10 ms·

I've been thinking recently that Windows 95/98/2000 had better UX than you can find nowadays on most websites, and while not "beautiful", it was still aesthetic

I've been thinking recently that Windows 95/98/2000 had better UX than you can find nowadays on most websites, and while not "beautiful", it was still aesthetic. That + a good console? Great idea. I'd love to see some innovation with the old school design ethos too; maybe there are even better ways of displaying controls? Or maybe a new way to think about controls that weren't around back then.

gfody 5y ago
I think that era of Windows stuck to the literature and best practices, the UI spoke to us in its own visual language and let us know what could be clicked or right-clicked or that it had focus and might do something if you hit the spacebar etc. etc. things that behave similarly look alike, all the clues you need to learn some software on your own were there, the visual language was teaching us how we're meant to use it, the more familiar we were with windows software the quicker we could pickup new windows software. and then I don't know what happened Steven Sinofsky showed up with radical ideas that software should be beautiful and everything sort of went to hell? curious if there was actually some kind of event marking the beginning of the end of intuitive software design for MS
- nmstoker 5y ago
  Mac also caved after a real highpoint of good definition in the 90s. With MS, they just seemed to stop paying attention to their own guidance and much preferred doing their own thing (see most editions of Office!), people just got fed up and it seems like it crumbled from there.
- bluedino 5y ago
  I think that Windows 2000 and Max OS were the pinnacle of clean Interfaces. It seems like once the graphics capabilities became common, OS interface developers used them even when they shouldn't have. Remember when moving windows in Linux had a "jiggle" to them? The genie effect in OS X? What about the "cube" of multiple desktop? I still don't know what the point of transparent windows is. A few effects are useful - like aero peek in Windows.
  - edgyquant 5y ago
    I think a lot of these things make interactions more pleasant, definitely more aesthetically pleasing. I know people love to hate on everything new but I grew up on early windows (my first PC was Windows 95) and I always thought it was kinda ugly but PCs couldn’t handle much more.
    - tpxl 5y ago
      I think you can face-lift the W95/W2000 system without losing the usability, people just didn't do that. That's what I hate the most about "modern" UIs, designers make them look pretty and degrade usability, instead of just making them pretty.
      - CRConrad 5y ago
        > That's what I hate the most about "modern" UIs, designers make them look pretty and degrade usability, instead of just making them pretty. What's worse is, (at least IMO) they aren't even particularly pretty.
      - edgyquant 5y ago
        What would you say the modern windows shell is missing that existed in Windows 2000?
      - chillfox 5y ago
        XP is basically the W95/W2000 interface but pretty.
  - doubled112 5y ago
    I think some of those animations make the desktop behave a little more like objects would in the real world. For minimize, whether it's a line that shrinks, a genie lamp, a simple shrink effect, it's all the same. A simple visual cue telling you where it went. A little form with the function is fine with me. There's a ton of computing power in even the weakest of machines. That said, I hope we'll always be able to turn it off. Even a default install of Raspberry Pi OS uses a composited window manager on the RPi 4 now.
- laurent92 5y ago
  And the keyboard shortcuts! Don’t forget the keyboard shortcuts! Which could help you automate, if you save a Windows macro and repeat it. And the F1-Help! In context, boring but always available. And the rearrangeable toolbars, native!! The status bar, not the flimsy tooltip at the bottom which disappears. And the treeviews! And the files ordered by name! Nowadays everything is ordered by “Most recently seen” so you can go back to the past because of the infinite roll. Everything was ordered and safe there. But you would lose your mind if you didn’t reorganize your desktop regularly, and that has faded away, no-one needs to organize files nowadays. Windows had reached an incredible level of usability, complete with blind and disability support, scriptable, standardized, reorganizable, repeatable UIs. Then the web appeared and despite having a searchbox in every app, there still isn’t a keyboard shortcut for it.
  - 1_player 5y ago
    > the web appeared and despite having a searchbox in every app, there still isn’t a keyboard shortcut for it This infuriates me. None of the browsers have a shortcut to "search this highlighted text with Google". I instead have to right click, and carefully pick the option between "Print" and "Copy". Not a single one, for an operation I do 200 times a day. I do not understand how it is possible. It's the most common operation I do in a browser.
    - garaetjjte 5y ago
      I use Ctrl-C Ctrl-T Ctrl-V ENTER for this.
    - jbbe 5y ago
      All my browsers (firefox, chrome and safair) on mac have this behavior at least. Do none of the windows browsers have the feature?
- rodgerd 5y ago
  The biggest problem - across a lot of fronts - was that we abandoned the idea of consistency and rooting these things in research. The original success of the Mac interface was rooted in the HIG which provided rigorous, clear, and (at least sometimes) evidence-based principles for UI/UX. Sun paid a bunch for work to be done on the GNOME 1.x series at one point, to try and significantly improve it. The HIG is no more at Apple. GNOME design decisions are justified with comments like "I asked some friends and they liked this better". Most of the pain in Windows 10 are all the jagged edges where you cut from one era to another for no particularly good reason.
- ansible 5y ago
  > ... let us know what could be clicked or right-clicked ... Oh my gosh, yes. This is what drives me to distraction with recent Android releases. I'm tapping on things in the battery settings menu that used to do something, but no, not anymore. Seriously, what is so damn awful about having some visual indication of what is a button?
- robbedpeter 5y ago
  Fundamentally, ui has to be a consequence of function - there's a pragmatic reality to how a thing is used that informs the limits of the representation of controls. In a visual context, it's less about skeumorphic analogs and more about how the brain maps those controls to things we already know. This is muscle memory and plasticity in action - the relative locations, stateful appearance, and behavior of controls gets mapped in our brains in the same way as taxi drivers learning the routes in a city, a violinist learning fingerings, or a child learning the alphabet. "Muscle memory" is required to establish foundations of more complex behaviors. Once you've built a user interface, you should not ever touch elements upon which the users have built those muscle memory mappings. Yo Yo Ma would be as lost as a child if you told him he had to play the bassoon instead of cello. After a couple years of practice, some of the higher level artistry could be brought to bear on the new instrument, but it's the low level fundamentals that matter. Firefox screwed with fundamentals, and their market share is evidence of why that shouldn't be done. Windows keeps pushing down that path as well, mistaking their current dominance in desktop as something absolute.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  Not only on the UI level, they were also responsible for COM's revenge on .NET after Longhorn, and the golden spot it now enjoys on Windows APIs, although most that don't do Windows think of it as gone.
godot 5y ago
Yes! My thoughts exactly. I'm pretty desperate for an OS UI that looks like this. KDE comes close but still too modernized. Would love to try Serenity on a laptop some time. Anyone know how usable this is as a daily driver?
- wheelerof4te 5y ago
  It is usable only in a VM, sadly. If you like to hack around and enjoy playing Diablo 1 on obscure software, Serenity OS is for you :)
  - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
    It seems to be at least somewhat capable of booting on metal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sT-ME3PsKtc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sT-ME3PsKtc
    - wheelerof4te 5y ago
      That is really inspiring to see!
      - squarefoot 5y ago
        I can't but wonder how nice it would be if ported to ARM devices. If Linux can run on $15 small boards with much fewer resources than big PCs, this much lighter OS could literally fly.
        jagger27 5y ago
        People are actively working on Arm support! https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/search?q=arm&type= https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/search?q=arm&type=
- CodeArtisan 5y ago
  LXQt with a retro theme may do it. The project reached version 1.0 at the beginning of this month. https://lxqt-project.org/about/ https://lxqt-project.org/about/ https://www.opencode.net/abgr/qtstep https://www.opencode.net/abgr/qtstep
bob1029 5y ago
Our current product has a UI that is on par with windows 2000. We reuse the same ~26 hand-rolled UI elements on a fixed-size layout. Things like alpha blending and pixel shaders are a distant fantasy for us. Target market is highly regulated B2B, so we have more tolerance to work with here. Everything is very serious business. No one really cares about button radii or drop shadows. They just want to push the paperwork as quickly as our screens will come back and then go home. We listen to our user delegates on a weekly basis. On the actual telephone for up to an hour. Any little UX gripes are usually dealt with judiciously as a result. Nothing is more frustrating than a perfect UI being fucked up by the passage of time. You don't need fancy shit. You just need consistency and speed. Give me back my xp-era explorer and start menu snappiness. Put a high speed camera on a windows 10 task bar and record someone right clicking on it. You might need a larger SD card than originally planned for this activity.
- andai 5y ago
  XP explorer is so much faster it blows my damn mind. I ran it inside Windows 10 in VirtualBox, the explorer window opens instantly and navigates instantly, while the new explorer has lag with every operation. The best way to see this is to copy or rename a file. Explorer, a Microsoft product (presumably better integrated with the kernel) will take a second or two to show the result of the action that it itself performed (!!), while Sublime Text open in the background will detect the change and display it instantly. Madness!
  - 0xcde4c3db 5y ago
    I feel like way too many engineers ca. 2005-2010 internalized the misconception that "asynchronous" is synonymous with "I don't need to care how long it takes". It turns out that the distinction isn't trivial.
  - exikyut 5y ago
    I wonder if Explorer is deliberately updating the display after a timeout to handle the scenario where many files might rename in short succession. One simple way to handle this could be to compute the timer to fire at $last_rename_time + $delay, initialize $last_rename_time to 0 (and later set it to the current time in milliseconds), then only actually start the timer if the calculated value is actually in the future (which it won't be for the first run). Of course... Explorer might (...still) be using periodic polling. xD You might be able to use Event Tracing for Windows to find out if Explorer is actually following events in real time, with the minor caveat that it might be a bit of a project. I gathered a small handful of ETW-related links over at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28348564 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28348564 a little while back FWIW.
1_player 5y ago
If you like the Windows 98 era of UI design, I recommend you having a look at the GUI for the UNIX-like embedded operating system QNX. The care, tactility and readability of that interface is in my opinion unparalleled, and hidden behind a operating system few have heard of, and fewer even used. https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/qnx621 https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/qnx621 I honestly think anything else produced since is worse than this, and since flat design has taken root, UIs have fallen off a cliff both in usability and style. I tend to get very Patrick Bateman-like when appreciating old UIs, the colour combination and choice of fonts on off-grey backgrounds, while modern interfaces just feel like there's no personality or warmth to them. Just flat uppercase #222 sans text on flat white background.
- tailspin2019 5y ago
  Looking at those screenshots, I can definitely see your point. For me, all the greys date it a little, but other than that it’s a simple, clean, elegant and highly consistent UI! The consistency is most notable. We’ve lost so much of that in modern operating systems (mainly Windows and macOS). It feels very approachable. EDIT: Now having watched the SerenityOS video(!) all the same comments above apply. Really nice work.
- nyanpasu64 5y ago
  Looks a lot like Haiku OS.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
    Yeah, while I haven't spent enough time in Haiku[0] to get familiar with really it's design language, it is so responsive, readable, and discoverable that it forced me to remember all that we have lost in personal computing because of... I'm not entirely sure who to blame, a lot of people who aught to be shot out of a cannon into the sun, I reckon. [0] sadly it doesn't even quite meet my relatively minimal almost-never-used laptop use case due to the only RDP client that worked at all being so horrifically out of date that it can't understand modern RDP authentication mechanisms.
akling 5y ago
>I'd love to see some innovation with the old school design ethos too; maybe there are even better ways of displaying controls? Or maybe a new way to think about controls that weren't around back then. Oh yeah, this is something we've been exploring (carefully) with SerenityOS! There's obviously been a lot of good UI/UX innovations since the late 90s, and it's super interesting to look for ways to integrate them with the classic aesthetics. As an example, we use breadcrumb bars in our file manager, to display the current directory as a part of separately interactive segments. And we also have "Assistant" which works similarly to macOS Spotlight, for fast access to a range of data providers. I'm sure there are many similar concepts we have yet to discover :)
- mysterydip 5y ago
  I'm sure you've seen this or similar paper before, but a good refresher from the windows 95 team: https://socket3.wordpress.com/2018/02/03/designing-windows-95s-user-interface/ https://socket3.wordpress.com/2018/02/03/designing-windows-9...
  - akling 5y ago
    Yes! That’s such a great post. For people interested in this, I strongly recommend getting a hold of the old Windows 2000 era user interface guidelines book from Microsoft.
    - edeion 5y ago
      What book are you talking about? Is it "Microsoft Windows User Experience" published by Microsoft Professional Editions? Aside: Thank you for your video! It looks great and that's yet another OS I'd like to try and play with -- along with Plan 9, which Serenity made me think of a bit, and TempleOS because of the soul-saving effect of devoting to a hard piece of beautiful software craftmanship.
      - akling 5y ago
        Yes indeed! “Microsoft Windows User Experience”. I got a used copy off of Amazon last year for $2
walrus01 5y ago
If you liked the simplicity of windows 2000 you'd likely do find with an XFCE4 desktop environment.
alx__ 5y ago
I feel like it's a product of the era we grew up in. Or the OS that made you fall in love with computers. For me that was Mac OS 8 on the first iMac :)
- topspin 5y ago
  For me it's the efficiency. The 90's era Windows UI and applications ran productively on machines with 8MB of RAM. That's an enormous amount of value for what amounts half today's desktop CPU cache. The limited memory forced developers to conform to the OS provided API and resources (fonts, color pallets, image formats, etc.) and the result was small, fast, consistent applications. Today this discipline survives in mobile devices. Meanwhile, our desktop operating systems are festooned with a multitude of widget toolkits and language runtimes yielding wildly diverse, inconsistent and often fragile behavior and require 3+ orders of magnitude more memory. Aside from (usually) pretty nice font rendering, what has actually been achieved with all of this?
- bsdooby 5y ago
  Absolutely
- badsectoracula 5y ago
  I don't really think it is only that. My first OS was DOS and i used Win3.1 a lot and while i do have nostalgia for those two, i think Win9x was better in terms of GUI design and as others have mentioned, the peak was around Win2K (though not everything was going upwards, i still think border-on-hover introduced in Win98 was backwards and essentially the herald of featureless form-over-function modern flat design). And ever since i started using a window manager in Linux (somewhere in early 2000s) i really liked Window Maker's style even though i never used NeXTSTEP for many years (in fact the only time i used it i was kinda disappointed at how primitive it was in terms of window management compared to Window Maker :-P).
DeathArrow 5y ago
UX means user experience, not user interface. And it does not have to be beautiful, but functional.

gfody 5y ago

I think that era of Windows stuck to the literature and best practices, the UI spoke to us in its own visual language and let us know what could be clicked or right-clicked or that it had focus and might do something if you hit the spacebar etc. etc. things that behave similarly look alike, all the clues you need to learn some software on your own were there, the visual language was teaching us how we're meant to use it, the more familiar we were with windows software the quicker we could pickup new windows software. and then I don't know what happened Steven Sinofsky showed up with radical ideas that software should be beautiful and everything sort of went to hell? curious if there was actually some kind of event marking the beginning of the end of intuitive software design for MS

nmstoker 5y ago
Mac also caved after a real highpoint of good definition in the 90s. With MS, they just seemed to stop paying attention to their own guidance and much preferred doing their own thing (see most editions of Office!), people just got fed up and it seems like it crumbled from there.
bluedino 5y ago
I think that Windows 2000 and Max OS were the pinnacle of clean Interfaces. It seems like once the graphics capabilities became common, OS interface developers used them even when they shouldn't have. Remember when moving windows in Linux had a "jiggle" to them? The genie effect in OS X? What about the "cube" of multiple desktop? I still don't know what the point of transparent windows is. A few effects are useful - like aero peek in Windows.
- edgyquant 5y ago
  I think a lot of these things make interactions more pleasant, definitely more aesthetically pleasing. I know people love to hate on everything new but I grew up on early windows (my first PC was Windows 95) and I always thought it was kinda ugly but PCs couldn’t handle much more.
  - tpxl 5y ago
    I think you can face-lift the W95/W2000 system without losing the usability, people just didn't do that. That's what I hate the most about "modern" UIs, designers make them look pretty and degrade usability, instead of just making them pretty.
    - CRConrad 5y ago
      > That's what I hate the most about "modern" UIs, designers make them look pretty and degrade usability, instead of just making them pretty. What's worse is, (at least IMO) they aren't even particularly pretty.
    - edgyquant 5y ago
      What would you say the modern windows shell is missing that existed in Windows 2000?
    - chillfox 5y ago
      XP is basically the W95/W2000 interface but pretty.
- doubled112 5y ago
  I think some of those animations make the desktop behave a little more like objects would in the real world. For minimize, whether it's a line that shrinks, a genie lamp, a simple shrink effect, it's all the same. A simple visual cue telling you where it went. A little form with the function is fine with me. There's a ton of computing power in even the weakest of machines. That said, I hope we'll always be able to turn it off. Even a default install of Raspberry Pi OS uses a composited window manager on the RPi 4 now.
laurent92 5y ago
And the keyboard shortcuts! Don’t forget the keyboard shortcuts! Which could help you automate, if you save a Windows macro and repeat it. And the F1-Help! In context, boring but always available. And the rearrangeable toolbars, native!! The status bar, not the flimsy tooltip at the bottom which disappears. And the treeviews! And the files ordered by name! Nowadays everything is ordered by “Most recently seen” so you can go back to the past because of the infinite roll. Everything was ordered and safe there. But you would lose your mind if you didn’t reorganize your desktop regularly, and that has faded away, no-one needs to organize files nowadays. Windows had reached an incredible level of usability, complete with blind and disability support, scriptable, standardized, reorganizable, repeatable UIs. Then the web appeared and despite having a searchbox in every app, there still isn’t a keyboard shortcut for it.
- 1_player 5y ago
  > the web appeared and despite having a searchbox in every app, there still isn’t a keyboard shortcut for it This infuriates me. None of the browsers have a shortcut to "search this highlighted text with Google". I instead have to right click, and carefully pick the option between "Print" and "Copy". Not a single one, for an operation I do 200 times a day. I do not understand how it is possible. It's the most common operation I do in a browser.
  - garaetjjte 5y ago
    I use Ctrl-C Ctrl-T Ctrl-V ENTER for this.
  - jbbe 5y ago
    All my browsers (firefox, chrome and safair) on mac have this behavior at least. Do none of the windows browsers have the feature?
rodgerd 5y ago
The biggest problem - across a lot of fronts - was that we abandoned the idea of consistency and rooting these things in research. The original success of the Mac interface was rooted in the HIG which provided rigorous, clear, and (at least sometimes) evidence-based principles for UI/UX. Sun paid a bunch for work to be done on the GNOME 1.x series at one point, to try and significantly improve it. The HIG is no more at Apple. GNOME design decisions are justified with comments like "I asked some friends and they liked this better". Most of the pain in Windows 10 are all the jagged edges where you cut from one era to another for no particularly good reason.
ansible 5y ago
> ... let us know what could be clicked or right-clicked ... Oh my gosh, yes. This is what drives me to distraction with recent Android releases. I'm tapping on things in the battery settings menu that used to do something, but no, not anymore. Seriously, what is so damn awful about having some visual indication of what is a button?
robbedpeter 5y ago
Fundamentally, ui has to be a consequence of function - there's a pragmatic reality to how a thing is used that informs the limits of the representation of controls. In a visual context, it's less about skeumorphic analogs and more about how the brain maps those controls to things we already know. This is muscle memory and plasticity in action - the relative locations, stateful appearance, and behavior of controls gets mapped in our brains in the same way as taxi drivers learning the routes in a city, a violinist learning fingerings, or a child learning the alphabet. "Muscle memory" is required to establish foundations of more complex behaviors. Once you've built a user interface, you should not ever touch elements upon which the users have built those muscle memory mappings. Yo Yo Ma would be as lost as a child if you told him he had to play the bassoon instead of cello. After a couple years of practice, some of the higher level artistry could be brought to bear on the new instrument, but it's the low level fundamentals that matter. Firefox screwed with fundamentals, and their market share is evidence of why that shouldn't be done. Windows keeps pushing down that path as well, mistaking their current dominance in desktop as something absolute.
pjmlp 5y ago
Not only on the UI level, they were also responsible for COM's revenge on .NET after Longhorn, and the golden spot it now enjoys on Windows APIs, although most that don't do Windows think of it as gone.

godot 5y ago

Yes! My thoughts exactly. I'm pretty desperate for an OS UI that looks like this. KDE comes close but still too modernized. Would love to try Serenity on a laptop some time. Anyone know how usable this is as a daily driver?

wheelerof4te 5y ago
It is usable only in a VM, sadly. If you like to hack around and enjoy playing Diablo 1 on obscure software, Serenity OS is for you :)
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
  It seems to be at least somewhat capable of booting on metal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sT-ME3PsKtc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sT-ME3PsKtc
  - wheelerof4te 5y ago
    That is really inspiring to see!
    - squarefoot 5y ago
      I can't but wonder how nice it would be if ported to ARM devices. If Linux can run on $15 small boards with much fewer resources than big PCs, this much lighter OS could literally fly.
      - jagger27 5y ago
        People are actively working on Arm support! https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/search?q=arm&type= https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/search?q=arm&type=
CodeArtisan 5y ago
LXQt with a retro theme may do it. The project reached version 1.0 at the beginning of this month. https://lxqt-project.org/about/ https://lxqt-project.org/about/ https://www.opencode.net/abgr/qtstep https://www.opencode.net/abgr/qtstep

bob1029 5y ago

Our current product has a UI that is on par with windows 2000. We reuse the same ~26 hand-rolled UI elements on a fixed-size layout. Things like alpha blending and pixel shaders are a distant fantasy for us. Target market is highly regulated B2B, so we have more tolerance to work with here. Everything is very serious business. No one really cares about button radii or drop shadows. They just want to push the paperwork as quickly as our screens will come back and then go home. We listen to our user delegates on a weekly basis. On the actual telephone for up to an hour. Any little UX gripes are usually dealt with judiciously as a result. Nothing is more frustrating than a perfect UI being fucked up by the passage of time. You don't need fancy shit. You just need consistency and speed. Give me back my xp-era explorer and start menu snappiness. Put a high speed camera on a windows 10 task bar and record someone right clicking on it. You might need a larger SD card than originally planned for this activity.

andai 5y ago
XP explorer is so much faster it blows my damn mind. I ran it inside Windows 10 in VirtualBox, the explorer window opens instantly and navigates instantly, while the new explorer has lag with every operation. The best way to see this is to copy or rename a file. Explorer, a Microsoft product (presumably better integrated with the kernel) will take a second or two to show the result of the action that it itself performed (!!), while Sublime Text open in the background will detect the change and display it instantly. Madness!
- 0xcde4c3db 5y ago
  I feel like way too many engineers ca. 2005-2010 internalized the misconception that "asynchronous" is synonymous with "I don't need to care how long it takes". It turns out that the distinction isn't trivial.
- exikyut 5y ago
  I wonder if Explorer is deliberately updating the display after a timeout to handle the scenario where many files might rename in short succession. One simple way to handle this could be to compute the timer to fire at $last_rename_time + $delay, initialize $last_rename_time to 0 (and later set it to the current time in milliseconds), then only actually start the timer if the calculated value is actually in the future (which it won't be for the first run). Of course... Explorer might (...still) be using periodic polling. xD You might be able to use Event Tracing for Windows to find out if Explorer is actually following events in real time, with the minor caveat that it might be a bit of a project. I gathered a small handful of ETW-related links over at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28348564 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28348564 a little while back FWIW.

1_player 5y ago

If you like the Windows 98 era of UI design, I recommend you having a look at the GUI for the UNIX-like embedded operating system QNX. The care, tactility and readability of that interface is in my opinion unparalleled, and hidden behind a operating system few have heard of, and fewer even used. https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/qnx621 https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/qnx621 I honestly think anything else produced since is worse than this, and since flat design has taken root, UIs have fallen off a cliff both in usability and style. I tend to get very Patrick Bateman-like when appreciating old UIs, the colour combination and choice of fonts on off-grey backgrounds, while modern interfaces just feel like there's no personality or warmth to them. Just flat uppercase #222 sans text on flat white background.

tailspin2019 5y ago
Looking at those screenshots, I can definitely see your point. For me, all the greys date it a little, but other than that it’s a simple, clean, elegant and highly consistent UI! The consistency is most notable. We’ve lost so much of that in modern operating systems (mainly Windows and macOS). It feels very approachable. EDIT: Now having watched the SerenityOS video(!) all the same comments above apply. Really nice work.
nyanpasu64 5y ago
Looks a lot like Haiku OS.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  Yeah, while I haven't spent enough time in Haiku[0] to get familiar with really it's design language, it is so responsive, readable, and discoverable that it forced me to remember all that we have lost in personal computing because of... I'm not entirely sure who to blame, a lot of people who aught to be shot out of a cannon into the sun, I reckon. [0] sadly it doesn't even quite meet my relatively minimal almost-never-used laptop use case due to the only RDP client that worked at all being so horrifically out of date that it can't understand modern RDP authentication mechanisms.

akling 5y ago

>I'd love to see some innovation with the old school design ethos too; maybe there are even better ways of displaying controls? Or maybe a new way to think about controls that weren't around back then. Oh yeah, this is something we've been exploring (carefully) with SerenityOS! There's obviously been a lot of good UI/UX innovations since the late 90s, and it's super interesting to look for ways to integrate them with the classic aesthetics. As an example, we use breadcrumb bars in our file manager, to display the current directory as a part of separately interactive segments. And we also have "Assistant" which works similarly to macOS Spotlight, for fast access to a range of data providers. I'm sure there are many similar concepts we have yet to discover :)

mysterydip 5y ago
I'm sure you've seen this or similar paper before, but a good refresher from the windows 95 team: https://socket3.wordpress.com/2018/02/03/designing-windows-95s-user-interface/ https://socket3.wordpress.com/2018/02/03/designing-windows-9...
- akling 5y ago
  Yes! That’s such a great post. For people interested in this, I strongly recommend getting a hold of the old Windows 2000 era user interface guidelines book from Microsoft.
  - edeion 5y ago
    What book are you talking about? Is it "Microsoft Windows User Experience" published by Microsoft Professional Editions? Aside: Thank you for your video! It looks great and that's yet another OS I'd like to try and play with -- along with Plan 9, which Serenity made me think of a bit, and TempleOS because of the soul-saving effect of devoting to a hard piece of beautiful software craftmanship.
    - akling 5y ago
      Yes indeed! “Microsoft Windows User Experience”. I got a used copy off of Amazon last year for $2

walrus01 5y ago

If you liked the simplicity of windows 2000 you'd likely do find with an XFCE4 desktop environment.

alx__ 5y ago

I feel like it's a product of the era we grew up in. Or the OS that made you fall in love with computers. For me that was Mac OS 8 on the first iMac :)

topspin 5y ago
For me it's the efficiency. The 90's era Windows UI and applications ran productively on machines with 8MB of RAM. That's an enormous amount of value for what amounts half today's desktop CPU cache. The limited memory forced developers to conform to the OS provided API and resources (fonts, color pallets, image formats, etc.) and the result was small, fast, consistent applications. Today this discipline survives in mobile devices. Meanwhile, our desktop operating systems are festooned with a multitude of widget toolkits and language runtimes yielding wildly diverse, inconsistent and often fragile behavior and require 3+ orders of magnitude more memory. Aside from (usually) pretty nice font rendering, what has actually been achieved with all of this?
bsdooby 5y ago
Absolutely
badsectoracula 5y ago
I don't really think it is only that. My first OS was DOS and i used Win3.1 a lot and while i do have nostalgia for those two, i think Win9x was better in terms of GUI design and as others have mentioned, the peak was around Win2K (though not everything was going upwards, i still think border-on-hover introduced in Win98 was backwards and essentially the herald of featureless form-over-function modern flat design). And ever since i started using a window manager in Linux (somewhere in early 2000s) i really liked Window Maker's style even though i never used NeXTSTEP for many years (in fact the only time i used it i was kinda disappointed at how primitive it was in terms of window management compared to Window Maker :-P).

DeathArrow 5y ago

UX means user experience, not user interface. And it does not have to be beautiful, but functional.