Comment by Quitschquat

20 hours ago

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.

11 comments

Quitschquat

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cryo32  18 hours ago

Yep even the later ones. I used to sit in front of a Solaris CDE desktop locked in a basement. Made me want to slit my wrists. The colour scheme, how it worked, the peformance. All horrible.

I used RISC OS at home. Was wonderful to come back to that.

  • lproven  4 hours ago

    > I used RISC OS at home. Was wonderful to come back to that.

    Same here.

    Windows 2 and Mac System 6 at work, RISC OS 2 at home -- faster, more responsive, more capable and flexible, and much better looking.

    Some of my friends had Amigas and to me, oh wow was AmigaOS 1.x fugly.

    40 years later, KDE still is.

    GNOME is beautiful but it's so limited it feels like trying to operate a mouse and keyboard with my feet while sitting on my hands.

    COSMIC feels fast and powerful, but it is not easy on the eyes, and the keyboard UI is poor.

  • Sophira  12 hours ago

    Ooo, a rare fellow home RISC OS user! I had an A3000 at home myself so I didn't have the benefit of using RISC OS with a hard drive, and we never upgraded to an ARM3, but we did use both RISC OS 2 and 3.

    Still love the old Acorn machines. I mostly use Arculator[0] nowadays for that nostalgia though.

    [0] https://b-em.bbcmicro.com/arculator/

    • cryo32  8 hours ago

      Brilliant. Yeah there were a few of us back in the day! Had an A440 then a RiscPC 700 here. Hard disk made all the difference even if it was only a 40MB one!

      There's a nice emulator here, a WebAssembly RiscPC one. Works quite well: https://rpcemu.m-h.org.uk/

      1 reply →

pjmlp  6 hours ago

Actually no, CDE, NeWS and NeXTSTEP are my favourite UNIX GUIs.

On FOSS side, I would vote for afterstep, windowmaker, original GNOME with sawmill, and KDE.

mc32  20 hours ago

No bloat was good! Snappy responsiveness on early CPUs.