I'm a big fan of this aesthetic. If you appreciate the usability of W95 without needing a pixel perfect copy, it's very easy to theme KDE to strike a really good balance.
As your global theme, use 'Reactionary'. Set your application style to 'MS Windows 9x'. For your icons, use 'Memphis98'. For cursors, 'Hackneyed (scaleable)'. Your Plasma style, colours, and window decorations should all follow your global theme (Reactionary). I keep the default Noto fonts because I find them quite easy on the eyes, but this is easy to change if you yearn for classic fonts.
My task bar (bottom bar) is set to use full names and not combine apps; I also use the application menu that looks like W95, and I've got it set to use a little W95 Start icon for that touch of nostalgia. Otherwise it's all very minimalist.
I've used this set-up for years and it works really well for me. I find it very conducive to being productive - it's stable, unchanging, and respectful of my attention and focus. I also don't need to hack away at anything or worry about updates - KDE officially supports theming and handles all of this really seamlessly.
> If you appreciate the usability of W95 without needing a pixel perfect copy
My experience suggests "not pixel perfect" usually means severely imperfect to the point of very ugly when Linux WMs try to imitate Windows 95. "Redmond" themes have been around for decades, always ugly as hell, only reminding of Windows 95 very loosely.
I don't think experience is relevant here, unless it's the same person doing that who made the previous ones. Maybe asking for a screenshot would help you discover if this one is good or not?
I've already wrote about this - this specific one (Chicago65) is actually amazing although still far from perfect. You can spot foreign quirks (including a really ugly one) even on the main screenshot if you look carefully and you will feel disilusioned once you actually try to use this at home. Nevertheless it is actually good, usable and by far better than any other attempt. I use it on everyday basis but I gave up hoping it to resemble Windows 95 and customized it instead. I am very grateful to the author who crafted this.
There is a KDE theme called 'Expose', by the same person who made Reactionary, which looks like it might be what you're after. (For icons, there's a set called just called 'Windows XP').
Absolutely. I’ve been doing this with the XP theme after this was posted on HN last time and I thought the same thing.
It exists, but need to check where.
Edit: No idea where I got it from. I know I installed the 98 theme first from this thing, and then downloaded a WinXP theme that I selected in all of the places it mattered.
> windows didn't really get any more usable after that...
The old UI is good but I am not a fan of the everything is folders and files idea of the start menu. Maybe I'm misremembering but iirc as a child I used to forget which sub menu inside the thing I needed was except for the ones I used frequently.
I like being able to just type obs and press enter in the new windows. I preferred the old theme better than windows XP Luna theme. I had a copy of tune up software and it said the old theme is somehow easier on my ram? iirc I only had 128MB on my pentium 4 computer.
> everything is folders and files idea of the start menu
Your comment is Ribbon/magic-search-bar vs hierarchical-organization preference in a nutshell.
I've decided there are two mutually-exclusive sorts of people: (a) those who want search to surface things for them, and hate having to remember where to find things & (b) those who want to remember where/how to find things, and hate relying on fuzzy search to surface them.
IMHO, there's enough of each type that any given UI should support both.
Ribbon would have gotten less flak if they hadn't also simultaneously made a mess of the organizational hierarchy behind the scenes. (MS Office-style "select things to show from a giant list in a tiny scrollbox" is terrible)
> I've decided there are two mutually-exclusive sorts of people: (a) those who want search to surface things for them, and hate having to remember where to find things & (b) those who want to remember where/how to find things, and hate relying on fuzzy search to surface them.
Funny because I belong in both camps, but for different things.
I prefer fuzzy, flat search for launching applications (I mean we basically do the same on the CLI right? Hierarchy for apps seem more like arbitrary labels. Some things don't neatly fit into one label.
And prefer to locate files by hierarchy. With the exception of less familiar and very large file systems and codebases, where I will resort to either fuzzy filename find or grep like tools. I use broot for my file manager which caters to all of these modes quite nicely.
Yes but that's only in terms of resolution, the interface is flat, i.e you don't explicitly ask for usr/sbin over usr/bin. The differences only become a problem with naming conflicts and misconfigured $PATHs.
I also prefer the ribbons, but a real power user of hierarchical menus doesn't click through them. The menus in Windows used to have the first character underlined: this is a shortcut. File->Save could be accessed with an incantation like Alt+fs. The real power of the old menus was remembering the discoverable shortcuts and flying through the menus without using mouse, somewhat similar to how Vim works.
For me menus are great for discovering related features on my own, search is great for getting to them quickly. I wouldn't want to have only one or the other.
> those who want to remember where/how to find things, and hate relying on fuzzy search to surface them.
I'm in this camp, but with a bit of nuance. Fuzzy search tends not to work well for me -- if I can't remember the exact name of the application I want to use (and I often can't), then search is an iffy way to locate it.
But mostly, it's about not liking to switch between using the mouse and using the keyboard. If I'm firing up a program, I'm almost certainly using the mouse at the moment. Switching to keyboard adds a bit of unnecessary disruption.
> Ribbon would have gotten less flak if they hadn't also simultaneously made a mess
My problem with the ribbon is that the contents move around, which means I'm constantly having to search through it for the thing I want to do.
If there was a keyboard shortcut to focus the menu searchbar I wouldn’t mind ribbon at all, typing ctrl+hekwj is just as fast as typing ctrl+/grou+enter
> I used to forget which sub menu inside the thing I needed was except for the ones I used frequently
The trick was to create your own folders to flatten the hierarchy, so you never have to look inside the "Programs" sub menu. You could even move your most frequently used items to the top level, with no folders at all, so they're available with a single click.
This got a lot easier with Windows 98 (or with the IE version that included the shell update) where you could just drag and drop to rearrange the menus.
> it was usually a pretty reliable clue as to their skill level.
But in which direction? I'm very skilled, and used to customize things like this -- but at a certain point, I stopped doing it because I'd develop muscle memory for my customizations that would really mess me up when using someone else's computer.
So now, I don't customize anything. It makes my life easier.
You can tack good modern search-launchers (a la spotlight or synapse) onto a Windows 95 interface without bringing over all the other modern UI cancer. It's an entirely orthogonal concern to things like flat icons, excessive whitespace, or bad discoverability.
I don't understand this objection. The Start menu (which was a step backward from Program Manager) really went downhill when it obscured or removed the ability to group your programs into folders. Why do I want my audio & music programs jumbled together with my development tools? Or my graphics programs mixed in with general office apps?
People who argue that you should just type into a search bar 100% of the time to find and launch apps are naíve. First of all, unless you have a trivial number of applications, it's absurd to expect everyone to remember the name of every program on his computer. Oh gee, what was that SD-card-formatting utility again? I don't know, but hey in two clicks I'm in my Utils folder and there it is. I'm not scouring a disorganized, flat list of 100 applications to find it.
> People who argue that you should just type into a search bar 100% of the time to find and launch apps are naíve. First of all, unless you have a trivial number of applications, it's absurd to expect everyone to remember the name of every program on his computer. Oh gee, what was that SD-card-formatting utility again? I don't know, but hey in two clicks I'm in my Utils folder and there it is.
Maybe you should relook at this again; they don't work like that anymore - you don't need to remember "Brasero" when searching for a CD burning tool, the menu items all have a description field which is also searched.
So for your specific example, all you'd need to do is search for "SD Card", even if the name does not have the text "SD" or "Card" in it.
Typing something like "SD Card" takes too much time in comparison with launching an application from a hierarchical menu using less key presses (or mouse movements/clicks).
In most cases, when you have to type something longer than "SD Card", the difference in launching speed is even greater.
Thanks for the info. I don't use Windows anymore, but people make the same argument on Mac; I don't see any description field there, and searches can fail even when you use a word contained in the program title.
Even if such a field is 100% accurately and adequately populated for every application (which I doubt), I don't want to invoke a text-based search and have to start typing a query.
Ah, the wonderful world of balanced and effective configurations from the bottom of the barrel PCs... So much time, money and CO2 could be saved by another/bigger atick of RAM.
> So much time, money and CO2 could be saved by another/bigger atick of RAM.
I did eventually get a 256 MB stick of RAM.
iirc I was already out of high school at that point.
One point I don't hear being talked about too much
is how hopeful and stupid we were in the late nineties
and early two thousands.
We were supposed to have 10GHz processors by 2005,
or I mean mass market for consumers
by the end of the decade, at the latest?
To put things in perspective,
my parents practically never used the computer.
For all intents and purposes,
the computer was for a child to learn
by parents who were not very computer savvy
in a time when computers were advancing (or at least so we thought)
very rapidly.
> One point I don't hear being talked about too much is how hopeful and stupid we were in the late nineties and early two thousands. We were supposed to have 10GHz processors by 2005, or I mean mass market for consumers by the end of the decade, at the latest?
Sure, but look at the decade prior. I had a 486 DX-50 in 1992. Within a decade, we had processors clocked in the GHz. A decade after that, clock rates had pretty much stagnated as we have shifted to multiple cores. We saw something similar happen with memory capacity (huge jump in the late 1990's, and near stagnation over the past decade). The switch from hard drives to solid state drives actually resulted in a huge step backwards (in terms of capacity, though we got a huge bump in performance).
There has been progress with modern computers, but the benchmarks we used in the late 1990's are practically irrelevant these days.
>One point I don't hear being talked about too much is how hopeful and stupid we were in the late nineties and early two thousands. We were supposed to have 10GHz processors by 2005, or I mean mass market for consumers by the end of the decade, at the latest?
I think a lot of those predictions came from a world unconcerned with cores and threading.
The jump from sub ghz to 1 ghz (p2 to p3) came about suddenly, the jump from 1ghz to 3ish ghz came about suddenly (p3 to p4); and then things moved to prioritizing chip real estate for cores/threading/parallelism.
The chips we have now are great, but it would be damn nice to have a 10ghz core somewhere.
( I eventually upgraded my RAM before ditching the Presario, too, but I think it's because at the time I wanted to play Dark Age of Camelot without lagging to death in team fights.)
I don't understand this sentiment from an HN user. It sounds like you wanted a 5-10x performance boost vs. what we had in 2000.
Today's CPUs are literally like 10-50x faster than CPUs of that era depending on how many cores you're using at once. Storage is an order of magnitude faster as well. Mission accomplished! Software is in general more bloated, so things don't always "feel" faster, but for raw computational tasks like e.g. video encoding they truly are orders of magnitude faster.
I've got plenty of complaints about how the industry has changed since then, but raw hardware performance certainly isn't one.
Not just cores and threading but implementation efficiency, which is a couple of orders of magnitude better today than it was in the late 90s.
Clock speeds were always more about marketing than actual performance.
There are a few power-user applications where a 10X to 1000X speed bump would be very welcome - mostly video, audio, and AI.
For example - if you generate/process audio at 32X or 64X oversampling you can eliminate all of the usual DSP and conversion artefacts, even for difficult processes like non-linear distortion.
But for most applications, most users have more cycles than they need.
> One point I don't hear being talked about too much is how hopeful and stupid we were in the late nineties and early two thousands.
If I aould be in tbe mood and stance I would reply again, but I for what it gives I'm really grateful for my parent who indulged in this thing, despite it being a total terra incognita for them.
long ago this 'category' was referred to as 'grandma gifts' by folks near me on the net : a computer that no one in their right mind would buy themselves, but seemingly everyone had received one from a distance grandma/aunt/uncle who themselves were clueless about computers so they hop in the car and just buy whatever is cheapest on the Circuit City (or equivalent) floor; generally they were Presarios/Inspirons/Pavillions/etc.
If you were real lucky you'd get a Sony VAIO; but fashion be damned it had the same crap specs as the rest of the grandma gifts.
> I like being able to just type obs and press enter in the new windows.
This might be one of the few useful features that I take for granted in modern Windows. That and Win + tab which I think GNOME does better. The "Windows" key in GNOME brings up the overview but also brings up search where you can either click which window you want or type what you want. Intuitive
I completely agree, but in my personal preference I would use the KDE1 window deco rather than the Windows 95/Redmond one. The Win95 style is good, but KDE1 is even better IMHO.
Not that I want the UX To _look_ like Windows 95, but I sure do feel nostalgic how fast and responsive the desktop “felt” back in those days. These days, it is a rarity to see a native app that is as responsive. It feels like all native apps burn through CPU cycles in cosmetic things and animations that it feels sluggish in comparison.
That's not how I remember it. Windows 9x was slow and constantly crashing. Booting and launching programs took ages. To be fair, the performance problems had more to do with the available hardware back then, but still.
Hard to believe that a few system crashes per day was the norm. You just hoped you hadn’t lost too much, would re-boot and go get a drink while you waited.
Due to that “training” I still hit CTRL-S obsessively even when it hasn’t been needed for years.
>Hard to believe that a few system crashes per day was the norm.
It certainly wasn't for me! At the time I had my first it job in a local pc repair shop and we had a series of 24h burn in tests. If the newly installed pc crashed during it, there was something wrong with the hw. My personal windows 95 definitely didn't crash more than once every few weeks of heavy use. Programs did crash, explorer did crash, but the actual BSOD was quite rare.
It was definitely the norm, but it seemed to have more to do with hardware and drivers and certain programs, so people's experiences varied dramatically.
Sounds like you just happened to luck into reliable hardware with well-written drivers.
For me, something about using CorelDraw with my video card led it to crash probably about once every twenty minutes of use.
On the other hand, if I just stuck to working in Word and wasn't trying to simultaneously play MP3's while also downloading files, I'd be fine.
I did a lot of optimization on my systems. Not drastically hacking crap, just obsessively pruning unnecessary services and software etc. Registry cleanup tools. Etc. Also always had as much RAM as I could afford.
I'm not sure if there was a correlation there but it sure felt like it. Seemed like folks with constant blue screens had PCs filled with crapware. Maybe the difference was purely hardware or, purely luck, I dunno.
> Due to that “training” I still hit CTRL-S obsessively even when it hasn’t been needed for years.
Same. I psychotically hit cmd-S or :w after every line of text I write; there was one time my computer crashed and I lost my entire 4th grade book report because I didn't save. I didn't know how to touch type then, so it took forever for me to retype it. Never again!
You better keep that habit when working in big MS Word files. It still randomly crashes and I've lost some amount of work several times due to this shit.
Same here, but because I used to forget to save before tabbing over to something else that depended on the changes I made. Now I never forget to save...
Contrast that to today, when you have editors like Sublime Text which will reliably keep your editor tabs (or "buffers") around for as long as you need them, even if you never save them (yourself - of course the editor does that behind the scenes).
A quirk in my config that I haven't bothered to fix makes it so my formatter runs post write. I've unfortunately picked up the habit of <esc>:w<cr>:w<cr> in rapid succession.
I had a carefully crafted 98SE CD that was created using a tool called (I think) 98lite. It let you remove components and set defaults. That was rock solid for me, and used so few resources. Boot times were very quick considering the hardware at the time. The all-important post-install defrag made a difference.
I didn't switch away from 98SE on my home computer until XP SP2 (which I immediately theme to look like 98 because I hated the primary colour nonsense).
Actually, every Windows installation from then until I switched to Linux was "shrunk" and tweaked (can't remember what tool I used, but it wasn't an official MS thing). Having a full licenced copy of InstallShield at work was extremely handy too - every app was repackaged into a fully automatic installer and bundled with the OS. It almost felt like a cloned PC. In fact when I got a job managing fleets of PCs, that XPCD Builder script was like a superpower.
Maybe you used nLite? I credit this tool for making me into a Windows power user. Taking the OS apart checkbox-by-checkbox gave me a good understanding of how the pieces fit together and what is required vs optional.
Chicago95 is a theme for XFCE. I run XFCE with i3wm on a SSD and it is insanely, perversely fast. Most of the default apps bundled with XFCE start instantly. The system boots within seconds, no need to consider any type of fast boot, hibernation etc. Native apps boot within seconds. Electron apps are slower, because Electron.
A typical XFCE system on startup will allocate around 500MB of RAM, but with the way memory management works on Linux I think it doesn't really need all of that and lets go of it if something else does.
It is kind of a barebones desktop environment, but certainly has a lot more stuff packed in than Win9x did and for a little extra disk space you can cherry pick whatever Gnome and KDE utilities you want anyway.
So I think this phenomenon of slow modern desktops is a Windows/Mac problem, if you want one that's lightning fast, they're out there.
The big one is desktops that I like, working out of the box: Cinnamon, XFCE or even MATE (can install more, of course, but these ones are supported and tested). XFCE is really snappy and lightweight, whereas Cinnamon is pretty polished and will also be familiar to folks coming from Windows (nice distro to recommend for that, for people with limited Linux experience).
Another big thing is not having snaps forced down my throat like Ubuntu increasingly seems to do. In that regard, Mint is closer to Debian, although if you want to, there is nothing holding you back from using AppImage, Flatpak or anything else (even snaps).
Compatibility that is otherwise pretty close to Ubuntu, as well as a long EOL period: after the demise of CentOS, Ubuntu remains one of those distros that you can just "install and forget about" (hopefully with regular updates), both locally on your workstation and in any of your servers. I can even base my containers on Ubuntu/run it on servers (pretty much every provider has support for it) but use Linux Mint locally and have pretty much everything work.
Now, frankly I could also opt for Debian without too many issues (they also have an LTS variety, albeit less advertised), but Mint is basically Ubuntu without some of the things that annoy me - boring and dependable, mostly just works.
Only annoying thing: if you ever need to setup an apt repo that points to packages that are compatible with Ubuntu and the script for doing that gets the release codename, it might get one that doesn't correspond to the correct Ubuntu release, but instead will grab the Mint name. Sometime need to fix that manually in the apt repository list with a text editor.
I install the system using the Xubuntu ISO. Presumably if you install the xubuntu-desktop package on some other flavor it will be similar but if for instance you installed it on top of e.g. Kubuntu you might still be getting KDE services loading when you log in.
Desktop became slow when windows and widgets became objects, as in the OOP sense.
The transition from hardcoded primitives to objects that would be created and destroyed on the fly slowed things down a lot, but that is the price to pay to have code that runs on very different platforms, also adapting itself to different screen sizes and resolutions, dynamic objects, etc.
I doubt it makes much difference. At least in C++ objects are just structs unless you’re using polymorphism, and tracking a few things like the position of a window can’t be very intensive anyway. It’s probably more things like loading assets and rendering effects and background tasks that slow it down
One of the interesting things about Apple vs. Microsoft in the early days was how differently the two companies handled the mindblow that was the GUI work at Xerox PARC.
Apple adopted the UI conventions, and refined, polished, and extended them to create first the Lisa system and then the Mac. But early Mac OS ("System" in those days) was very much based on a procedural, Pascal-based API without much in the way of object orientation. Your app had to handle the close button and the resize grabber itself, for instance -- actually listen for mouse events, determine if there was a click in the appropriate region, and close the window or buzz in a loop drawing the resize rectangle. Utility functions were provided to help with this process, but it still had to be part of your main loop. Dialog boxes were defined with Pascal records.
Microsoft, by contrast, hired some of the Xerox PARC engineers away -- guys like Charles Simonyi. The design of Windows reflects this, as Windows more closely reflects the Xerox PARC work at an architectural level. It had from the very earliest days something like an object system. A window belonged to a window class, which contained a single method (the window procedure or WndProc), that processed messages from a flexible and extensible message system. Windows could even be "subclassed" by substituting a different window procedure. This more flexible design allowed the system to provide the necessary decorations (minimize and maximize buttons, a system menu, resize grips and even scrollbars) and the client window would receive messages from them to let it know that, for example, it had been resized or scrolled. The actual mechanics of how these decorations worked could be delegated to the system. The API was still in C, not OO like we know it today, and was a bit cumbersome to use -- but it had more of those object-oriented ideas than early Mac did.
Of course, Steve Jobs didn't make the same mistake twice, and for his first post-Mac system, NeXT, he had it based all around object orientation.
In C++ it would still be very fast. I doubt you'd notice the difference.
The turning point was MS switching to C# for everything. Now built in apps load slow because the code is not JIT compiled yet, and I bet other issues...
That's not how I remember it. Windows 9x was slow and
constantly crashing.
It was like... both.
If you had a did your own clean Windows installs, had an extra $100 of RAM, defragged the HDD regularly, and disabled crapware and unnecessary services etc. the UI felt real sharp and instant.
However this was not the typical experience. Typical experience for most people was that you clicked the Start menu and then listened to the HDD grind away.
True that crashes were more frequent and annoying. However, that’s not what I was talking about. While it worked, the UX felt responsive. Moving the mouse around clicking things, opening files and folders, dragging stuff, scrolling, window switching, even the clicks felt responsive. These days the whole thing feels like “smooth” in a bad slow way. As if every action spends a good 20% of time first doing some animation and then doing what you really intended.
This. I was recently backing up some stuff from an old Mac OS 8 machine and it was amazing how snappy a lot of things feel.
But if something is not on RAM you can clearly notice it.
At least at the beginning not everybody had hardware that supported DMA for disk access (and those that had it, not always had it configured properly).
I think it largely came down to how much RAM you had in your system.. 4MB was mostly okay, and sluggish, 8-16 much more usable... 32+ was downright snappy.
I recall using an AMD 5x86@133 with 64mb ram with Win95 then NT4 and it was very usable at the time. It wasn't the best for gaming, my cpu/gpu weren't great, but for general work/productivity use it was pretty great for the time. I had received the wrong ram by mistake, and it worked... was supposed to be 16mb.
edit: I also recall paying extra to add in a cache module on that mb.
My Intel Pentium 4 machine usually runs reliably and responsively, but you have to be careful: the default Windows picture viewer instantly freezes the PC if you click 'next image' before the current one has finished loading!
Haha not Windows 10 :) Actually it was Windows XP... I cannot remember which Service Pack, but I believe it is the second. One day I'll try NetBSD on it...
The terrible performance you remember is from slow hard drives and just a couple megabytes of RAM. Retro computing enthusiasts today have win 95 running on solid state flash disks and 32 megabytes of memory and it flies.
My Windows 11 laptop at home is quite snappy. My Windows 10 laptop at work with more RAM, a better SSD, and a newer, faster CPU, is not. It's because they virus scan and authorization check every single file access, every time. Even starting small programs like Notepad takes at least 2 seconds at work whereas it's instantaneous at home.
Same story at my previous job. Actually, my work laptop had been faster than my personal one for a while because I had gotten a special purchase due to the nature of my work and IT didn't know what to do with it (we contracted IT services out to a 3rd party. We were a small non-tech company). But then someone caught wind and I was made to figure out how to get IT's tracking software installed for them. And that's when I started working from home all the time (a situation I could manage as the non-tech company wanted me to own the code personally. Yes, a little weird, but it was all a tiny sure other for the company).
I got a dell XPS 15 for work, 2022 one. 32gb 12700h. It’s slow and loud. Especially compared to my personal laptop. Not enough to be annoying tho. But then IT decided they want some software installed to make sure they can monitor for bad processes. Wow it’s annoyingly slow now for development because every process is analysised.
I find that doing almost everything under WSL is a much better experience, if you can spare enough ram to the environment. Mostly because the monitoring software doesn't run inside the WSL/Ubuntu env.
I think nostalgia might have rewritten your memory. Spinning rust disks meant apps would take 5-10 seconds to load, moving and resizing windows was laggy and left behind repaint artifacts, and anything network related took approximately forever
Yes - what he described was the experience using BeOS, which had an amazing I/O scheduler, but switching back to Win95 was noticeably worse on latency. A big problem was I/O deadlines - I knew so many people who burned “coasters” because Win95 and classic MacOS couldn’t reliably feed data to a CD writer with a small buffer. Audio capture and data acquisition were similarly fragile if you needed latency guarantees lower than hundreds of milliseconds.
One of the biggest things that contribute to the feeling of slowness today are all the animations /transitions etc. The very first thing I do when installing a new version of gnome is disable all of it. It suddenly feels 5x faster.
Windows 9x feels snappy and responsive -- on a VM on modern hardware. On the hardware of the day... yeah, it chugged. You needed about 16 MiB of RAM and a graphics accelerator for acceptable performance in 1995, and that was quite a beefy system for that year.
I got the wrong ram (64mb instead of 16) and will say it ran like a dream on a 5x86-133 with a cache module. NT4 ran really well on there as well for the time. OS/2 didn't behave quite right, after NT4 I never really looked back. Kept a 9x partition for games only.
Initial releases of KDE 4 were absolute pigs. They spent several years trimming fat from those until it started to be useful for me around KDE 4.9 or so. Plasma 5 and onward have been excellent.
My experience was different as my first Windows PC was already quite old when I got it, so I was used to random delays in UI feedback. My current M1 feels like what you've just described.
I tried to run DSL (damn small linux) on my P60 around 2003-4 and felt what you've just described. The UI seemed to respond before the interaction!
Then, a few months ago I spent a an evening or two messing with Microsoft Bob (Win 3.11) then Win 95 trying to code a simple website compatible with the tech of the time, using the tools available at the time. Everything felt so snappy.
I don't mind animations applied thoughtfully (e.g. short UI transitions emphasising the state change), but what annoys me the most is animation jank, drops in frame rate, unpredictable delays. Older Windows versions weren't that great in that regard either (do you remember how much time it used to take for the "Open With" dialog, or event file context menu to show up on Win, when you right clicked on a file in Win9x-7?)
I miss, when I had a jailbroken phone, briefly being able to set the animation time to zero. Everything is so much faster, even with hardware that can more than handle the GPU stuff. It’s now (on fast hardware) the actual animation frames themselves that are literally wasting my time.
I wish Apple would let me watch each of their oh-so-clever animations one time to give these “designers” their satisfaction, and just jump-cut to the final state from that point on.
I think Android KitKat 4.4 had an animation time slider hidden in some "Developer" menu that could be trivally enabled. It made my phone feel so much faster.
>for the "Open With" dialog, or event file context menu to show up on Win, when you right clicked on a file in Win9x-7?)
That's because you installed a ton of 3rd party shit which were registered as a handler for this/all filetypes so when the Explorer needed to show that menu it had to query every registered handler, extract an icon and if those .dlls weren't in the RAM, then you waited for the slow disk access.
Such a pity GTK3 and later aren't intended to be themeable, and the devs make no release-to-release compatibility guarantees for the theme engines.
If this only affected Gnome, I wouldn't mind so much. But so many regular non-Gnome apps I use are GTK-based, even if I pick a different DE (which I do), I can't personalise my own user experience in a way that's consistent. The UX I keep behind a password, so I doesn't matter if anyone else would get confused if they tried to use it, because they can't.
I can still try to pick QT-based desktop apps where possible. And for some fairly simple apps, there are both GTK and QT implementations (e.g. calculators), so that's feasible. But a lot of apps have one main implementation in their niche, and you either have no choice, or if you pick the one with fewer developers some features just aren't there.
I really feel like we've lost something significant from where things were 15-odd years ago.
I love the Gnome design language but the way they made theming so difficult has put me off using GTK for anything. Sadly, I don't know any better alternatives for my language of choice (Rust).
I get that developers don't want their app to be stylized and broken by distro maintainers, but now none of them look native or good. It's like that time Android apps all started inventing their own bad UI themes, nothing feels native anymore and everything is a chore to use.
In theory, if every app kept their libadwaita versions and modifications up to date, you can still offer themes and everything works great. I practice, there's inconsistency everywhere and theming is impossible to apply to every application.
> Sadly, I don't know any better alternatives for my language of choice (Rust).
This is the case for a lot of languages. I believe Qt being written in C++ hurts its adoption much more than some might think… plain C bindings are must for UI toolkits.
I really like GTK4 / Adwaita and dislike the look and feel of QT, but I guess that's just personal preference.
You can change the colors of Adwaita using https://github.com/GradienceTeam/Gradience it even has a mode to extract colors from your background like current android versions
Contrary to what many are saying, I want the LOOK but not the usability. We've made some good leaps since then and Cinnamon desktop represents just about the cutting edge in usability and familiarity. But that squared look with high-contrast and clearly-interactable elements was lost along the way. Now everything has to be flat, flat, flat with disappearing controls. Take me back.
My subjective experience agree with the study too. But since the entire industry (be it cooperate or non-profit org) collectively lost their mind and decided flat is the one true way and purged the entire internet of anything vaguely 3D, I can't really compare the experience again in a more objective manner.
I'd always go back to [Ross Scott's video of how a "non-expert" view modern GUI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AItTqnTsVjA) whenever I want some reminder on what good GUI should do. I don't agree with everything he say since a lot of it is subjective, but this video cursed me to pay far more attention on how shitty modern GUI is in my everyday interaction with the computer and phone.
(Ross's video essay style is more akin to how a cultist on the street preaches about the UFO or the end-of-the-world and doesn't even care if anyone listen. I personally love it but it may not be everyone's cup of tea)
> with high-contrast and clearly-interactable elements
Yeah, I miss that a lot. My favorite example is the iTunes sidebar icons going from clearly distinguishable different colors to flat uniform monochrome.
Why? Because someone decided it made the interface look "better" as an art object, rather than being a better user experience.
At the $bigcorp level, they ask survey panels "Which of these interfaces looks more modern to you?" that's largely the extent of the justification to completely change the entire UI that has been perfected and beloved by users over many years. The users begrudgingly learn the new UI, and a bunch of project managers get promoted and leave for the next company to do the same thing.
Reflecting on the comments, I'm surprised - a little - that MS don't have backwards compatibility of GUI. Many older users like the interface not to change, or to change only superficially. It would, I think, be a usability improvement for many.
As a "family admin" I'd want to update for security reasons, or if the new version is better optimised or lacks some bugs, but for many elders (IME) any significant changes to UI are devastating to their comfort in using the OS.
MS just don't seem good at making windows (a DE), IMO.
It's still possible to render similar kinds of controls in Windows. It's evident by old software that is still shipped in Windows.
But judging by the abysmal state of Microsoft modern UI toolkits, and Microsoft's complete inability to adhere to any consistency between the different frameworks that render toolkits, I just don't see any way Microsoft could offer cross-OS theme support that would work in any meaningful way. This was possible up to and including Windows 7, but then Microsoft just derped in their UI development, and it has been more and more embarrassing with every Windows release.
It's still there in some places...try <WindowsKey>+r then run odbcad32.exe
Click the "System DSN" tab, then "Add", Double-click the top entry ("Driver Da Microsoft..."), uncheck "Use Current Directory", then click the "Select Directory" button.
That's the officially deprecated for decades "Multiple Document Interface". Any app still using it will render that on modern versions of Windows.
The open source Windows all I maintain still uses this paradigm, and there's not really a good migration path to anything else, and Microsoft refuses to fix the chrome.
That's excellent. I wonder how deeply the UI elements go. Like can I produce a UI from Windows 3 or 2000 on Windows 11 if I make the right Win32 calls? Is the classic theme really gone, or just aggressively hidden? The new Windows 11 taskbar is definitely new code and doesn't behave like the old one, so I imagine you can't have a true classic taskbar on 11.
Yes, it's Windows Aero minus most of the 3D accelerated special effects. It was also used on low performance systems or if you RDP'd in to save bandwidth.
Would be cool to “do it right” and have a proper window manager for Linux like this rather than “just” a skin (I really don’t want to diminish the ton of work sunk into this). So you get the last details about windowing behavior and animations right, and achieving much more in terms of start menu, task bar behavior and so on.
To be less niche and reach even more nostalgic users it could be something like a RetroWM with modes for like Windows 95, XP, maybe even Mac OS 9.
I’ve wanted to work on OS clone desktop environments (to cover all the little things a window manager alone can’t) for a while now because I think it’s worthwhile to preserve older environments and keep them available for usage even after their commercial creators have abandoned them.
Finding the time to do that is a challenge though, particularly with the higher activation energy of having to learn the ins and outs of X11, Wayland, and other bits and pieces involved in building a functional *nix desktop.
Yeah, that’s exactly it! Unfortunately the different skill sets required here are so different. You part need deep understanding of the low level inner workings, and part need great attention to detail in user interface design. It would probably be easiest to pull of as a team effort.
Aren't you mixing up toolkits and window manager? Seems to me like we are pretty well sorted on linux with some amazing window managers that are superior to what Microsoft and Apple ever produced.
Am I the only one that doesn't like the win95 look anymore but still appreciates designs that are similarly conservative about whitespace? Is there any design system out there that is like that?
I guess my best bet would be retaking the original pictures (the OG MS Natural Keyboard, CDs, etc.) and recreating it, but it sounds like plenty of work
For dithered images I find waifu2x with the noise removal at 'None' to be pretty good at scaling these things up without destroying the dithered shapes.
Unrelated (Maybe related actually) this tool for applying old-school style dithering to an image with a bunch of settings and dithering algos: https://doodad.dev/dither-me-this/
You probably already thought of this, but this looks like a 1-bit dithered image (maybe Floyd-Steinberg?) so maybe you can blur it to get something like the original image, then scale it up, and apply the dither again.
yes, technically that is possible, but it would give you an image with... big square blocks instead of tiny pixels.
I'm thinking of achieving something like https://github.com/nestoris/win98wallpapers, and maybe Midjourney's img2img (as the other commenter suggested) might be able to do something like that, I don't know.
You know the old saying: "BSD is for people who like Unix, Linux is for people who hate Windows". I don't think it's hate. I think it's "for people who are tsundere about Windows".
You say that, but jwm was born on Irix I think and plenty of people used that instead of MWM/FVWM and similar. In the end, you just managed windows, so
using XFM/XFE with JWM was more than enough.
Also, lots of *BSD people liked IceWM with Metal themes for similar reasons.
The Windows UI was already peaking at usability, so they used that among virtual desktops and the power of Unix utilities on shells, tools and services.
I also like the old quote "BSD is what you get when a bunch of Unix hackers sit down to try to port a Unix system to the PC. Linux is what you get when a bunch of PC hackers sit down and try to write a Unix system for the PC."
Linux is a kernel and does have a graphical interface. This theme is for XFCE, one of the many "desktop environments" that can run on the Linux kernel.
Other being: Gnome, Plasma (KDE), LXQt, and many more.
To make it more interesting, XFCE also runs on FreeBSD (another open source kernel/OS).
This is so beautiful it brings tears to my eyes! Reproductions like this somehow always end up feeling just a bit off, like being so close but something is wrong. But this one seems spotless.
Pure UI that works from before the word "ux" was invented.
If you like it, you should check out era X Windows managers with a multi button mouse. Same hierarchical start menu, but bring it up from any location on the desktop with right mouse click! Then most simple apps don't really need menu bars or windows controls, just maybe small resize handles at the corners, use right click to do the rest as well. Once you created a perfect arrangement for each virtual desktop, save it and have it perfectly recreated on startup. With not a pixel wasted and apps themselves not wasting much white space, it becomes possible to have all the tools you need for your workflow side by side rather than constantly hunting for the right overlapping window. Plus, workstations had keyboards with dedicated copy/cut/paste keys, rather than remembering to press Control-Shift-C in Terminal and Control-C elsewhere and half of the time killing your current command by mistake.
The last time this theme was posted here I had just replaced my Win 7 machine with a Linux machine running XFCE so I decided to install it for kicks. 5 months later and I am still using it. The "why" is simple: I've used Windows far longer than Unix/Linux, back to the early 90's with Win 3.1. Navigating the menus is almost second nature and familiar icons for notepad and others lead me right to the programs I need. Me and my brother did tons of gaming in Win 95/98 and setup our first LAN on 98 with a Netgear kit and our friends would come over for 1v1 DM - those were the days. Its a nice mix of nostalgia, familiarity and simplicity.
I tested Windows 11 recently and I was really shocked. Apparently, it has two basic themes: my-eyeballs-hurt white and what-is-the-point-of-living black.
I used this theme for awhile but I kept running into visual bugs that caused certain applications to not render at all, and as a recent parent I just decided that tinkering with desktop / window manager constantly just wasn't worth it anymore.
What it did do however is remind me just how much space can actually fit on a 1920x1080 screen, and that was very special for the experience and applications that did work (which was most of them).
Back then about just anything was better looking than Windows 95. OS/2 was slick. Mac computers had a very enjoyable UI. SGI machines had a very good looking UI.
But people mostly only knew Windows 95, so that's what they remember.
I would say that Win95 aesthetics was about someone with an actual good taste taking Motif and making it not suck. Remember how selecting menu items by hovering was BIG? Coming from Windows 3.1/3.11, the usability improvement of this alone was massive. Same with mouse wheel becoming ubiquitous, courtesy of Microsoft (they weren't the first, but it's thanks to them that everyone and their dog could actually make use of it).
Another thing about Win95 aesthetics (which peaked at the time of Windows 2000) was the extreme consistency which had been simply absent before that in the DOS/Win3/PC world. Maybe Apple could brag about it too, can't say about SGI (was it all like Motif in all applications, with colors/hotkeys set platform-wide, or was it the ugly Motif/Xaw/Athena mix seen elsewhere and each application having a mind of its own?). Man, you can't find it these days, especially since Electron.
I'm purposely omitting Qt/GTK, as they have always felt like also-ran toolkits, mimicking the conventions of the platforms they inhabited, and I can't for the life of me remember when it was that they actually set any trends instead of mimicking some hotness of the day introduced by the dominant platforms.
Thing about GTK and QT though, is they are extremely relevant in 2023. I use QT at work and as a nerd that reads spaces like this I hear those acronyms basically every day - conversely, other than these, we have all been saying names of things that essentially don't exist anymore.
Not here to fight, but I dunno, slow and steady wins the race I guess?
I thought they were all similarly ugly. Thought so then and still do now. Drab grays and muted colors for miles. (Ignoring utility here.) Uglier stuff could be found off the beaten path, though.
If someone is on KDE, I recommend the themes by phobian [0]. I had an issue where I needed to force my DPI to get things aligning nicely, but there's a lot of themes based off of various operating systems that are fun to mess with.
The best I've seen so far yet far from perfect when you try to actually do it. Just look how ugly do the window menus hot keys underlines look even on the screenshot. And that's not the only quirk even there, and there will be more on your actual machine.
There also is (or, perhaps, was? I haven't cheecked for a year) a problem with GTK3 apps which don't get skinned this way even if they use uncustomized window decorations.
In fact it fascinates me how hard it appears to restyle your widows to look like whatever you want.
I used this as a slacker (Slackware user) for a year or so. I really enjoyed the aesthetic overall, and while I've been using Fedora KDE for a while now I have debated moving back to XFCE and would certainly reinstall this theme if I did.
I've got a screenshot somewhere of using this theme while playing the dos game Jetpak Christmas in dosbox with Xsnow running, it was fun.
I've never done hiring myself, but I'd joke with my manager that I should be allowed to watch potential new hires type for a bit before approving them for the role which involves a lot of typing/chatting, copy/paste, general UI work. So frustrating to see tech staff manually highlight words, right-click, copy, find some buried window, hunt and peck to type, etc.
It's comforting to see all the folders turned upright. Ever since Vista they've been sideways, spilling your documents all over the taskbar (this is why I moved my taskbar to the side).
Windows 95 "theme" was very nice for the CRT monitors and their resolutions of back in the day (1024x768 etc). Running it on a modern display?... I don't get it.
Some of these old style themes are interesting for nostalgic reasons but then after a while you do realize that there are reasons why the world has moved on.
Seriously wonder what you think the reasons the world moved on is? Everything was so clear, neat and discoverable back then. Now everything needs to be hidden behind labels that may of may not be a button. And that is on a good day because many times I need to learn a new language where a rocket means pipeline and to download an artifact from it you obviously need to press the pinkish two squares thingy. But that is actually still a good day because nobody knew that to do [useful feature] you need to click the triangle next to the lightning bolt so nobody used it. Next update it will be removed. This update will also make the now remaining three buttons two times bigger because our CAD software needs to be mobile first.
I kind of agree with this in that WIMP is a good philosophy for desktop UI design, and I feel that mobile has never really had the equivalent (hamburger menus falling out of fashion being the apotheosis of chasing rainbows IMHO)
But I feel we need only point to Microsoft Word as an example of how the statement.
>Everything was so clear, neat, and discoverable back then
just isn't true. The only difference now is that we have dozens of pieces of software in our lives now instead of the half dozen we used in the 90s, and we don't have one company monopolistically decreeing what the status quo of UI design is.
Meaningful competition is also why I think there is no WIMP in mobile. And that's a double-edged sword.
I can name only one thing that has been massively popularised since then in "professional" tools and which I wouldn't mind the older software had: command palette.
Press some hot key, and then type the name of your command in a pop up window with full-text search, autocomplete and a hint what the hot key and toolbar icon for that particular command is. Probably single most useful thing that became mainstream roughly after the ubiquitous CLI-phobia mostly went away.
I dunno but there's only a few things missing from those old-style UIs. (Notably, hiDPI support for example)
This is probably a niche opinion but I think we have been steadily devolving and going backwards in terms of user design. We waste so much space, require so many clicks for worse usability than we started with.
With the death of skeumorphism and textual UIs we regularly have to guess or hover buttons to find out what they are. Even scrollbars are starting to be unusable - I can barely see some of them because they are small, low-contrast and auto-hiding.
100%. And all of this regression is either in the name of pure vapid trendiness, or an attempt to supposedly make things “easier for non-technical people” — and yet these people still have no idea how to use their devices any more expertly than they could Windows 95. The only difference is back then people knew what a file was and where it was located. Now there are a lot of people who don’t.
I can theme some things (unless some modern packaging tech makes the app ignore my theme), I can make the ones in Firefox usable but ugly (with widget.gtk.overlay-scrollbars.enabled and widget.non-native-theme.scrollbar.style), and so on. But I can see where we are heading. Scrollbars are one of many UI features that were too useful, so they must be destroyed.
I did not expect to feel so old at such a young age.
I wish I could have a very long discussion of this. It is my belief that people think they want new stuff because marketing has told them that. The corporate internet is like someone took that process and welded their finger to the fast forward button, endless iterations of pointless redesigns, galaxies of UXes that only a few people in Boise Iowa ever visited, it's nuts.
I want the internet back where everything looked like that phpbb stuff. You just got the information then. Now you have to solve the CCS/JS puzzle first.
Remember how everyone was complaining how "heavy" all that glitz was? Images this, heavy HTML that, garishness this, load times that? I remember.
And then Windows 8 aesthetic came in, suddenly flat and a few colors with very reduced palette of available widgets became en vogue, but at the same time somehow the load and render times of sites bragging to be "simple" and "minimalistic" and "lightweight" soared with megabytes of assets none of your old sites sporting image borders and marble backgrounds ever had.
I'm not sure I agree. I used the Chicago95 theme (with some added 98 icons) for a good 2 years. The only reason I stopped was because I left the job I was at and couldn't be bothered to replicate the experience on my private device and haven't really been using Linux as my main driver. My team found it hilarious and I thought the theme was quite usable. I find modern Windows windowing far more egregious and unusable. I can't even think of anything you might mean that would justify moving away from the 90s themes or UI concepts.
edit: I've recently been using Chromafiler (https://github.com/vanjac/chromafiler) and I'm realizing we've gone off in completely the wrong direction since the 90s.
Moved on to dark patterns and dumbed down interfaces. Personally, I really miss mnemonics. Alt+underlined letter for_everything_. But having an underlined letter for everything died out and keyboard nav means a lot more memorization.
I'm going to miss when the ability to double-click the top-left corner of a window will close it (and right-click brings up the window menu). This has been around since the Windows 3 days and still persists in 11, but it's going away in some places - e.g. you can't do this in most browsers, and the new file Explorer in 11 dropped it to support tabs.
People hate on the default blue Luna theme, but there was a perfectly professional Silver version, and the later (black with orange accents) Zune Theme was one of the most attractive UIs I ever got to use.
I can't find the xfwm theme, but it had a good balance between usability and "fun". That with some GTK theme such as the default for XFCE 4.6 looked fun to use without looking very childish.
Altough I must 'konfess' that the Keramik theme with the Noia icons and some handwritting font made reading advanced man pages in Konqueror a lot less "dramatic" and careless, thus, keeping the stress down.
Personally Windows 8 UI and after is the reason I'm never going to touch this specific OS again. In fact, I find it an even bigger hindrance than the monstrosity Windows Updates is.
As your global theme, use 'Reactionary'. Set your application style to 'MS Windows 9x'. For your icons, use 'Memphis98'. For cursors, 'Hackneyed (scaleable)'. Your Plasma style, colours, and window decorations should all follow your global theme (Reactionary). I keep the default Noto fonts because I find them quite easy on the eyes, but this is easy to change if you yearn for classic fonts.
My task bar (bottom bar) is set to use full names and not combine apps; I also use the application menu that looks like W95, and I've got it set to use a little W95 Start icon for that touch of nostalgia. Otherwise it's all very minimalist.
I've used this set-up for years and it works really well for me. I find it very conducive to being productive - it's stable, unchanging, and respectful of my attention and focus. I also don't need to hack away at anything or worry about updates - KDE officially supports theming and handles all of this really seamlessly.