Comment by cosmic_cheese
8 days ago
> Man, the desktop was so beautiful and refreshing.
I get the same feeling when doing a fresh install+boot of both OS X 10.9 Mavericks and Windows 7. They're just so much more pleasant than what we have now.
It'd be nice if modern desktop operating systems took a lesson or two from their past selves.
I feel the same way about Unix desktops. The newer stuff just.. looks gross? And it's difficult to use. I'm very thankful for Mate, especially the Alt+F2 behavior, but also the simple menu layout vs some horrible combination of search and popups.
GNOME 2/MATE isn't quite to my taste for my personal use, but it is cozy in a way that post-3.0 versions aren't.
For me it's the difference between "this is a computer" vs "this is a computer trying to be a cell phone". I think that's what everything from the last 15yr is trying to be--a phone. And not everything is a phone. On a computer we have a keyboard and a mouse, which are much, much more precise tools than vague gestures on a touchscreen.
EDIT: I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say this is basically everything that's wrong with the computer(-adjacent) industry. We can appreciate the problem statement by asking "why would anyone want to make a computer be a phone?" The answer is a terminal case of a particularly defensive form of groupthink. It goes something like this:
(1) "everyone is talking about the iPhone" (2) "i need to feel relevant, ergo i must make phone noises too"
then they rub these two neurons together, and since it's the only two they got it isn't hard for them, and this process repeats a few generations and like a nuclear chain reaction soon enough the entire industry is trying to make everything be a fucking phone.
It shouldn't be like that.
EDIT2: As a species we don't play these games with other tools. Cars--some super early attempts had weird shit like tillers for steering but we quickly outgrew that idea and settled on the steering wheel, levers for the other hand, and pedals for the feet. Same with airplanes and tracked vehicles (bulldozers, tanks, etc). Same with machine tools. This stupid game people are playing with computer interfaces these days is fundamentally inhuman.
19 replies →
I've settled on XFCE. It just works. You have to turn too many knobs to make it work on weird DPI / screen sizes, but other than that, it's fine.
Recently, I fired up Win 3.11 in 1600x1200@256 mode to run SimAnt, and was pretty shocked at how much better it felt than most modern operating systems.
I kind of feel like the start menu + task bar were a mistake now.
It is nice having the bluetooth + network icon somewhere accessible, but maybe <ctrl>-space should just pop up a thing that lets you type program names + also temporarily hide all windows over 10% of the screen or something? That'd solve the problem of trying to find program manager to run a second program. Also, the windows in windows approach of program manager wasn't great. Still, it's better than most things out there these days. The icons are so... clean.
10 replies →
There are people who believe that KDE 3 was the perfect desktop. They forked it when KDE 4 was released (initial KDE 4 releases were really rough), called it the Trinity Desktop Environment (TDE). I actually really like modern Gnome but every once in a while I try out TDE and it does give me a nice cozy feeling, like looking at old album photos.
I have a friend who refuses to use anything other than CDE and still manages to compile and run it on modern Linux distros.
I have an older computer running Ubuntu with Unity 7 DE, I think it looks beautiful. It’s a computer that barely connects to the internet and I use for playing with electronics. I think that was the most intuitive DE on Linux.
Installed and activated Windows 7 yesterday on the laptop I was preparing to sell. Surprised to learn something my brain offloaded long time ago. We had Apple Glass in 2008 on Windows!
My PC is unfortunately on Windows 11, but I recently purchased StartAllBack which lets you replace the start menu with a Windows 7-era sensible one, and you can even change the Start icon and various chrome in the OS (the task bar, file explorer, etc) to revert back to Windows 7 style. Maybe I'm just nostalgic but it's made Windows 11 so much better.
I feel the average HN user though might be a bad representation of the general population. Personally I prefer the aesthetic of windows 11 over 7, it’s about the ONLY thing I prefer about windows 11, but windows 7 looks extremely dated to me now.
That is, until you try to use windows 11. And it gives you bing results instead of the option in control panel you want, even though you spelled it exactly.
I've never had this happen to me and I've daily driven Windows 11 for some years now. Can you give an example?
It’s like you didn’t read the rest of my comment. However I can’t confirm. I wack that windows key on my keyboard and start typing all the time and can’t remember it ever opening the wrong thing.
I'd prefer Windows 2000, myself. Relatively light weight, no bling or junk in the UI. Windows XP was okay, but the default UI looked like a toy. I know you can turn it off, but most people didn't. We won't mention Vista...
i don't have a w11 supported machine, but when I see the OS in videos or screenshots, I always thought it looks surprisingly pleasant and fresh, compared to 10. Really miss Vista though, that one was amazing visually.
You probably do, I thought I didn’t but if you just disable the warning about TPM 2.0 with a simple command it lets you install it just fine. Had no problems for years now.
Have you ever used Windows 8.1? With a classic start button app the UI layout is the good Windows 7 one with the "modern" Windows appearance.
In terms of functionality, 8.1 isn't bad but I can't stand the flat square theme that could've dropped straight out of the DOS era. It's so ugly.
I understand why Aero didn't continue on in its Vista/7 form, but Metro swung way too far in the other direction. The Fluent look used by Windows 11 is a nice middleground that I wish 8, 8.1, and 10 could've adopted instead. Too bad the rest of 11 sucks.
Of course, it was fine. I was real glad they removed the full screen start menu at the time. I still prefer the look of 11.
>but windows 7 looks extremely dated to me now.
This is a highly subjective thing.
This can be a relevant reminder at times, but based on their phrasing, I think they’re aware:
> Personally I prefer […] looks extremely dated to me now.
Compare to the GP comment, for instance, where this may still be the case but is less clear from phrasing:
> They're just so much more pleasant
1 reply →
That’s my point. They were stating it like it was objective, so I countered with my subjective opinion.