some alternate reality in which people still designed games and desktop applications for 800x600 or 1024x768 monitors again.

It's interesting at present how there's stuff like 4K and then there's the playdate with a relatively tiny handheld resolution, but relatively little interest for new content for those types of resolutions in-between.

I used winaero tweaker [1] to disable web search, the search is infinitely better now.

You can do the same tweak by editing the registry [2] if you don't want to download an app for it (though the app includes a lot of additional useful tweaks).

[1] https://winaerotweaker.com/

[2] https://www.tomshardware.com/how-to/disable-windows-web-sear...

You can download openshell and it will replace the start menu from the start menu from whatever era you want (XP, 7, 8, I think 10 too). It's open source as well

Type into the search box and when the app icon comes up, click on it.

I think they drank the Macintosh kool-aid and expect you to have all your commonly used apps pinned. In Win11 this even looks sort of like a Mac dock. Still made no sense to ruin the usability of the start menu which they invented.

I use two free programs to return my computer usability to Windows 10 days.

https://open-shell.github.io/Open-Shell-Menu/

https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher

Without these I would probably give up on computers and go live under a bridge.

At least you get the right-click menu that has a lot of handy stuff in the old format.

An aspect of System 7/Mac OS 8/9 that I find criminally underrated is how flexible it is.

For those versions, a good bulk of the “system” isn’t part of the system proper but instead implemented by way of extensions and control panels loaded at startup. The OS itself is extremely minimal, basically just enough to provide a barebones desktop and act as a substrate for apps to run on. Everything else, including “core” functionality like audio and networking, was implemented in an extension.

This meant that you could pare back the OS to be extremely lean and only have the exact functionality you personally needed at that precise moment and nothing else, and doing so didn’t require you to recompile a kernel or anything like that — just create an extension set that only loaded what you needed. This was excellent for use cases like games and emulators where you wanted every last ounce of resources to go to those, and nice for single purpose machines too (no point in loading game controller support on a box that only ever runs Photoshop and Illustrator).

Of course the way it was implemented is awful by modern standards, but the concept is golden and I think there should be OS projects trying to replicate it.

> However, most people were still novices at using computers

It has (to my surprise, initially) been my experience that "kids these days" are more novice at (desktop) computer-usage than the people of the 90s

This attitude is why Linux based operating systems have such poor market share on the desktop. Opportunity costs are real. Friction is real. You don't see Windows creating a new OS for a single theme. You don't see macOS do it either.

I see, it still seems like the kind of project that would be much better suited to a DE packge-group style release. I think very few people will want to reinstall their OS just to try it.