4 ms·

This was a kludgey hack that never managed to land upstream, yet utterly dominated (for a brief moment) the headspace of the early linux desktop. It's funny ho

by ajross 11mo ago

This was a kludgey hack that never managed to land upstream, yet utterly dominated (for a brief moment) the headspace of the early linux desktop. It's funny how quickly things were moving at the time. In the mid 90's, GUI design elements were still in their infancy. Even basic stuff like "what do windows do?" was in flux. Traditional X window managers hadn't settled on anything like a regular usage model: twm was still in regular use, fvwm mostly cloned its UI, Sun was still defaulting to OpenWindows which was pretty and clever but sort of an evolutionary dead end, and other commercial unixes were running Motif which was a lot like a monochrome Windows 3.1 that used too many pixels. Macs were still stuck in the only-one-foreground-app-is-enough model with System 7 and had nothing to offer. Then Windows 95 landed like a bomb: there was a CLOSE button in the corner of the window finally! And there was a start menu and a little status bar! And that's what we all decided we wanted, really badly. So it got cloned and picked up pervasively. Basically everyone not already part of one of the X11 camps was running this. But the window was small. KDE kicked off mere months later, Gnome followed quickly after that, and we all forgot about fvwm95. But we for sure all remember it.

trinix912 11mo ago
It was actually NeXTSTEP that introduced the familiar "Windows 9x" 3D control appearance and close buttons on the top right. The first versions were released around '88.
- bandrami 11mo ago
  I love that interface. If I ever get a lodpi monitor again I'm going straight back to Windowmaker.
- ptx 11mo ago
  And the Windows 1.0 UI [1] looks really similar to Mac OS (especially dialogs and buttons), so apparently Microsoft pilfered their UI design from Steve Jobs's companies not only once but twice. [1] https://www.pcjs.org/software/pcx86/sys/windows/1.00/ https://www.pcjs.org/software/pcx86/sys/windows/1.00/
cosmic_cheese 11mo ago
> Then Windows 95 landed like a bomb: there was a CLOSE button in the corner of the window finally! And there was a start menu and a little status bar! And that's what we all decided we wanted, really badly. So it got cloned and picked up pervasively. Basically everyone not already part of one of the X11 camps was running this. Huh? Perhaps I'm misunderstanding, but Mac windows had close buttons even as far back as System 1.x in 1984. Multitasking didn't land until System 5 with the optional MultiFinder in 1987 (made standard in System 7), but window close buttons were absolutely not a Win95 innovation.
- ajross 11mo ago
  Mac UI as generally understood didn't involve moving windows around yet, not really[1]. "Window management" at the time was limited to the paradigm you'd see on the mac plus screen where you'd have one app window and some dialog boxes. Yes, you had a button to close it, but the paradigm didn't match the needs of the big workstation screens on which X11 evolved. [1] These were the dark days of the mac. It was falling behind rapidly and the failure was accelerating. Jobs would walk back in the door within months of this moment too! Again, Windows 95 isn't felt to be notable in this community of true believers, but it was absolutely a bomb in the market as a whole. It changed everything, instantly.
  - cosmic_cheese 11mo ago
    On the Mac Plus and other Macs in a similar chassis, yes, there wasn't much room to move windows around, but it was still possible. Apple also released several larger Mac displays (around 16 by my count) prior to 1995, including two 21" models (in 1989 and 1991, respectively). Workstation-like window management absolutely happened on Macs in the late 80s and early 90s.
    - ajross 11mo ago
      (I remain amazed at how people even today will argue like this trying to avoid talking nice about MS. You're misconstruing the point, seemingly deliberately.) Sure, on $15k ($30k in 2025 dollars) Mac II's. See also the answer elsewhere about NeXTSTEP being a player in this space. No one was doing it in the consumer space, no consumer knew about that stuff, Linux consumers on their 14" 800x600 monitors sure hadn't see it. And to repeat yet again, Microsoft Windows 95 landed like a bomb in this community and changed everything. And it happened very fast.
jeroenhd 11mo ago
The close button has always been there, you double clicked the top left menu button. That worked all the way until Microsoft started redoing window decorations in desktop mode with Windows 8.1, and even for a short period after. This was also copied into other X window control styles. Even today, a Motif replicates the Windows 1.0-3.11 top-left menu+close button.
- ajross 11mo ago
  And that answer is precisely why (1) Windows 95 was such a revelation to the market and (2) nerds like us remain oblivious to that[1] even three decades on. Yeah, yeah, I know CUA allows for a window close. No one knew. I worked IT at the time (as did lots of us here in our youth I'm sure) and was constantly teaching and re-teaching this trick to the poor people trapped with their CUA environments. But suddenly with Windows 95 you could see how it worked. [1] Even if we knew in our bones, c.f. this very discussion about the popularity of a cloned hack on Linux, that it was the Right Thing.
  - actionfromafar 11mo ago
    Yet we are back to hamburger menus.
  - anthk 11mo ago
    FVWM users with virtual desktops disagree. Windows 95 was a step back compared to the FVWM configurability. Deskbars? Why when you can have 3x3 desktops by default, and people even had a 16 (4x4) pane based environments? You didn't switch between tasks, you switched between full opened desktops with Windows inside, one or two, the rest was somewhere else.
- efdee 11mo ago
  It actually still works to this day. Doubleclick the top left menu button (the one with the app icon) and your window closes.
  - LocalH 11mo ago
slashdave 11mo ago
I ran Motif from a terminal, and used command lines to bring up windows. Windows 95 felt like a toy in comparison, not to mention PC performance was pretty sad when compared to a high-end unix workstation. To each their own I guess.
- thesuitonym 11mo ago
  It's not really fair to compare a bottom-of-the-barrel PC to a high-end unix workstation though. The high-end Windows boxes were running Windows NT 3.51, and later NT 4, and there just weren't many of them. NT 4 wasn't quite there yet, but it had a lot of what was good from the Windows 95 interface, but on a real, enterprise-grade OS. It's almost a shame Microsoft clung to DOS compatibility for so long, that probably kept a lot of power users from seeing what Windows could do. But on the other hand, it's probably a good thing because it kept Unix popular and gave Linux and BSD room to grow.
anthk 11mo ago
NeXTStep and MacOS already had a CLOSE button. Stop trying to spread bullshit.

by ajross 11mo ago

trinix912 11mo ago

It was actually NeXTSTEP that introduced the familiar "Windows 9x" 3D control appearance and close buttons on the top right. The first versions were released around '88.

bandrami 11mo ago
I love that interface. If I ever get a lodpi monitor again I'm going straight back to Windowmaker.
ptx 11mo ago
And the Windows 1.0 UI [1] looks really similar to Mac OS (especially dialogs and buttons), so apparently Microsoft pilfered their UI design from Steve Jobs's companies not only once but twice. [1] https://www.pcjs.org/software/pcx86/sys/windows/1.00/ https://www.pcjs.org/software/pcx86/sys/windows/1.00/

cosmic_cheese 11mo ago

> Then Windows 95 landed like a bomb: there was a CLOSE button in the corner of the window finally! And there was a start menu and a little status bar! And that's what we all decided we wanted, really badly. So it got cloned and picked up pervasively. Basically everyone not already part of one of the X11 camps was running this. Huh? Perhaps I'm misunderstanding, but Mac windows had close buttons even as far back as System 1.x in 1984. Multitasking didn't land until System 5 with the optional MultiFinder in 1987 (made standard in System 7), but window close buttons were absolutely not a Win95 innovation.

ajross 11mo ago
Mac UI as generally understood didn't involve moving windows around yet, not really[1]. "Window management" at the time was limited to the paradigm you'd see on the mac plus screen where you'd have one app window and some dialog boxes. Yes, you had a button to close it, but the paradigm didn't match the needs of the big workstation screens on which X11 evolved. [1] These were the dark days of the mac. It was falling behind rapidly and the failure was accelerating. Jobs would walk back in the door within months of this moment too! Again, Windows 95 isn't felt to be notable in this community of true believers, but it was absolutely a bomb in the market as a whole. It changed everything, instantly.
- cosmic_cheese 11mo ago
  On the Mac Plus and other Macs in a similar chassis, yes, there wasn't much room to move windows around, but it was still possible. Apple also released several larger Mac displays (around 16 by my count) prior to 1995, including two 21" models (in 1989 and 1991, respectively). Workstation-like window management absolutely happened on Macs in the late 80s and early 90s.
  - ajross 11mo ago
    (I remain amazed at how people even today will argue like this trying to avoid talking nice about MS. You're misconstruing the point, seemingly deliberately.) Sure, on $15k ($30k in 2025 dollars) Mac II's. See also the answer elsewhere about NeXTSTEP being a player in this space. No one was doing it in the consumer space, no consumer knew about that stuff, Linux consumers on their 14" 800x600 monitors sure hadn't see it. And to repeat yet again, Microsoft Windows 95 landed like a bomb in this community and changed everything. And it happened very fast.

jeroenhd 11mo ago

The close button has always been there, you double clicked the top left menu button. That worked all the way until Microsoft started redoing window decorations in desktop mode with Windows 8.1, and even for a short period after. This was also copied into other X window control styles. Even today, a Motif replicates the Windows 1.0-3.11 top-left menu+close button.

ajross 11mo ago
And that answer is precisely why (1) Windows 95 was such a revelation to the market and (2) nerds like us remain oblivious to that[1] even three decades on. Yeah, yeah, I know CUA allows for a window close. No one knew. I worked IT at the time (as did lots of us here in our youth I'm sure) and was constantly teaching and re-teaching this trick to the poor people trapped with their CUA environments. But suddenly with Windows 95 you could see how it worked. [1] Even if we knew in our bones, c.f. this very discussion about the popularity of a cloned hack on Linux, that it was the Right Thing.
- actionfromafar 11mo ago
  Yet we are back to hamburger menus.
- anthk 11mo ago
  FVWM users with virtual desktops disagree. Windows 95 was a step back compared to the FVWM configurability. Deskbars? Why when you can have 3x3 desktops by default, and people even had a 16 (4x4) pane based environments? You didn't switch between tasks, you switched between full opened desktops with Windows inside, one or two, the rest was somewhere else.
efdee 11mo ago
It actually still works to this day. Doubleclick the top left menu button (the one with the app icon) and your window closes.
- LocalH 11mo ago

slashdave 11mo ago

I ran Motif from a terminal, and used command lines to bring up windows. Windows 95 felt like a toy in comparison, not to mention PC performance was pretty sad when compared to a high-end unix workstation. To each their own I guess.

thesuitonym 11mo ago
It's not really fair to compare a bottom-of-the-barrel PC to a high-end unix workstation though. The high-end Windows boxes were running Windows NT 3.51, and later NT 4, and there just weren't many of them. NT 4 wasn't quite there yet, but it had a lot of what was good from the Windows 95 interface, but on a real, enterprise-grade OS. It's almost a shame Microsoft clung to DOS compatibility for so long, that probably kept a lot of power users from seeing what Windows could do. But on the other hand, it's probably a good thing because it kept Unix popular and gave Linux and BSD room to grow.

anthk 11mo ago

NeXTStep and MacOS already had a CLOSE button. Stop trying to spread bullshit.