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This looks nice and easy to use. My hypothesis is today's "modern" OS user interfaces are objectively worse from a usability perspective, obfuscating key funct

This looks nice and easy to use. My hypothesis is today's "modern" OS user interfaces are objectively worse from a usability perspective, obfuscating key functionality behind layers of confusing menus. It reminds me of these "OS popularity since the 70s" time lapse views: https://youtube.com/watch?v=cTKhqtll5cQ https://youtube.com/watch?v=cTKhqtll5cQ The dominance of Windows is crazy, even today, Mac desktops and laptops are comparatively niche

voidfunc 2y ago
I got in an argument with an accessibility engineer about this recently... The whole UI as branding thing has utterly killed usability.
- pwg 2y ago
  "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/21810-it-is-difficult-to-get-a-man-to-understand-something https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/21810-it-is-difficult-to-ge...
- hyperbrainer 2y ago
  It's interesting especially because it seems like companies today pour tens of millions into "accessibility", but I never see a thing's usability in terms of simple and easy-to-do-what-I-want UX fall in to the same category.
  - rafram 2y ago
    One is required by law and/or contract terms, the other is just nice to have.
    - layer8 2y ago
      And that is why we can’t have nice things, apparently.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
  - cenamus 2y ago
    Even just simple UX testing with people that have never seen or used your software seems to be a lost art.
    - hnthrowaway0315 2y ago
      Companies are outsourcing testing. I'm not surprised that they get rid of UI testing. Back in the day companies used to invite people to sit down and use their software. Nowadays they just push out whatever they have and then start collecting bug tickets. Then they let the community to vote on the tickets. It's basically a huge "pay for being a beta tester" scheme.
      - ivan_gammel 2y ago
        UX testing is not UI testing and it is not QA.
        hnthrowaway0315 2y ago
        You are probably right, just saying in general...
        girvo 2y ago
        Quite, but lots of companies jam them all together these days.
- cosmic_cheese 2y ago
  It’s a completely predictable result if you think about it. Old style UI was developed with the findings of countless man-hours of UX research performed by field experts, while branded UI is typically whipped together purely based on trends and vibes in an evening by a visual designer who’s probably never performed an ounce of serious research or user trials. It’s natural that the latter is only going to be good at the most superficial of purposes. UI as branding is the McMansion of UX.
  - bri3d 2y ago
    I think it’s worse from a time wasting standpoint, really - a lot of modern UX does have thousands of hours of UX research dumped into it, but with faulty metrics driven goal seeking and internal politics bolted on. I agree that Vibe Branding killed UX in the way you describe in the 2000s (remember when every company had some abominable Flash site?!), but now, we’ve come full circle: from the ashes we’ve allowed warring factions of UX researchers to return to create hundreds of carefully constructed disparate systems with no consistency.
    - cosmic_cheese 2y ago
      I don’t think we’re quite back to where we were, because branded UI widgets are almost always devoid of functionality compared to their traditional UI toolkit counterparts. If a feature is even slightly “power user”, branded UI widgets probably don’t implement it, even in tools made for technical users. One of my favorite examples is tree-style lists (“outline views” in AppKit nomenclature). On macOS these have a very convenient functionality where holding down option while expanding/collapsing a section performs that action on all children as well, and it’s practically never implemented in custom-built tree widgets even in cases where the primary audience skews Mac-heavy.
- burnte 2y ago
  > The whole UI as branding thing has utterly killed usability. This is caused by a change in who is hired as UI/UX developers. In days past it was HCI experts and engineers, now it's graphic designers. "Pretty" is the order of the day, not "useful". "There are too many menu items" is now answered with "So let's hide them" when it used to be "How can we organize them in the UI us a simple, discoverable manner?" But then that "overflow" menu (really? Needed menu commands are now OVERFLOW?) gets crowded so they start just removing features so the UI is nice.
  - ivan_gammel 2y ago
    >This is caused by a change in who is hired as UI/UX developers. „UX/UI developers“ is a strange name for it. In 2000s the web enabled more sophisticated presentation designs and there was a push from client-server to web-based applications using incredibly strange technologies for building UIs — HTML, CSS and JavaScript, which gave the rise to UX design as a interdisciplinary job (HCI+digital graphics design). By 2010 the internet of applications kicked off and in mid-2010s moved to mobile, dramatically increasing the demand for UX designers. By then it actually mattered more who is hiring designers, not who is hired. Since only relatively small fraction of hiring managers does understand the scope of this job even now, they even started calling it „UX/UI designers“ or „Product designers“ as if that name change could help, still judging design work by often-fake screenshots on Behance rather than by case studies in the portfolio. Even HCI professionals are often reduced to mere graphic designers by those managers who skip research and apply „taste“ to a science-based discipline. At the same time, since UX design is one of the most well-paid and less stressful creative jobs, a lot of people switched to it without proper education or experience, having no idea what is statistical significance or how to design a survey. And voila, we are here.
    - burnte 2y ago
      > „UX/UI developers“ is a strange name for it. I agree. It's a UI Engineer. User Experience is just the fluffification of the title to something that sounds expansive and nebulous when it's actually pretty focused and critical.
- Lorkki 2y ago
  It's also repeating what the hellscape of inconsistent skinned UIs did in the late 90s and early 2000s. People are looking back at those times with a rather selective memory.
  - xandrius 2y ago
    People forget having to use IE with 12 toolbars when going over at some friend's house.
  - Gormo 2y ago
    The themed UIs of that era were very superficial -- if they applied to serious software at all, they were just a cosmetic layer on top of an otherwise well-engineered interface, and could be easily disabled. Most people I knew, for example, disabled the theming engine that shipped with Windows XP. Most applications that supported UI skinning still had a default or fallback UI that adhered well enough to modern conventions. Not so much anymore. The abandonment of any coherent organizing principle to UI layout in favor of pure aesthetics has been a massive regression. Reasonably complex software often doesn't even include menu bars anymore, for example.
- WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
  > The whole UI as branding thing has utterly killed usability. Imagine if Active Desktop had taken over. I eventually came up with a not-awful use for AD but that was a few years after it went away.
  - anthk 2y ago
    It did under several ways since w98SE and Explorer with IE merged on.
esafak 2y ago
Microsoft Windows programs hid functionality under layers of menus and the registry. MacOS, at least, surfaces much less functionality, because it offers sensible defaults. I never had to do anything akin to fiddling with the Windows Registry. I did like some Windows things, though, like the ribbon, and reconfigurable UIs. Today's UIs are more immutable, for the worse.
- bbqfog 2y ago
  MacOS is pretty cursed. The equivalent to registry fiddling is doing anything in ~/Library/Application Support It still has "Services" as a hold over from Next that is completely broken and unused (but still present in every app for some reason). Now you also have the joy of diving deep into the Settings every time an app needs some sort of permission. I'd say something about .DS_Store files, but that's not really UI.
  - wpm 2y ago
    I'd much rather work with plain-text human readable property list files with straightforward `defaults` commands than the hive of Hell called the registry.
  - anthk 2y ago
    NeXTStep/GNUStep/Cocoa 'defaults' commands.
- brandon272 2y ago
  There is an entire ecosystem of free and paid Mac apps meant to augment the Mac experience because MacOS does not provide functionality or configuration needed for a sensible computing experience out of the box.
  - exiguus 2y ago
    I think, the main difference of MacOS and Windows is, that Windows allow drivers from 3rd-party. MacOS does not. Drivers means also hardware. So you can build your own PC. Same as with Linux. This is the Apple secret of success IMO. No 3rd-party drivers and hardware, means, it will just work and no one will blame you for stuff 3rd-parties messed up. But its also like: There is only a red and blue t-shirt. Choose. No gray, no white, no yellow, no printings.
mananaysiempre 2y ago
> This looks nice These kinds of things almost always give me an uncanny-valley feeling. Here I'm looking at the screenshot and can’t help noticing that the taskbar buttons are too close to the taskbar’s edge, the window titles are too narrow, the folders are too yellow, and so on and so forth. (To its credit, Wine is the one exception that is not susceptible to this, even when configured to use a higher DPI value so the proportions aren’t actually the ones I’m used to.) I’m not so much criticizing the theme’s authors as wondering why this is so universal across the many replicas.
- mouse_ 2y ago
  Computing is largely a cargo cult thing these days. The problem is that the interfaces these bootleg skins draw "inspiration" from were designed on the back of millions of pre-inflationary dollars' R&D from only the best at Golden-Age IBM, Microsoft, Apple, etc.. BeOS, OS/2, Windows 95-2000 do not look the way they do because it looks good, they look the way they do because it works good, countless man hours went into ensuring that. Simply designing an interface that looks similar is not going to bring back the engineering prowess of those Old Masters.
  - mananaysiempre 2y ago
    I’m less inclined to attribute it to “these days”, as I remember the contemporary copycat themes in e.g. KDE and Tk looking off as well. Even Swing with the native look-and-feel didn’t quite look or feel right, IIRC. As a (weak) counterpoint to supplicating ourselves to the old UI masters, I submit Raymond Chen’s observations from 2004[1] that the flat/3D/flat cycle is largely fashion, e.g. how the toolbars in Office 97 (and subsequent “coolbars”) had buttons that did not look like buttons until you hovered over them, in defiance of the Windows 95 UI standard. (Despite Chen’s characteristic confident tone, he doesn’t at all acknowledge the influence of the limited palettes of baseline graphics adapters on the pre-Win95 “flat” origins of that cycle.) Also worth noting are the scathing critiques of some Windows 95 designs[2,3] in the Interface Hall of Shame (2000). I don’t necessarily agree with all of them (having spent the earlier part of my childhood with Norton Commander, the separate folder/file selectors in Windows 3.x felt contrived to me even at the time) but it helps clear up some of the fog of “it has always been this way” and remember some things that fit badly at first and never felt quite right (e.g. the faux clipboard in file management). And yes, it didn’t fail to mention the Office 97 UI, either[4,5]. (Did you realize Access, VB, Word, and IE used something like three or four different forks of the same UI toolkit, “Forms3”, among them—a toolkit that looked mostly native but was in fact unavailable outside of Microsoft?..) None of that is meant to disagree with the point that submitting to the idea of UI as branding is where it all went wrong. (I’ll never get tired of mentioning that the futuristic UI of the in-game computers of the original Deus Ex, from 2000, supported not only Tab to go between controls and Enter and Esc to submit and dismiss, but also Alt accelerators, complete with underlined letters in the labels.) [1] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20040728-00/?p=38313 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20040728-00/?p=38... [2] http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/file95.htm http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/file95.htm [3] http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/explore.htm http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/explore.htm [4] http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/visual.html#VISUAL36 http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/visual.html#VISUAL36 [5] http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/visual.html#VISUAL38 http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/visual.html#VISUAL38
toast0 2y ago
Honestly, I don't think anyone has done real user research on basic interfaces since Microsoft did it for Windows 95. I'm pretty sure that was the last publication I've seen. It's a lot of time, effort, and expense to run user research, but the potential benefits to the users are big.
exiguus 2y ago
What do you mean exactly? Like the Menu-Issues in Windows 10? Because from a UX perspective, basically nothing has change. UI of course, but UX is the same like in the 90's following "The Design of Everyday Things" by Donald A. I think its more about the change management, expectations. For example in Win XP you had the option to use the NT theme. As a user: "I can decide when to move on to the new design." Usually around 50% of your users are conservative about change. You have to keep this in mind when u change design. On the other hand, if you sell a product with subscription, you have to introduce new feature, else user will move to another product. But, when you introduce new feature, UI gets more complicated and user will blame you for that.
- myself248 2y ago
  Like making window borders 1px wide, even as screen pixel density increases. It's darn near impossible to resize a window anymore. Like making buttons auto-hide unless you mouse-over them. I don't remember when this came in, but the default PDF viewer in something did this, and I spent _weeks_ being baffled that some jerk made a PDF viewer that couldn't zoom in on the page, until I randomly waggled the mouse for some reason and the missing buttons magically appeared. I have no words for how upsetting this was. Like having icons-only for many functions, with no text-and-icons or text-only option to replace them. I'm sure some people are fine with that, but other people can scan a screen for a desired word MUCH faster than they can scan for a desired icon, and removal of text labels is just an insult to that segment of the userbase. Like no longer highlighting, or even having, hotkeys for many menus. I can alt-space or alt-menukey my way through a late-90s menu tree _way_ faster than I can mouse through it, even with today's better mice, but that simply doesn't work anymore in a great many programs. It's one thing for people who've never known a different UI to just be slow in this one and that's all they've known, and that's fine for them I guess, if it's pretty and they prefer that, or if keyboards frighten them. But for people who have DECADES of reflexes invested in these shortcuts to suddenly find that they don't work anymore, and we're forced to SLOW DOWN and be less productive than in the past, that's a high insult. Microsoft spilled tankers of ink in the 90s talking about how their new GUI patterns would make people more productive by unifying these things across programs (which was true; in the DOS era every program made up its own shortcuts and ways to access them), and folks who learned them are now being punished for trusting MS with our loyalty. "Basically nothing has changed" my ass.
TacticalCoder 2y ago
> The dominance of Windows is crazy, even today, Mac desktops and laptops are comparatively niche But for whom and to do what? People around me, like my wife and mother in law, are happy with an Android phone. If they use a computer, the only thing they need is a browser. I wouldn't be surprised if 90%+ of all Windows users would use Windows for one thing: click on a browser icon. That's why after one malware too many I confiscated my mother-in-law's Windows laptop and got her a Chromebook. I'd say that's why the shit UI/UX doesn't even matter anymore for most users: the only use a browser anyway.
- herbst 2y ago
  So much this. Just make sure their browser is working and updating and that office files automatically open with a fitting software. I have way less work since everybody just gets Linux
breadwinner 2y ago
Agree that "modern" OS user interfaces are objectively worse from a usability perspective. That's thanks to Flat UI, mostly. In my opinion, nothing beats the 35-year-old NeXTSTEP interface (which W95 is a weak imitation of): https://www.gnustep.org/carousel/PC_1300x650.png https://www.gnustep.org/carousel/PC_1300x650.png
hnthrowaway0315 2y ago
For modern Windows operating system, i.e. >= Windows 10, getting rid of ads, weather, auto-update and search bar can improve UI usability significantly. Windows 95 was not stable enough back then. I believe Windows 2000 was the first OS that was easy to use and relatively stable. XP and 7 are both solid options too. I have used both MacOS X and modern MacOS (15) and the UI of X is definitely way better than the UI of 15. It is more clean cut.
- epolanski 2y ago
  98 was a very good os. I don't think many got 2000, XP was the major windows for millennials.
  - anthk 2y ago
    XP was almost a re-skinned 2000. Most drivers for XP worked under 2000 and viceversa.
leonidasv 2y ago
When I used XFCE as my daily driver, I once tried installing Chicago95 just for nostalgia and it stick as my daily driver for almost a year! The UI is less distracting than modern UIs and there's something to it that makes it easier to just know which window is open over which window that's lacking in modern UIs (I think it's the over-reliance on soft shadows and the borderless windows). Eventually, I stopped using it because: 1- it was always annoying to send an screenshot to someone and have to explain that no, I wasn't using Windows 95, and why; 2- the grey-ish look of everything started to bother me over time; 3- I wanted a more integrated desktop experience and moved to KDE Plasma. Still, I configured my Plasma to work like old Windows: window titles on taskbar, zero to none animations, etc.
- caseyy 2y ago
  I also dailied it on XFCE. The UI was very utilitarian and purposeful. I suppose aesthetically it is unimpressive and not streamlined, but it serves the purpose of being a good interface to do a task. Same as you say, people have asked me a lot about it and even asked me if I could set it up for them. The theme is evangelizing Linux a little bit, and that is interesting. In the right hands, these UI principles could convert many people to some product. P.S. You can now change the grey-ish look with Win95-style theming support. I've not used it, but here's more info: https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95/blob/master/Plus/README.MD https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95/blob/master/Plus/READ...
- keyringlight 2y ago
  >and there's something to it that makes it easier to just know which window is open over which window that's lacking in modern UIs (I think it's the over-reliance on soft shadows and the borderless windows). I think this started with Vista, I remember watching a video criticizing the new love of glass effects on UI chrome as it got rid of or minimized the color/shading difference between focused/unfocused windows. The example the video used was 6 notepad windows and pick which one was focused, and the main cue you'd need to look for is that the window with focus had a close button colored red. Thin borders and minimalist/hiding scrollbars is another one that annoys me, give me something graphical for my gaze to grasp.
- 2y ago
trbutler 2y ago
Yes. I'd love to see someone take the basic design of Windows 95 or even early OS X and reimplement it not so much visually, but tactilely. Make something that works as well, is as simple but isn't nostalgia. In any case though, this particular attempt at giving a complete Windows 95 experience is quite cool.
hx8 2y ago
> The dominance of Windows is crazy, even today, Mac desktops and laptops are comparatively niche I was actually surprised that macOS/Linux/ChromeOS together are >20% of all desktop/laptops. I would have expected Microsoft machines to be closer to 90% than 80%.
- everdrive 2y ago
  I'm surprised by the breakdown as well. At least according to these two citations in Wikipedia, the breakdown is: --- For desktop computers and laptops, Microsoft Windows has 71%, followed by Apple's macOS at 16%, unknown operating systems at 8%, desktop Linux at 4%, then Google's ChromeOS at 2%.[3][4] --- [3] "Now more than ever, ChromeOS is Linux with Google's desktop environment". About Chromebooks. 1 August 2023. Retrieved 25 September 2024. [4]"Desktop Operating System Market Share Worldwide". StatCounter Global Stats. Retrieved 9 March 2025.
hi_hi 2y ago
As a kid, the OS's supported me in learning. They were simple, intuitive and rewarding. I'd click around and explore, and discover cool things like a Wheezer music video, or engaging puzzle games. There was no one who could help me when I got stuck, beyond maybe an instruction manual. I just had to figure it out, mostly by trial and error. I learned so much, eventually being able to replace hardware, install and upgrade drivers, re-install the entire OS and partition the hard drive, figure out networking and filesystems. It built confidence. Now my kid sits infront of an OS (Windows, Mac, it doesn't really matter) and there's so much noise. Things popping up, demanding attention. Scary looking warnings. So much choice. There's so many ways to do simple things. Actions buried deep within menus. They have no hope of building up a mental model or understanding how the OS connects them to the foundations of computing. Even I'm mostly lost now if there's a problem. I need to search the internet, find a useful source, filter out the things that are similar to my problem but not the same. It isn't rewarding any more, it's frustrating. How is a young child meant to navigate that by themselves? This looks like a step in the right direction. I look forward to testing it out.
- underlipton 2y ago
  There're also performance issues. Building muscle memory (which means offloading tasks from working memory, leaving it open for learning) can't happen if you're constantly trying to figure out when the system is going to actually respond to your input.
  - crims0n 2y ago
    This is so true. The most frustrating thing in the world to me is waiting for the UI to catch up to my actions… that should just never happen in 2025. Not only is it frustrating to wait, but as you elegantly stated it forces the menial task to enter working memory.
    - LoganDark 2y ago
      Win32 would buffer keystrokes so that a sequence of commands wouldn't be lost even if the UI took long to respond (e.g. if a dialog took long to open), but that has mostly been lost in the era of web apps and other similar bullshit.
epolanski 2y ago
Mobile too, I'm sick of those OSs updating every 18 months because some product person along marketing decides the wheel has to be reinvented otherwise there will be no buzz. I have a harder and harder time navigating both iOS and Android as time goes, should be the opposite. Same for Windows or MacOs.
walrus01 2y ago
Give today's XFCE4 a try, on debian stable or testing. It's a remarkably no bullshit GUI for use with xorg. You can of course still install all the gnome and kde libraries and run all the gnome and kde applications, though things will look a little bit mismatched.
interludead 2y ago
The Windows dominance really puts things in perspective... Even with the rise of mobile and Macs making some headway, it's amazing how entrenched it still is on the desktop.
happyopossum 2y ago
> My hypothesis is today's "modern" OS user interfaces are objectively worse from a usability perspective, obfuscating key functionality behind layers of confusing menus. I think if you went back and actually tried to use these old UIs you would realize that one of the reasons stuff isn't hidden behind layers of menus is that in a lot of cases the 'hidden' features just didn't exist back then.

voidfunc 2y ago

I got in an argument with an accessibility engineer about this recently... The whole UI as branding thing has utterly killed usability.

pwg 2y ago
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/21810-it-is-difficult-to-get-a-man-to-understand-something https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/21810-it-is-difficult-to-ge...
hyperbrainer 2y ago
It's interesting especially because it seems like companies today pour tens of millions into "accessibility", but I never see a thing's usability in terms of simple and easy-to-do-what-I-want UX fall in to the same category.
- rafram 2y ago
  One is required by law and/or contract terms, the other is just nice to have.
  - layer8 2y ago
    And that is why we can’t have nice things, apparently.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
- cenamus 2y ago
  Even just simple UX testing with people that have never seen or used your software seems to be a lost art.
  - hnthrowaway0315 2y ago
    Companies are outsourcing testing. I'm not surprised that they get rid of UI testing. Back in the day companies used to invite people to sit down and use their software. Nowadays they just push out whatever they have and then start collecting bug tickets. Then they let the community to vote on the tickets. It's basically a huge "pay for being a beta tester" scheme.
    - ivan_gammel 2y ago
      UX testing is not UI testing and it is not QA.
      - hnthrowaway0315 2y ago
        You are probably right, just saying in general...
      - girvo 2y ago
        Quite, but lots of companies jam them all together these days.
cosmic_cheese 2y ago
It’s a completely predictable result if you think about it. Old style UI was developed with the findings of countless man-hours of UX research performed by field experts, while branded UI is typically whipped together purely based on trends and vibes in an evening by a visual designer who’s probably never performed an ounce of serious research or user trials. It’s natural that the latter is only going to be good at the most superficial of purposes. UI as branding is the McMansion of UX.
- bri3d 2y ago
  I think it’s worse from a time wasting standpoint, really - a lot of modern UX does have thousands of hours of UX research dumped into it, but with faulty metrics driven goal seeking and internal politics bolted on. I agree that Vibe Branding killed UX in the way you describe in the 2000s (remember when every company had some abominable Flash site?!), but now, we’ve come full circle: from the ashes we’ve allowed warring factions of UX researchers to return to create hundreds of carefully constructed disparate systems with no consistency.
  - cosmic_cheese 2y ago
    I don’t think we’re quite back to where we were, because branded UI widgets are almost always devoid of functionality compared to their traditional UI toolkit counterparts. If a feature is even slightly “power user”, branded UI widgets probably don’t implement it, even in tools made for technical users. One of my favorite examples is tree-style lists (“outline views” in AppKit nomenclature). On macOS these have a very convenient functionality where holding down option while expanding/collapsing a section performs that action on all children as well, and it’s practically never implemented in custom-built tree widgets even in cases where the primary audience skews Mac-heavy.
burnte 2y ago
> The whole UI as branding thing has utterly killed usability. This is caused by a change in who is hired as UI/UX developers. In days past it was HCI experts and engineers, now it's graphic designers. "Pretty" is the order of the day, not "useful". "There are too many menu items" is now answered with "So let's hide them" when it used to be "How can we organize them in the UI us a simple, discoverable manner?" But then that "overflow" menu (really? Needed menu commands are now OVERFLOW?) gets crowded so they start just removing features so the UI is nice.
- ivan_gammel 2y ago
  >This is caused by a change in who is hired as UI/UX developers. „UX/UI developers“ is a strange name for it. In 2000s the web enabled more sophisticated presentation designs and there was a push from client-server to web-based applications using incredibly strange technologies for building UIs — HTML, CSS and JavaScript, which gave the rise to UX design as a interdisciplinary job (HCI+digital graphics design). By 2010 the internet of applications kicked off and in mid-2010s moved to mobile, dramatically increasing the demand for UX designers. By then it actually mattered more who is hiring designers, not who is hired. Since only relatively small fraction of hiring managers does understand the scope of this job even now, they even started calling it „UX/UI designers“ or „Product designers“ as if that name change could help, still judging design work by often-fake screenshots on Behance rather than by case studies in the portfolio. Even HCI professionals are often reduced to mere graphic designers by those managers who skip research and apply „taste“ to a science-based discipline. At the same time, since UX design is one of the most well-paid and less stressful creative jobs, a lot of people switched to it without proper education or experience, having no idea what is statistical significance or how to design a survey. And voila, we are here.
  - burnte 2y ago
    > „UX/UI developers“ is a strange name for it. I agree. It's a UI Engineer. User Experience is just the fluffification of the title to something that sounds expansive and nebulous when it's actually pretty focused and critical.
Lorkki 2y ago
It's also repeating what the hellscape of inconsistent skinned UIs did in the late 90s and early 2000s. People are looking back at those times with a rather selective memory.
- xandrius 2y ago
  People forget having to use IE with 12 toolbars when going over at some friend's house.
- Gormo 2y ago
  The themed UIs of that era were very superficial -- if they applied to serious software at all, they were just a cosmetic layer on top of an otherwise well-engineered interface, and could be easily disabled. Most people I knew, for example, disabled the theming engine that shipped with Windows XP. Most applications that supported UI skinning still had a default or fallback UI that adhered well enough to modern conventions. Not so much anymore. The abandonment of any coherent organizing principle to UI layout in favor of pure aesthetics has been a massive regression. Reasonably complex software often doesn't even include menu bars anymore, for example.
WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
> The whole UI as branding thing has utterly killed usability. Imagine if Active Desktop had taken over. I eventually came up with a not-awful use for AD but that was a few years after it went away.
- anthk 2y ago
  It did under several ways since w98SE and Explorer with IE merged on.

esafak 2y ago

Microsoft Windows programs hid functionality under layers of menus and the registry. MacOS, at least, surfaces much less functionality, because it offers sensible defaults. I never had to do anything akin to fiddling with the Windows Registry. I did like some Windows things, though, like the ribbon, and reconfigurable UIs. Today's UIs are more immutable, for the worse.

bbqfog 2y ago
MacOS is pretty cursed. The equivalent to registry fiddling is doing anything in ~/Library/Application Support It still has "Services" as a hold over from Next that is completely broken and unused (but still present in every app for some reason). Now you also have the joy of diving deep into the Settings every time an app needs some sort of permission. I'd say something about .DS_Store files, but that's not really UI.
- wpm 2y ago
  I'd much rather work with plain-text human readable property list files with straightforward `defaults` commands than the hive of Hell called the registry.
- anthk 2y ago
  NeXTStep/GNUStep/Cocoa 'defaults' commands.
brandon272 2y ago
There is an entire ecosystem of free and paid Mac apps meant to augment the Mac experience because MacOS does not provide functionality or configuration needed for a sensible computing experience out of the box.
- exiguus 2y ago
  I think, the main difference of MacOS and Windows is, that Windows allow drivers from 3rd-party. MacOS does not. Drivers means also hardware. So you can build your own PC. Same as with Linux. This is the Apple secret of success IMO. No 3rd-party drivers and hardware, means, it will just work and no one will blame you for stuff 3rd-parties messed up. But its also like: There is only a red and blue t-shirt. Choose. No gray, no white, no yellow, no printings.

mananaysiempre 2y ago

> This looks nice These kinds of things almost always give me an uncanny-valley feeling. Here I'm looking at the screenshot and can’t help noticing that the taskbar buttons are too close to the taskbar’s edge, the window titles are too narrow, the folders are too yellow, and so on and so forth. (To its credit, Wine is the one exception that is not susceptible to this, even when configured to use a higher DPI value so the proportions aren’t actually the ones I’m used to.) I’m not so much criticizing the theme’s authors as wondering why this is so universal across the many replicas.

mouse_ 2y ago
Computing is largely a cargo cult thing these days. The problem is that the interfaces these bootleg skins draw "inspiration" from were designed on the back of millions of pre-inflationary dollars' R&D from only the best at Golden-Age IBM, Microsoft, Apple, etc.. BeOS, OS/2, Windows 95-2000 do not look the way they do because it looks good, they look the way they do because it works good, countless man hours went into ensuring that. Simply designing an interface that looks similar is not going to bring back the engineering prowess of those Old Masters.
- mananaysiempre 2y ago
  I’m less inclined to attribute it to “these days”, as I remember the contemporary copycat themes in e.g. KDE and Tk looking off as well. Even Swing with the native look-and-feel didn’t quite look or feel right, IIRC. As a (weak) counterpoint to supplicating ourselves to the old UI masters, I submit Raymond Chen’s observations from 2004[1] that the flat/3D/flat cycle is largely fashion, e.g. how the toolbars in Office 97 (and subsequent “coolbars”) had buttons that did not look like buttons until you hovered over them, in defiance of the Windows 95 UI standard. (Despite Chen’s characteristic confident tone, he doesn’t at all acknowledge the influence of the limited palettes of baseline graphics adapters on the pre-Win95 “flat” origins of that cycle.) Also worth noting are the scathing critiques of some Windows 95 designs[2,3] in the Interface Hall of Shame (2000). I don’t necessarily agree with all of them (having spent the earlier part of my childhood with Norton Commander, the separate folder/file selectors in Windows 3.x felt contrived to me even at the time) but it helps clear up some of the fog of “it has always been this way” and remember some things that fit badly at first and never felt quite right (e.g. the faux clipboard in file management). And yes, it didn’t fail to mention the Office 97 UI, either[4,5]. (Did you realize Access, VB, Word, and IE used something like three or four different forks of the same UI toolkit, “Forms3”, among them—a toolkit that looked mostly native but was in fact unavailable outside of Microsoft?..) None of that is meant to disagree with the point that submitting to the idea of UI as branding is where it all went wrong. (I’ll never get tired of mentioning that the futuristic UI of the in-game computers of the original Deus Ex, from 2000, supported not only Tab to go between controls and Enter and Esc to submit and dismiss, but also Alt accelerators, complete with underlined letters in the labels.) [1] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20040728-00/?p=38313 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20040728-00/?p=38... [2] http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/file95.htm http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/file95.htm [3] http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/explore.htm http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/explore.htm [4] http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/visual.html#VISUAL36 http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/visual.html#VISUAL36 [5] http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/visual.html#VISUAL38 http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/visual.html#VISUAL38

toast0 2y ago

Honestly, I don't think anyone has done real user research on basic interfaces since Microsoft did it for Windows 95. I'm pretty sure that was the last publication I've seen. It's a lot of time, effort, and expense to run user research, but the potential benefits to the users are big.

exiguus 2y ago

What do you mean exactly? Like the Menu-Issues in Windows 10? Because from a UX perspective, basically nothing has change. UI of course, but UX is the same like in the 90's following "The Design of Everyday Things" by Donald A. I think its more about the change management, expectations. For example in Win XP you had the option to use the NT theme. As a user: "I can decide when to move on to the new design." Usually around 50% of your users are conservative about change. You have to keep this in mind when u change design. On the other hand, if you sell a product with subscription, you have to introduce new feature, else user will move to another product. But, when you introduce new feature, UI gets more complicated and user will blame you for that.

myself248 2y ago
Like making window borders 1px wide, even as screen pixel density increases. It's darn near impossible to resize a window anymore. Like making buttons auto-hide unless you mouse-over them. I don't remember when this came in, but the default PDF viewer in something did this, and I spent _weeks_ being baffled that some jerk made a PDF viewer that couldn't zoom in on the page, until I randomly waggled the mouse for some reason and the missing buttons magically appeared. I have no words for how upsetting this was. Like having icons-only for many functions, with no text-and-icons or text-only option to replace them. I'm sure some people are fine with that, but other people can scan a screen for a desired word MUCH faster than they can scan for a desired icon, and removal of text labels is just an insult to that segment of the userbase. Like no longer highlighting, or even having, hotkeys for many menus. I can alt-space or alt-menukey my way through a late-90s menu tree _way_ faster than I can mouse through it, even with today's better mice, but that simply doesn't work anymore in a great many programs. It's one thing for people who've never known a different UI to just be slow in this one and that's all they've known, and that's fine for them I guess, if it's pretty and they prefer that, or if keyboards frighten them. But for people who have DECADES of reflexes invested in these shortcuts to suddenly find that they don't work anymore, and we're forced to SLOW DOWN and be less productive than in the past, that's a high insult. Microsoft spilled tankers of ink in the 90s talking about how their new GUI patterns would make people more productive by unifying these things across programs (which was true; in the DOS era every program made up its own shortcuts and ways to access them), and folks who learned them are now being punished for trusting MS with our loyalty. "Basically nothing has changed" my ass.

TacticalCoder 2y ago

> The dominance of Windows is crazy, even today, Mac desktops and laptops are comparatively niche But for whom and to do what? People around me, like my wife and mother in law, are happy with an Android phone. If they use a computer, the only thing they need is a browser. I wouldn't be surprised if 90%+ of all Windows users would use Windows for one thing: click on a browser icon. That's why after one malware too many I confiscated my mother-in-law's Windows laptop and got her a Chromebook. I'd say that's why the shit UI/UX doesn't even matter anymore for most users: the only use a browser anyway.

herbst 2y ago
So much this. Just make sure their browser is working and updating and that office files automatically open with a fitting software. I have way less work since everybody just gets Linux

breadwinner 2y ago

Agree that "modern" OS user interfaces are objectively worse from a usability perspective. That's thanks to Flat UI, mostly. In my opinion, nothing beats the 35-year-old NeXTSTEP interface (which W95 is a weak imitation of): https://www.gnustep.org/carousel/PC_1300x650.png https://www.gnustep.org/carousel/PC_1300x650.png

hnthrowaway0315 2y ago

For modern Windows operating system, i.e. >= Windows 10, getting rid of ads, weather, auto-update and search bar can improve UI usability significantly. Windows 95 was not stable enough back then. I believe Windows 2000 was the first OS that was easy to use and relatively stable. XP and 7 are both solid options too. I have used both MacOS X and modern MacOS (15) and the UI of X is definitely way better than the UI of 15. It is more clean cut.

epolanski 2y ago
98 was a very good os. I don't think many got 2000, XP was the major windows for millennials.
- anthk 2y ago
  XP was almost a re-skinned 2000. Most drivers for XP worked under 2000 and viceversa.

leonidasv 2y ago

When I used XFCE as my daily driver, I once tried installing Chicago95 just for nostalgia and it stick as my daily driver for almost a year! The UI is less distracting than modern UIs and there's something to it that makes it easier to just know which window is open over which window that's lacking in modern UIs (I think it's the over-reliance on soft shadows and the borderless windows). Eventually, I stopped using it because: 1- it was always annoying to send an screenshot to someone and have to explain that no, I wasn't using Windows 95, and why; 2- the grey-ish look of everything started to bother me over time; 3- I wanted a more integrated desktop experience and moved to KDE Plasma. Still, I configured my Plasma to work like old Windows: window titles on taskbar, zero to none animations, etc.

caseyy 2y ago
I also dailied it on XFCE. The UI was very utilitarian and purposeful. I suppose aesthetically it is unimpressive and not streamlined, but it serves the purpose of being a good interface to do a task. Same as you say, people have asked me a lot about it and even asked me if I could set it up for them. The theme is evangelizing Linux a little bit, and that is interesting. In the right hands, these UI principles could convert many people to some product. P.S. You can now change the grey-ish look with Win95-style theming support. I've not used it, but here's more info: https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95/blob/master/Plus/README.MD https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95/blob/master/Plus/READ...
keyringlight 2y ago
>and there's something to it that makes it easier to just know which window is open over which window that's lacking in modern UIs (I think it's the over-reliance on soft shadows and the borderless windows). I think this started with Vista, I remember watching a video criticizing the new love of glass effects on UI chrome as it got rid of or minimized the color/shading difference between focused/unfocused windows. The example the video used was 6 notepad windows and pick which one was focused, and the main cue you'd need to look for is that the window with focus had a close button colored red. Thin borders and minimalist/hiding scrollbars is another one that annoys me, give me something graphical for my gaze to grasp.
2y ago

trbutler 2y ago

Yes. I'd love to see someone take the basic design of Windows 95 or even early OS X and reimplement it not so much visually, but tactilely. Make something that works as well, is as simple but isn't nostalgia. In any case though, this particular attempt at giving a complete Windows 95 experience is quite cool.

hx8 2y ago

> The dominance of Windows is crazy, even today, Mac desktops and laptops are comparatively niche I was actually surprised that macOS/Linux/ChromeOS together are >20% of all desktop/laptops. I would have expected Microsoft machines to be closer to 90% than 80%.

everdrive 2y ago
I'm surprised by the breakdown as well. At least according to these two citations in Wikipedia, the breakdown is: --- For desktop computers and laptops, Microsoft Windows has 71%, followed by Apple's macOS at 16%, unknown operating systems at 8%, desktop Linux at 4%, then Google's ChromeOS at 2%.[3][4] --- [3] "Now more than ever, ChromeOS is Linux with Google's desktop environment". About Chromebooks. 1 August 2023. Retrieved 25 September 2024. [4]"Desktop Operating System Market Share Worldwide". StatCounter Global Stats. Retrieved 9 March 2025.

hi_hi 2y ago

As a kid, the OS's supported me in learning. They were simple, intuitive and rewarding. I'd click around and explore, and discover cool things like a Wheezer music video, or engaging puzzle games. There was no one who could help me when I got stuck, beyond maybe an instruction manual. I just had to figure it out, mostly by trial and error. I learned so much, eventually being able to replace hardware, install and upgrade drivers, re-install the entire OS and partition the hard drive, figure out networking and filesystems. It built confidence. Now my kid sits infront of an OS (Windows, Mac, it doesn't really matter) and there's so much noise. Things popping up, demanding attention. Scary looking warnings. So much choice. There's so many ways to do simple things. Actions buried deep within menus. They have no hope of building up a mental model or understanding how the OS connects them to the foundations of computing. Even I'm mostly lost now if there's a problem. I need to search the internet, find a useful source, filter out the things that are similar to my problem but not the same. It isn't rewarding any more, it's frustrating. How is a young child meant to navigate that by themselves? This looks like a step in the right direction. I look forward to testing it out.

underlipton 2y ago
There're also performance issues. Building muscle memory (which means offloading tasks from working memory, leaving it open for learning) can't happen if you're constantly trying to figure out when the system is going to actually respond to your input.
- crims0n 2y ago
  This is so true. The most frustrating thing in the world to me is waiting for the UI to catch up to my actions… that should just never happen in 2025. Not only is it frustrating to wait, but as you elegantly stated it forces the menial task to enter working memory.
  - LoganDark 2y ago
    Win32 would buffer keystrokes so that a sequence of commands wouldn't be lost even if the UI took long to respond (e.g. if a dialog took long to open), but that has mostly been lost in the era of web apps and other similar bullshit.

epolanski 2y ago

Mobile too, I'm sick of those OSs updating every 18 months because some product person along marketing decides the wheel has to be reinvented otherwise there will be no buzz. I have a harder and harder time navigating both iOS and Android as time goes, should be the opposite. Same for Windows or MacOs.

walrus01 2y ago

Give today's XFCE4 a try, on debian stable or testing. It's a remarkably no bullshit GUI for use with xorg. You can of course still install all the gnome and kde libraries and run all the gnome and kde applications, though things will look a little bit mismatched.

interludead 2y ago

The Windows dominance really puts things in perspective... Even with the rise of mobile and Macs making some headway, it's amazing how entrenched it still is on the desktop.

happyopossum 2y ago

> My hypothesis is today's "modern" OS user interfaces are objectively worse from a usability perspective, obfuscating key functionality behind layers of confusing menus. I think if you went back and actually tried to use these old UIs you would realize that one of the reasons stuff isn't hidden behind layers of menus is that in a lot of cases the 'hidden' features just didn't exist back then.