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So it will feel like Real® UNIX® again. Solaris just wasn't the same after they switched to GNOME. Now you just need that utility that replicates HDD clicking

So it will feel like Real® UNIX® again. Solaris just wasn't the same after they switched to GNOME. Now you just need that utility that replicates HDD clicking noise through the speaker when your SSD is accessed. Is there a Firefox skin that looks like Netscape 4? For extra realism have a script that randomly kills the process every 15 minutes to simulate Netscape crashing.

LeoPanthera 1y ago
There is a hardware solution for clicking SSDs: https://www.serdashop.com/HDDClicker https://www.serdashop.com/HDDClicker (Though it does require your computer have a drive access LED.) For a modern "Netscape", look into Seamonkey.
- hulitu 1y ago
  Pale Moon has also a Netscape skin.
anthk 1y ago
TBH Solaris' Nimbus theme was amazing; elegant and modern but usable and functional. Not so brutalist but miles ahead of Aero.
- johnisgood 1y ago
  I am not sure what OpenSolaris had, but I liked that theme. OpenIndiana has the same one. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/95/OpenIndiana_Hipster_2021.10_MATE_desktop_environment_screenshot.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/95/OpenIndi...
DonHopkins 1y ago
Solaris just wasn't the same after they switched from XView Sun Deskset Environment. https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-x-windows-disaster-128d398ebd47#97a7 https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-x-windows-disaster-128d398... >The “drag-and-drop” metaphor tries to cover up the Unix file system, but so little of Unix is designed for the desktop metaphor that it’s just one kludge on top of another with little holes and sharp edges popping up everywhere. Maybe the “sag-and-drop” metaphor is more appropriate for such ineffective and unreliable performance. >A shining example is Sun’s Open Windows File Manager, which goes out of its way to display core dump files as cute little red bomb icons. When you double-click on the bomb, it runs a text editor on the core dump. Harmless, but not very useful. But if you intuitively drag and drop the bomb on the DBX Debugger Tool, it does exactly what you’d expect if you were a terrorist: it ties the entire system up, as the core dump (including a huge unmapped gap of zeros) is pumped through the server and into the debugger text window, which inflates to the maximum capacity of swap space, then violently explodes, dumping an even bigger core file in place of your original one, filling up the entire file system, overwhelming the file server, and taking out the File Manager with shrapnel. (This bug has since been fixed.) >But that’s not all: the File Manager puts even more power at your fingertips if you run it as root! When you drag and drop a directory onto itself, it beeps and prints “rename: invalid argument” at the bottom of the window, then instantly deletes the entire directory tree without bothering to update the graphical directory browser. David Rosenthal (author of ICCCM) summed it up nicely in this leaked email: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44050165 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44050165 That's right, he's a great down-to-earth guy (but he can still write like a passionate punk rocker -- see below), and there's a wealth of interesting thoughtful stuff on his blog. I've known him since the days of the X10 / X11 / NeWS window system wars. He worked with James Gosling on Andrew at CMU and NeWS at Sun, and on X10 as well as X11 and ICCCM, and he implemented the original X10 compatibility layer that was in NeWS 1.0, before X11 was a "thing". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_S._H._Rosenthal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_S._H._Rosenthal One of my favorite classics is his Recreational Bugs talk [1989] by "Sgt." David Rosenthal (author of the ICCCM, developer of the Andrew Window Manager, X10, X11, and NeWS, employee #4 and chief scientist at Nvidia): https://blog.dshr.org/2018/05/recreational-bugs.html https://blog.dshr.org/2018/05/recreational-bugs.html [...] Here's David Rosenthal's notorious Sun Deskset Environment flame that some rogue leaked to the Unix-Haters mailing list (inspiring the Unix-Haters Handbook's X-Windows chapter), in which he poignantly concluded: "It's like having a Roy Lichtenstein painting on your bedroom wall.": [...] PS - I notice that someone filed a bug today pointing out that even your example of dropping a mail message on CM doesn't work if CM is closed. That's a symptom of the kind of arrogance that all the deskset tools seem to show - they're so whizzy and important that they deserve acres of screen real estate. Why can't they just shut up and do their job efficiently and inconspicuously? Why do they have to shove their bells and whistles in my face all the time? They're like 50's American cars - huge and covered with fins. What I want is more like a BMW, small, efficient, elegant and understated. Your focus on the whizzy demos may look great at trade shows, but who wants to have their tools screaming at them for attention all the time? It's like having a Roy Lichtenstein painting on your bedroom wall.
- n4r9 1y ago
  > like a BMW, small, efficient, elegant and understated I'll give you elegant, maybe. Perhaps you were thinking of a Mini Electric?
  - shrubble 1y ago
    Early BMWs were like that. Look up the ~1979 320i for instance.
- pjmlp 1y ago
  NeWS was one thing that made Solaris special and not yet another boring UNIX clone. I only consider NeXTSTEP and Irix as well on this box, from all big iron UNIX.
  - anthk 1y ago
    Irix DE it's just a tweaked MWM and Motif tools. Nothing you couldn't get with EMWM, XMToolBox for the menu and some additions. https://fastestcode.org/emwm.html https://fastestcode.org/emwm.html No vector icons for XFile, but at least you can set SGI-like ones once you extract the TGZ in the correct place. And some tools like the Fluxbox-Blackbox like slit from this guy: https://luke8086.dev/netbsd-on-thinkpad-380z.html https://luke8086.dev/netbsd-on-thinkpad-380z.html https://github.com/luke8086/pmdock https://github.com/luke8086/pmdock
    - pjmlp 1y ago
      Yeah, but I am speaking about the out of the box experience, and culture of people using those systems, not the do your own distro kind of thing that nowadays plagues Linux. Or all the other UNIX clones that were basically UNIX System V (or BSD derived) + twm, latter CDE, with the only visible difference being the vendor's name.
      - anthk 1y ago
        Well OTOB Irix wasn't that 'user friendly', even the installer required some thinkering. Irix 5.23 and up were a bit more fair to the user. https://www.tech-pubs.net/wiki/IRIX_101 https://www.tech-pubs.net/wiki/IRIX_101
netfortius 1y ago
I was hoping someone would mention Solaris... :)
tracker1 1y ago
Oh man... Once I started working on NT/Win2k, Netscape 4.x became the bane of my existence... So many ways to make it crash it wasn't even funny or intentional. Especially at a time on dialup, where people weren't willing to spend an hour or more downloading an updated browser.
Lammy 1y ago
> Is there a Firefox skin that looks like Netscape 4? There used to be a really great one called FOXSCAPE, but it was killed off by Firefox's “Australis” UI re-engineering in 2014: https://mw.rat.bz/foxscape/ https://mw.rat.bz/foxscape/ https://mw.rat.bz/foxscape/history/index.html https://mw.rat.bz/foxscape/history/index.html

LeoPanthera 1y ago

There is a hardware solution for clicking SSDs: https://www.serdashop.com/HDDClicker https://www.serdashop.com/HDDClicker (Though it does require your computer have a drive access LED.) For a modern "Netscape", look into Seamonkey.

hulitu 1y ago
Pale Moon has also a Netscape skin.

anthk 1y ago

TBH Solaris' Nimbus theme was amazing; elegant and modern but usable and functional. Not so brutalist but miles ahead of Aero.

johnisgood 1y ago
I am not sure what OpenSolaris had, but I liked that theme. OpenIndiana has the same one. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/95/OpenIndiana_Hipster_2021.10_MATE_desktop_environment_screenshot.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/95/OpenIndi...

DonHopkins 1y ago

Solaris just wasn't the same after they switched from XView Sun Deskset Environment. https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-x-windows-disaster-128d398ebd47#97a7 https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-x-windows-disaster-128d398... >The “drag-and-drop” metaphor tries to cover up the Unix file system, but so little of Unix is designed for the desktop metaphor that it’s just one kludge on top of another with little holes and sharp edges popping up everywhere. Maybe the “sag-and-drop” metaphor is more appropriate for such ineffective and unreliable performance. >A shining example is Sun’s Open Windows File Manager, which goes out of its way to display core dump files as cute little red bomb icons. When you double-click on the bomb, it runs a text editor on the core dump. Harmless, but not very useful. But if you intuitively drag and drop the bomb on the DBX Debugger Tool, it does exactly what you’d expect if you were a terrorist: it ties the entire system up, as the core dump (including a huge unmapped gap of zeros) is pumped through the server and into the debugger text window, which inflates to the maximum capacity of swap space, then violently explodes, dumping an even bigger core file in place of your original one, filling up the entire file system, overwhelming the file server, and taking out the File Manager with shrapnel. (This bug has since been fixed.) >But that’s not all: the File Manager puts even more power at your fingertips if you run it as root! When you drag and drop a directory onto itself, it beeps and prints “rename: invalid argument” at the bottom of the window, then instantly deletes the entire directory tree without bothering to update the graphical directory browser. David Rosenthal (author of ICCCM) summed it up nicely in this leaked email: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44050165 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44050165 That's right, he's a great down-to-earth guy (but he can still write like a passionate punk rocker -- see below), and there's a wealth of interesting thoughtful stuff on his blog. I've known him since the days of the X10 / X11 / NeWS window system wars. He worked with James Gosling on Andrew at CMU and NeWS at Sun, and on X10 as well as X11 and ICCCM, and he implemented the original X10 compatibility layer that was in NeWS 1.0, before X11 was a "thing". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_S._H._Rosenthal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_S._H._Rosenthal One of my favorite classics is his Recreational Bugs talk [1989] by "Sgt." David Rosenthal (author of the ICCCM, developer of the Andrew Window Manager, X10, X11, and NeWS, employee #4 and chief scientist at Nvidia): https://blog.dshr.org/2018/05/recreational-bugs.html https://blog.dshr.org/2018/05/recreational-bugs.html [...] Here's David Rosenthal's notorious Sun Deskset Environment flame that some rogue leaked to the Unix-Haters mailing list (inspiring the Unix-Haters Handbook's X-Windows chapter), in which he poignantly concluded: "It's like having a Roy Lichtenstein painting on your bedroom wall.": [...] PS - I notice that someone filed a bug today pointing out that even your example of dropping a mail message on CM doesn't work if CM is closed. That's a symptom of the kind of arrogance that all the deskset tools seem to show - they're so whizzy and important that they deserve acres of screen real estate. Why can't they just shut up and do their job efficiently and inconspicuously? Why do they have to shove their bells and whistles in my face all the time? They're like 50's American cars - huge and covered with fins. What I want is more like a BMW, small, efficient, elegant and understated. Your focus on the whizzy demos may look great at trade shows, but who wants to have their tools screaming at them for attention all the time? It's like having a Roy Lichtenstein painting on your bedroom wall.

n4r9 1y ago
> like a BMW, small, efficient, elegant and understated I'll give you elegant, maybe. Perhaps you were thinking of a Mini Electric?
- shrubble 1y ago
  Early BMWs were like that. Look up the ~1979 320i for instance.
pjmlp 1y ago
NeWS was one thing that made Solaris special and not yet another boring UNIX clone. I only consider NeXTSTEP and Irix as well on this box, from all big iron UNIX.
- anthk 1y ago
  Irix DE it's just a tweaked MWM and Motif tools. Nothing you couldn't get with EMWM, XMToolBox for the menu and some additions. https://fastestcode.org/emwm.html https://fastestcode.org/emwm.html No vector icons for XFile, but at least you can set SGI-like ones once you extract the TGZ in the correct place. And some tools like the Fluxbox-Blackbox like slit from this guy: https://luke8086.dev/netbsd-on-thinkpad-380z.html https://luke8086.dev/netbsd-on-thinkpad-380z.html https://github.com/luke8086/pmdock https://github.com/luke8086/pmdock
  - pjmlp 1y ago
    Yeah, but I am speaking about the out of the box experience, and culture of people using those systems, not the do your own distro kind of thing that nowadays plagues Linux. Or all the other UNIX clones that were basically UNIX System V (or BSD derived) + twm, latter CDE, with the only visible difference being the vendor's name.
    - anthk 1y ago
      Well OTOB Irix wasn't that 'user friendly', even the installer required some thinkering. Irix 5.23 and up were a bit more fair to the user. https://www.tech-pubs.net/wiki/IRIX_101 https://www.tech-pubs.net/wiki/IRIX_101

netfortius 1y ago

I was hoping someone would mention Solaris... :)

tracker1 1y ago

Oh man... Once I started working on NT/Win2k, Netscape 4.x became the bane of my existence... So many ways to make it crash it wasn't even funny or intentional. Especially at a time on dialup, where people weren't willing to spend an hour or more downloading an updated browser.

Lammy 1y ago

> Is there a Firefox skin that looks like Netscape 4? There used to be a really great one called FOXSCAPE, but it was killed off by Firefox's “Australis” UI re-engineering in 2014: https://mw.rat.bz/foxscape/ https://mw.rat.bz/foxscape/ https://mw.rat.bz/foxscape/history/index.html https://mw.rat.bz/foxscape/history/index.html