Comment by pavlov
7 years ago
It's interesting to use the original NeXT interface after all these years. Honestly I feel I could be very happy with a modern desktop that stuck to the NeXT principles, just updated text rendering to modern standards.
2-bit greyscale is good enough for UI widgets, especially now that we have high-DPI displays and don't necessarily need edge antialiasing anymore for vector graphics.
Text labels on menus and buttons is such an improvement over the undecipherable "flat school" icons that are currently used everywhere.
Yeah I would love to see a modern Fluxbox. My only issue with Fluxbox on Ubuntu and similar is other DE's seem to have better visual support for wireless. I have no way of connecting to the internet if I can't even see the Wi-Fi icon anywhere. I don't want to have to install components from another DE. Also they seem to mostly be abandoned. I have the same issue with tiling WM's. I don't want to have to configure my DE / VM it should just work, what I should configure is preferential settings not functional settings.
> I have the same issue with tiling WM's.
My Manjaro-i3 environment worked out of the box and had all of the things you'd expect (wifi icon, volume icon, battery indicator etc). The only reason I had to configure anything at all is because of personal taste. I find the Manjaro WM packages pretty good, personally.
I tried Manjaro before, didn't have the nicest experience getting it setup on one of my laptops. I try to stick to Ubuntu derived Linux distros cause they usually support my hardware cleanly enough. I wouldn't mind trying it out again though, but i3 is a lot different from Fluxbox.
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>connecting to the internet if I can't even see the Wi-Fi icon
I usually just run nmtui in a terminal.
Right, but you get the idea yea? If you sat me down at the machine ten seconds ago and said "turn on the WiFi," would "run a command in terminal that doesn't have the words network, wifi, or internet in it" really be at the top of the list of things I'd try?
Edit: oh, that's some sort of ui opening command?
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This. It uses dialog like interface.
You probably also want a battery and volume indicator
Personally I get along with nmtui from the command line (as user) but I appreciate the desire for a tray icon of some kind.
The first few versions of OS X were more NeXT-like. They felt dated.
And the column-based file browser never appealed to me.
I do agree that a high-res black and white screen is so much better for text related tasks than what we had back then in PC land. 640x480x16 colors was a mess. Worked fine for things like CAD but kind of gross to type documents on.
> And the column-based file browser never appealed to me.
That's actually my favorite feature of the Finder and really the only thing I miss when using Windows sometimes. Using arrow keys + typing a letter or two to jump through dirs, and being able to see full hierarchy the whole time works really well with my mental model of the filesystem in a way the tree-based list view never does.
I remember paying $129 for Mac OS X 10.0 and it didn't feel anything like NeXT.
On a supposedly state of the art Mac G4, it ran like a lobotomized sloth mostly because of the heavy new graphics stack. The giant fonts, translucent titlebars, pinstripe patterns and "lickable" candy color buttons were the aesthetic opposite of the 2-bit original NeXT.
While 10.1 did a decent job of patching up more egregious issues, 10.2 Jaguar was the first truly usable iteration of OS X, and it incidentally also brought the first bits of toning down to Aqua.
A lot of folks fondly remember Snow Leopard but for me the golden era for OS X was 10.2 - 10.4. 10.5 and 10.6 were great too, but honestly speaking I wouldn’t be bothered if I had to use a modern version of 10.4 for day to day work.
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The first few versions of OS X were more NeXT-like. They felt dated.
Very interesting. My first Mac was an OS9 machine that came out so close to the release of OSX that it came with a free upgrade coupon.
I had a NeXT at work at the same time, and my memory is that the two environments were significantly different. Different enough that I gave the OS9 machine to my wife when OSX came out because it was so easy to use (she had a PS/2).