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I can't help thinking about how much we have lost. Just finding the scrollbar nowadays can be a challenge. Not to mention if you want to resize a pane - in some

I can't help thinking about how much we have lost. Just finding the scrollbar nowadays can be a challenge. Not to mention if you want to resize a pane - in some applications they seem to have taken extra steps to make it difficult to find the line to grab.

pjc50 5mo ago
Operating systems of that era were designed based on UX research to help people use the unfamiliar operating system. Subsequent ones were designed by UI designers, and opinionated senior managers, who already knew how to use them, and took out usability features to make them "look nicer". This sort of worked when the opinionated manager was Steve Jobs. Most managers are not Steve Jobs. > in some applications they seem to have taken extra steps to make it difficult to find the line to grab Pet peeve of mine in Windows where the line is at most one pixel now. They also took away the coloured distinction between title bars for the active window, so you don't know where keystrokes are going to go.
- andai 5mo ago
  Chesterton's fence! Don't delete something unless you know why it's there in the first place.
- abanana 5mo ago
  > Operating systems of that era were designed based on UX research Too many developers nowadays don't know this. On any HN discussion of UIs, I've been noticing a growing number of younger devs insisting that usability is entirely subjective (their words, not mine). It's not just that they don't know about cleverly thought-out things such as safe triangles in nested menus or all the affordances/signifiers espoused by Don Norman et al. The bigger problem is that they don't know what they don't know, and they come across as being unwilling to learn. It does make UX discussions frustrating and meaningless when they could, and should, be interesting and a learning experience for us all.
  - exe34 5mo ago
    > safe triangles in nested menus I did not know about this, but I did notice my own menu-rage every time a submenu disappears!
    - jonhohle 5mo ago
      I was trying to use Orca Slicer (which itself is intractable) and it had a combo button whose menu was disconnected from the button. The menu would disappear as soon as the cursor left the button boundary, but because it was disconnected, there was no way to get to the menu without leaving the button boundary, traveling a void, and then getting to the menu. I’m unsure what incantation allowed me to finally choose the right command, but forget how it looks, it was if no one even tried to see if it works.
      - embedding-shape 5mo ago
        Most fun is when the menu opens both on button hover and on button press, but if the menu already opened, clicking the button closes it instead, so the first 2-3 you use it, you end up opening the panel and closing it immediately. Not sure how stuff like this gets deployed in the first place, guess we're just a few people left who test things we develop before we push them to the public, I'd rather believe that than that people just don't care anymore...
        exe34 5mo ago
        I feel like the modern web/app ecosystems have forced developers onto a red queen type treadmill, so software never really matures. They often build up to 70% of the features they want, the codebase gets intractable because of all the crap they have to deal with and they start over. I love software like Gimp, Blender, Inkscape, etc, that matured over decades and kept their soul.
      - exe34 5mo ago
        Potentially keyboard arrows?
  - 5mo ago
- AlienRobot 5mo ago
  For the brief time I used Windows 11 the amount of times I placed a window over another and then clicked on the wrong window because I couldn't tell at first glance where one started and the other ended was absolutely ridiculous. I'm afraid that the core of the problem is something far more simple and fundamental. The people designing desktop apps today simply never learned the conventions that make desktop applications good. They grew up with smartphone apps, web apps, electron apps, games, etc. In fact, you can observe from things like JavaFX, Flutter, WPF, etc., that the trend has long been about the ability of easily creating custom widgets like you could with Javascript (or Flash), rather than the convenience of having a library of widgets that look and feel exactly the same as every other widget in the system.
  - doubled112 5mo ago
    > couldn't tell at first glance where one started and the other ended This was even worse in an RDP session. No drop shadows. I'm not sure who thought "everything should be flat and white" was a good idea.
    - zozbot234 5mo ago
      > I'm not sure who thought "everything should be flat and white" was a good idea. It's just the old Windows 2.0 look.
      - dspillett 5mo ago
        Windows 2 had plainly visible borders, with decent contrast depending on your colour settings, so you could see what ended where.
        hulitu 5mo ago
        The UX designers copied the look, minus the colors, and without functionality. Whoever thinks, that an 1px border for a resizable element on a 4k display is ok, is insane.
- skydhash 5mo ago
  My pet peeve is spacing. My usual resolution is 1920x1080 (scaled or not) and it feels I could cram more information in an old 1024x768 desktop. You have to maximize most windows to get it to show enough information.
  - hecifato 5mo ago
    This drives me crazy. Even looking at these old screenshots you just know that these systems we outputting a display resolution lower than 1024x768. When I was checking out the MacBook Neo a while back I was disappointed that the resolution is not natively x2 scaled. It uses fractional scaling when macOS handles fractional scaling quite poorly. I've set the resolution on my M1 MBP to 1280x800 so it was x2 scaled and clarity improved significantly. But I also sacrificed usable space because apps don't adjust, everything is just made larger.
    - otherme123 5mo ago
      [dead]
    - deleted 5mo ago
      [deleted]
    - tom_ 5mo ago
      Over 75% (well... just...) of the screenshots are 1024x768 or greater - though admittedly typically not by much. Over half (well, again: just!) are 1152x864 or larger.
      - hecifato 5mo ago
        I meant more that those systems at the time would have likely been paired with lower resolution displays.
  - phkahler 5mo ago
    >> You have to maximize most windows to get it to show enough information. At work I use 1 or 2 monitors plus the laptop screen (on Windows). At home I just use a single 55" 4K TV for my monitor and place apps center, left, right, and up top for rarely used stuff (on Linux). The desktop metaphor always wanted a big display but you're right - most Windows apps expect a full 1920x1080 for themselves.
- hecifato 5mo ago
  > Operating systems of that era were designed based on UX research to help people use the unfamiliar operating system. I have a lot of thoughts on things like PC usability today. You're right that UX research would have heavily contributed to the design on these older systems. As computers moved from the warehouse to the living room they had to be easier to use and understand for people without CS degrees. I think it is fair to assume *some* things about what people these days are familiar with when it comes to the desktop GUI, but usability should receive more focus now even if it slightly hinders aesthetic. A friend of mine has been teaching a college program for video editing and she has students who needed her to explain what files and folders are. This is not the first time I've heard of things like this. Smartphones and tablets have obfuscated so many basic functions and features that it is actively harming people's understanding of how to use a computer. Things like window sizing, executables, how apps know where things are, and how programs are installed. Android does allow users to peek behind the curtain more than iOS but Google has been going down the path of locking down Android. I haven't been in an elementary school classroom for like 17 years but I remember having computer lab time where we would learn how to use Windows 95/98. I think what has benefited my friends and others my age (~30) is that we grew up when computers were in the home and were usable enough for us to log in and intuit our way around but there was enough friction that made it so we would have to figure things out on our own.
- kps 5mo ago
  ‘Took out usability features to make them "look nicer"’ is exactly how Steve Jobs gave us the double-click, undiscoverable and timing-sensitive.
  - dspillett 5mo ago
    Double-click came out of Xerox's research park. Apply might have been the first to put that into a popular desktop PC solution, but it wasn't their design any more than the rest of the system they copied. There are arguments that a second button was a much better idea, but that would still not be immediately discoverable and even with many buttons in modern solutions we _still_ have double-clicking.
    - graemep 5mo ago
      Everything I have read about this suggests it was Apple. e.g. https://www.folklore.org/Busy_Being_Born.html https://www.folklore.org/Busy_Being_Born.html
    - rahoulb 5mo ago
      Minor correction - Xerox knew they could not commercialise their invention so they wanted someone to take it off their hands. So Apple didn't copy - they paid for it (in stock, not cash) - and if you've ever used a Smalltalk environment you'll know that what Apple actually shipped (in the Lisa and then the Mac) is a _lot_ of work done over the top of what Xerox had.
    - kps 5mo ago
      It may have been Tajo (XDE) though a quick search doesn't find any documentation of multi-click _older_ than Apple's. Star definitely didn't have multi-click.
    - abanana 5mo ago
      I've always heard it came from Xerox PARC, but even if it originated at Apple, it would have been one of their OS devs. It's nuts how the cult of Steve Jobs leads some to label him as the inventor of everything.
  - 5mo ago
- deleted 5mo ago
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- tom_ 5mo ago
  If you haven't tried it already, I've found it useful to get Windows to use the accent colour in the title bar and window borders: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/personalize-your-colors-in-windows-3290d30f-d064-5cfe-6470-2fe9c6533e37 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/personalize-your...
  - roelschroeven 5mo ago
    Absolutely, but there are many programs that don't use that accent color, making it less useful than it should be.
  - chiph 5mo ago
    Thank you for posting this. I have enabled them at home and work. I am really tired of having to look for a window's shadow to resize it. Which is problematic when you run a black desktop. Having to resize a window by grabbing it just outside the visible border is so wrong.
- vjvjvjvjghv 5mo ago
  "Subsequent ones were designed by UI designers, and opinionated senior managers, who already knew how to use them, and took out usability features to make them "look nicer"." With desktop OS I feel a lot of designers don't know how to use them. They grew up with phones and never use a desktop OS outside of work.
- washingupliquid 5mo ago
  > This sort of worked when the opinionated manager was Steve Jobs. Steve indirectly had a hand in this, by emphasizing the humanities. That, unfortunately, backfired as a sort of positive feedback loop. Someone hired a few underemployed artists onto the team, and the artists invited all their friends and soon took over the department. People that in an alternate timeline would be smoking weed whilst sculpting wood in a derelict loft somewhere are now the lead designers, using our software as the canvas of a perpetual avant-garde art piece. They also need to look productive to justify their jobs, so the need to change things is constant. That's why in 2026 you could have a PhD in CS and still need to watch a YouTube video to learn how to change the volume. Can anyone name a single substantive UI improvement in the last 20 years? They're simply hiding or moving stuff around at this point while no one has even touched accessibility.
  - xp84 5mo ago
    You are so very spot on with this. All of it. Literally nothing is better in the UI world in the past 20 years. Zero. We already had multitouch scrolling on laptops back then. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that most of the problem can be traced back to the transition to Mobile first design. The motivations were arguably pretty innocent in general. If there were no downsides, it’s nice that there isn’t a separate code base and an entirely separate set of capabilities for desktop and little 5-inch phone screens. However, the way that we have achieved that - nearly across the board - is by lobotomizing the experience everywhere. And because of fashion (those artists who control the UX can’t resist it), even in places where that doesn’t even make any sense because there is no mobile version (say, B2B SaaS products that only get used on a desktop), they still feel the need to cosplay as a mobile app by using all the same stupid design elements (the ••• and “hamburger” menus, the giant grids of “tiles” that should have been a table, etc.
    - liendolucas 5mo ago
      > And because of fashion... That's basically the curse. Fucking fashion. If that human concept wouldn't exist, UIs today would be way way better. But no, we have to keep changing it forever and with each iteration worse and worse. UI enshittification at its pinnacle.
- titzer 5mo ago
  > based on UX research to help people use the unfamiliar operating system. It's worthwhile to note that this was not just research in a vacuum, but a lot of user studies where they literally watched and studied people using the software and how they were confused, found or didn't find functionality, etc. Lots of interviews, talking to people, boiling things down to how actual people struggled with the software.
- xnx 5mo ago
  > opinionated senior managers, who already knew how to use them The latest design of interfaces is designed by people who have barely used a desktop computer and have no idea of the conventions or advanced usage. They create terrible UIs because they have no idea what a good UI is and they often don't even use the product they create.
- radiator 5mo ago
  One example of a UI being a result of research seems to be Windows 98. Much of the surface is gray, and a lot of the text is black. It might look boring, but that is how you get to use a little colour for things that need accent, and it will make a difference. Also in a factory, the walls are gray, but the fire extinguisher is red so that you can hardly miss it.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 5mo ago
Just finding a drag able area of the window to reposition it is a huge pain.
BoppreH 5mo ago
We also lost clearly identifiable buttons, loading bars (replaced with throbbers), status bars that tell you what you're hovering over and what the program is doing, stable UIs to develop muscle memory, etc. But we did gain some nice things! - Tabs. - Titlebar buttons and other space-saving measures. - Document editors remembering unsaved changes. - Forms that validate on focus lost, instead of submission. - Ctrl+P menus to fuzzy-search all actions and settings (we need more of those). - Easy syncing (if I open Spotify on any device I'll see the same playlists, my clipboard is shared between phone/desktop/notebook, Immich integrates local and remote media, etc). - Program-specific URL protocols, so that you can click on a link and have it open in a separate program (like `steam://open/games`). - Map widgets, a small miracle we take for granted. - Package managers/app stores that cleanly install and uninstall applications.
- andai 5mo ago
  There was a brief moment in history where we had the best of both worlds. I grew up with Windows XP. We had most of these (except the titlebar buttons — although on second thought some custom Windows Media Player skins did have that, haha). We all carried USB sticks around. So you always had your files with you. The computer itself was interchangeable, for the most part. (Which also led to my interest in portable apps.)
  - andai 5mo ago
    ...and of course, Portable Apps require a relatively stable ABI... https://blog.hiler.eu/win32-the-only-stable-abi/ https://blog.hiler.eu/win32-the-only-stable-abi/ >Win32 is the only stable ABI on Linux Though macOS I think has a similar issue.
- alberto-m 5mo ago
  I appreciate this balanced take! Let's hope one day we'll get the best of today's and yesterday's era.
- spider-mario 5mo ago
  > Forms that validate on focus lost, instead of submission. Not always positive. The form briefly loses focus for two seconds (while you open your password manager or whatever) and you are shouted at to “PLEASE ENTER A VALID USERNAME” in red.
saw-lau 5mo ago
One of my biggest bugbears is losing the OK/Apply/Cancel concept with dialog boxes or settings windows. If I have a window with lots of settings that I want to experiment with then I've no problem with that setting taking effect immediately, but please give me the ability to back out all the changes I've tentatively made via a Cancel button.
- nogridbag 5mo ago
  I have a feeling you're in the minority. I've been using computers for 35+ years and I feel like I still don't understand OK/Apply/Cancel buttons. I still click Apply before clicking OK even if I know it's unnecessary. Plus, I don't believe Cancel reverts changes the user made if they clicked Apply already. So your suggestion would go against how the UX of OK/Apply/Cancel has historically worked.
  - abanana 5mo ago
    Yeah, me too. The Amiga had a good idea with its Preferences programs (i.e. settings or options) - a "Use" button, which only saves to memory, separate from the "Save" button, which also saves to disk. So even if you make a mess of it, just reboot. Of course, in those days we were used to rebooting often, so that wasn't an issue. But if the idea had caught on, then by now we'd probably also have a "Revert" option that copies from disk to memory and activates it.
- chuckadams 5mo ago
  My favorite is when I click a button to cancel an operation and a confirm dialog pops up where clicking “cancel” cancels the cancel.
CalRobert 5mo ago
I still want alt+underlined letter for menus. Ubuntu is great for resizing - alt + middle click anywhere on the window. If only other OS'es could do the same.
- andai 5mo ago
  Yeah, this is the one thing about Linux I constantly miss when using anything else. I wonder how hard it would be to make a thing for that...
  - isityettime 5mo ago
    Here's a maintained fork of one I used to use in another life: https://github.com/RamonUnch/AltSnap https://github.com/RamonUnch/AltSnap
- Measter 5mo ago
  Microsoft's PowerToys did add that in (I think) the last version. Alt + Left click moves, alt + right click resizes.
  - c-hendricks 5mo ago
    Oh my gosh they actually did! https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/pull/47024 https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/pull/47024 https://learn.microsoft.com/en-ca/windows/powertoys/grab-and-move https://learn.microsoft.com/en-ca/windows/powertoys/grab-and...
- lelanthran 5mo ago
  > Ubuntu is great for resizing - alt + middle click anywhere on the window. If only other OS'es could do the same. Not Ubuntu -specific. On all my setups alt+LMB moves, alt+RMB near any edge resizes that specific edge. No need for pixel-perfect grabbing.
Unai 5mo ago
Have you been unable to find a DE or a DE theme with that type of UI/UX? I haven't looked into it, since I don't have these issues and prefer a more modern look, but surely there must be options out there if that's what you want.
- dijit 5mo ago
  I think the parent is lamenting the lack of this in a commercially viable DE, like MacOS or Windows. As much as it pains me to say it: custom Linux distros are not often deployed en masse. Especially not the ones that “look old”.
- zozbot234 5mo ago
  SerenityOS is the most well known but it's a fully custom operating system of its own. For Linux you can install the chicago95 theme (includes a widget set for GTK+3) and the b00merang GTK+4 theme (doesn't help with excess padding unfortunately, but it still has proper high-contrast 3D for the widgets and color for the headerbar. The mobile-friendly responsive UX of new GTK+4 apps actually works great with the traditional 3D look.)
- red_admiral 5mo ago
  The latest KDE with a suitable theme actually comes quite close.
Liftyee 5mo ago
I'm curious - how often do you use the scrollbar? For me, almost never (or only as an indication of progress through a document). I'm scrolling only with wheel or arrows or PgUp etc. Perhaps though this is learned behaviour from scrollbars being tiny. I'd rather have the extra screen space. The scrollbar is usually a nuisance when I accidentally touch it (touchscreen) and the page jumps away.
- bityard 5mo ago
  For mouse users, clicking and dragging the scrollbar is the fastest and most intuitive way to scroll through a large document or list. (The scroll wheel, if you have one, is much slower.)
  - red_admiral 5mo ago
    Until some dolt decides to build "infinite scroll" - I've seen dragging the scrollbar with the mouse cause JS exceptions to be thrown on some pages. One for the UI hall of shame.
    - abanana 5mo ago
      I don't think I've seen a JS exception like that, but it drives me nuts when I'm dragging the scrollbar down for a quick scan of the page contents (especially if it's images or huge product tiles), and at some point it suddenly loads more in, scrolls down a chunk further before I can let go of the mouse button, and then I don't know where the hell I was.
- criddell 5mo ago
  You can do interesting things in the scroll bar. Some coding editors (like Visual Studio) cram a lot of useful information into the scroll bar. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/ide/how-to-track-your-code-by-customizing-the-scrollbar?view=visualstudio https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/ide/how-to-tr...
- foobarbecue 5mo ago
  When reading a document in a browser, I rely on the scrollbar to know things like: how long is it? Where am I in the document? How much of the document is on my screen right now? This is critical for decisions like: "Should I read the whole thing?" and for building a mental map of the whole document. I use the scrollbar to scroll between parts of the document if I need to flick back and forth quickly, say between the data and the interpretation, once I have that mental map and know where things roughly are. While reading, I'm dragging or wheeling.
bartread 5mo ago
I agree. There's something about those 80s and 90s interfaces with their visible affordances, grab points, etc., that just makes them instantly comprehensible. Many of them are also beautiful. The absolute peak, for me, though are those early releases of MacOS X. Cheetah and Puma were both incredible, both in appearance, and in use. They looked fantastic but they still had all the affordances and comprehensibility of earlier interfaces. One thing that's also very noticeable to me: title bars are title bars and nothing else. It's just easy to grab windows and move them, resize them, etc. Nowadays I really struggle sometimes to find a place in (what should be) the titlebar to drag a window in many application. We have lost indeed.
- julenx 5mo ago
  In Mac I use: defaults write -g NSWindowShouldDragOnGesture -bool true in order to enable dragging windows via `Cmd + Ctrl + Click`.
  - bartread 5mo ago
    YOU are awesome - thank you, that's a great tip!
infinet 5mo ago
It is very difficult for people with impaired vision to find the scrollbars, buttons et.al. on windows 11. The scrollbars are too narrow and often auto hidden. The buttons are flat and not easy to separate from normal text. Tell one window from another is also quite challenge.
arjie 5mo ago
I don't think we've lost these things so much as our preferences have now become a minority where once we were the majority. It seems completely normal. With the barrier to entry dropping, designs now match what is appealing to the largest number. Linux DEs are still quite customizable, and we're fortunate that niche desires can still be met there.

pjc50 5mo ago

Operating systems of that era were designed based on UX research to help people use the unfamiliar operating system. Subsequent ones were designed by UI designers, and opinionated senior managers, who already knew how to use them, and took out usability features to make them "look nicer". This sort of worked when the opinionated manager was Steve Jobs. Most managers are not Steve Jobs. > in some applications they seem to have taken extra steps to make it difficult to find the line to grab Pet peeve of mine in Windows where the line is at most one pixel now. They also took away the coloured distinction between title bars for the active window, so you don't know where keystrokes are going to go.

andai 5mo ago
Chesterton's fence! Don't delete something unless you know why it's there in the first place.
abanana 5mo ago
> Operating systems of that era were designed based on UX research Too many developers nowadays don't know this. On any HN discussion of UIs, I've been noticing a growing number of younger devs insisting that usability is entirely subjective (their words, not mine). It's not just that they don't know about cleverly thought-out things such as safe triangles in nested menus or all the affordances/signifiers espoused by Don Norman et al. The bigger problem is that they don't know what they don't know, and they come across as being unwilling to learn. It does make UX discussions frustrating and meaningless when they could, and should, be interesting and a learning experience for us all.
- exe34 5mo ago
  > safe triangles in nested menus I did not know about this, but I did notice my own menu-rage every time a submenu disappears!
  - jonhohle 5mo ago
    I was trying to use Orca Slicer (which itself is intractable) and it had a combo button whose menu was disconnected from the button. The menu would disappear as soon as the cursor left the button boundary, but because it was disconnected, there was no way to get to the menu without leaving the button boundary, traveling a void, and then getting to the menu. I’m unsure what incantation allowed me to finally choose the right command, but forget how it looks, it was if no one even tried to see if it works.
    - embedding-shape 5mo ago
      Most fun is when the menu opens both on button hover and on button press, but if the menu already opened, clicking the button closes it instead, so the first 2-3 you use it, you end up opening the panel and closing it immediately. Not sure how stuff like this gets deployed in the first place, guess we're just a few people left who test things we develop before we push them to the public, I'd rather believe that than that people just don't care anymore...
      - exe34 5mo ago
        I feel like the modern web/app ecosystems have forced developers onto a red queen type treadmill, so software never really matures. They often build up to 70% of the features they want, the codebase gets intractable because of all the crap they have to deal with and they start over. I love software like Gimp, Blender, Inkscape, etc, that matured over decades and kept their soul.
    - exe34 5mo ago
      Potentially keyboard arrows?
- 5mo ago
AlienRobot 5mo ago
For the brief time I used Windows 11 the amount of times I placed a window over another and then clicked on the wrong window because I couldn't tell at first glance where one started and the other ended was absolutely ridiculous. I'm afraid that the core of the problem is something far more simple and fundamental. The people designing desktop apps today simply never learned the conventions that make desktop applications good. They grew up with smartphone apps, web apps, electron apps, games, etc. In fact, you can observe from things like JavaFX, Flutter, WPF, etc., that the trend has long been about the ability of easily creating custom widgets like you could with Javascript (or Flash), rather than the convenience of having a library of widgets that look and feel exactly the same as every other widget in the system.
- doubled112 5mo ago
  > couldn't tell at first glance where one started and the other ended This was even worse in an RDP session. No drop shadows. I'm not sure who thought "everything should be flat and white" was a good idea.
  - zozbot234 5mo ago
    > I'm not sure who thought "everything should be flat and white" was a good idea. It's just the old Windows 2.0 look.
    - dspillett 5mo ago
      Windows 2 had plainly visible borders, with decent contrast depending on your colour settings, so you could see what ended where.
      - hulitu 5mo ago
        The UX designers copied the look, minus the colors, and without functionality. Whoever thinks, that an 1px border for a resizable element on a 4k display is ok, is insane.
skydhash 5mo ago
My pet peeve is spacing. My usual resolution is 1920x1080 (scaled or not) and it feels I could cram more information in an old 1024x768 desktop. You have to maximize most windows to get it to show enough information.
- hecifato 5mo ago
  This drives me crazy. Even looking at these old screenshots you just know that these systems we outputting a display resolution lower than 1024x768. When I was checking out the MacBook Neo a while back I was disappointed that the resolution is not natively x2 scaled. It uses fractional scaling when macOS handles fractional scaling quite poorly. I've set the resolution on my M1 MBP to 1280x800 so it was x2 scaled and clarity improved significantly. But I also sacrificed usable space because apps don't adjust, everything is just made larger.
  - otherme123 5mo ago
    [dead]
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
  - tom_ 5mo ago
    Over 75% (well... just...) of the screenshots are 1024x768 or greater - though admittedly typically not by much. Over half (well, again: just!) are 1152x864 or larger.
    - hecifato 5mo ago
      I meant more that those systems at the time would have likely been paired with lower resolution displays.
- phkahler 5mo ago
  >> You have to maximize most windows to get it to show enough information. At work I use 1 or 2 monitors plus the laptop screen (on Windows). At home I just use a single 55" 4K TV for my monitor and place apps center, left, right, and up top for rarely used stuff (on Linux). The desktop metaphor always wanted a big display but you're right - most Windows apps expect a full 1920x1080 for themselves.
hecifato 5mo ago
> Operating systems of that era were designed based on UX research to help people use the unfamiliar operating system. I have a lot of thoughts on things like PC usability today. You're right that UX research would have heavily contributed to the design on these older systems. As computers moved from the warehouse to the living room they had to be easier to use and understand for people without CS degrees. I think it is fair to assume *some* things about what people these days are familiar with when it comes to the desktop GUI, but usability should receive more focus now even if it slightly hinders aesthetic. A friend of mine has been teaching a college program for video editing and she has students who needed her to explain what files and folders are. This is not the first time I've heard of things like this. Smartphones and tablets have obfuscated so many basic functions and features that it is actively harming people's understanding of how to use a computer. Things like window sizing, executables, how apps know where things are, and how programs are installed. Android does allow users to peek behind the curtain more than iOS but Google has been going down the path of locking down Android. I haven't been in an elementary school classroom for like 17 years but I remember having computer lab time where we would learn how to use Windows 95/98. I think what has benefited my friends and others my age (~30) is that we grew up when computers were in the home and were usable enough for us to log in and intuit our way around but there was enough friction that made it so we would have to figure things out on our own.
kps 5mo ago
‘Took out usability features to make them "look nicer"’ is exactly how Steve Jobs gave us the double-click, undiscoverable and timing-sensitive.
- dspillett 5mo ago
  Double-click came out of Xerox's research park. Apply might have been the first to put that into a popular desktop PC solution, but it wasn't their design any more than the rest of the system they copied. There are arguments that a second button was a much better idea, but that would still not be immediately discoverable and even with many buttons in modern solutions we _still_ have double-clicking.
  - graemep 5mo ago
    Everything I have read about this suggests it was Apple. e.g. https://www.folklore.org/Busy_Being_Born.html https://www.folklore.org/Busy_Being_Born.html
  - rahoulb 5mo ago
    Minor correction - Xerox knew they could not commercialise their invention so they wanted someone to take it off their hands. So Apple didn't copy - they paid for it (in stock, not cash) - and if you've ever used a Smalltalk environment you'll know that what Apple actually shipped (in the Lisa and then the Mac) is a _lot_ of work done over the top of what Xerox had.
  - kps 5mo ago
    It may have been Tajo (XDE) though a quick search doesn't find any documentation of multi-click _older_ than Apple's. Star definitely didn't have multi-click.
  - abanana 5mo ago
    I've always heard it came from Xerox PARC, but even if it originated at Apple, it would have been one of their OS devs. It's nuts how the cult of Steve Jobs leads some to label him as the inventor of everything.
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tom_ 5mo ago
If you haven't tried it already, I've found it useful to get Windows to use the accent colour in the title bar and window borders: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/personalize-your-colors-in-windows-3290d30f-d064-5cfe-6470-2fe9c6533e37 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/personalize-your...
- roelschroeven 5mo ago
  Absolutely, but there are many programs that don't use that accent color, making it less useful than it should be.
- chiph 5mo ago
  Thank you for posting this. I have enabled them at home and work. I am really tired of having to look for a window's shadow to resize it. Which is problematic when you run a black desktop. Having to resize a window by grabbing it just outside the visible border is so wrong.
vjvjvjvjghv 5mo ago
"Subsequent ones were designed by UI designers, and opinionated senior managers, who already knew how to use them, and took out usability features to make them "look nicer"." With desktop OS I feel a lot of designers don't know how to use them. They grew up with phones and never use a desktop OS outside of work.
washingupliquid 5mo ago
> This sort of worked when the opinionated manager was Steve Jobs. Steve indirectly had a hand in this, by emphasizing the humanities. That, unfortunately, backfired as a sort of positive feedback loop. Someone hired a few underemployed artists onto the team, and the artists invited all their friends and soon took over the department. People that in an alternate timeline would be smoking weed whilst sculpting wood in a derelict loft somewhere are now the lead designers, using our software as the canvas of a perpetual avant-garde art piece. They also need to look productive to justify their jobs, so the need to change things is constant. That's why in 2026 you could have a PhD in CS and still need to watch a YouTube video to learn how to change the volume. Can anyone name a single substantive UI improvement in the last 20 years? They're simply hiding or moving stuff around at this point while no one has even touched accessibility.
- xp84 5mo ago
  You are so very spot on with this. All of it. Literally nothing is better in the UI world in the past 20 years. Zero. We already had multitouch scrolling on laptops back then. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that most of the problem can be traced back to the transition to Mobile first design. The motivations were arguably pretty innocent in general. If there were no downsides, it’s nice that there isn’t a separate code base and an entirely separate set of capabilities for desktop and little 5-inch phone screens. However, the way that we have achieved that - nearly across the board - is by lobotomizing the experience everywhere. And because of fashion (those artists who control the UX can’t resist it), even in places where that doesn’t even make any sense because there is no mobile version (say, B2B SaaS products that only get used on a desktop), they still feel the need to cosplay as a mobile app by using all the same stupid design elements (the ••• and “hamburger” menus, the giant grids of “tiles” that should have been a table, etc.
  - liendolucas 5mo ago
    > And because of fashion... That's basically the curse. Fucking fashion. If that human concept wouldn't exist, UIs today would be way way better. But no, we have to keep changing it forever and with each iteration worse and worse. UI enshittification at its pinnacle.
titzer 5mo ago
> based on UX research to help people use the unfamiliar operating system. It's worthwhile to note that this was not just research in a vacuum, but a lot of user studies where they literally watched and studied people using the software and how they were confused, found or didn't find functionality, etc. Lots of interviews, talking to people, boiling things down to how actual people struggled with the software.
xnx 5mo ago
> opinionated senior managers, who already knew how to use them The latest design of interfaces is designed by people who have barely used a desktop computer and have no idea of the conventions or advanced usage. They create terrible UIs because they have no idea what a good UI is and they often don't even use the product they create.
radiator 5mo ago
One example of a UI being a result of research seems to be Windows 98. Much of the surface is gray, and a lot of the text is black. It might look boring, but that is how you get to use a little colour for things that need accent, and it will make a difference. Also in a factory, the walls are gray, but the fire extinguisher is red so that you can hardly miss it.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 5mo ago

Just finding a drag able area of the window to reposition it is a huge pain.

BoppreH 5mo ago

We also lost clearly identifiable buttons, loading bars (replaced with throbbers), status bars that tell you what you're hovering over and what the program is doing, stable UIs to develop muscle memory, etc. But we did gain some nice things! - Tabs. - Titlebar buttons and other space-saving measures. - Document editors remembering unsaved changes. - Forms that validate on focus lost, instead of submission. - Ctrl+P menus to fuzzy-search all actions and settings (we need more of those). - Easy syncing (if I open Spotify on any device I'll see the same playlists, my clipboard is shared between phone/desktop/notebook, Immich integrates local and remote media, etc). - Program-specific URL protocols, so that you can click on a link and have it open in a separate program (like `steam://open/games`). - Map widgets, a small miracle we take for granted. - Package managers/app stores that cleanly install and uninstall applications.

andai 5mo ago
There was a brief moment in history where we had the best of both worlds. I grew up with Windows XP. We had most of these (except the titlebar buttons — although on second thought some custom Windows Media Player skins did have that, haha). We all carried USB sticks around. So you always had your files with you. The computer itself was interchangeable, for the most part. (Which also led to my interest in portable apps.)
- andai 5mo ago
  ...and of course, Portable Apps require a relatively stable ABI... https://blog.hiler.eu/win32-the-only-stable-abi/ https://blog.hiler.eu/win32-the-only-stable-abi/ >Win32 is the only stable ABI on Linux Though macOS I think has a similar issue.
alberto-m 5mo ago
I appreciate this balanced take! Let's hope one day we'll get the best of today's and yesterday's era.
spider-mario 5mo ago
> Forms that validate on focus lost, instead of submission. Not always positive. The form briefly loses focus for two seconds (while you open your password manager or whatever) and you are shouted at to “PLEASE ENTER A VALID USERNAME” in red.

saw-lau 5mo ago

One of my biggest bugbears is losing the OK/Apply/Cancel concept with dialog boxes or settings windows. If I have a window with lots of settings that I want to experiment with then I've no problem with that setting taking effect immediately, but please give me the ability to back out all the changes I've tentatively made via a Cancel button.

nogridbag 5mo ago
I have a feeling you're in the minority. I've been using computers for 35+ years and I feel like I still don't understand OK/Apply/Cancel buttons. I still click Apply before clicking OK even if I know it's unnecessary. Plus, I don't believe Cancel reverts changes the user made if they clicked Apply already. So your suggestion would go against how the UX of OK/Apply/Cancel has historically worked.
- abanana 5mo ago
  Yeah, me too. The Amiga had a good idea with its Preferences programs (i.e. settings or options) - a "Use" button, which only saves to memory, separate from the "Save" button, which also saves to disk. So even if you make a mess of it, just reboot. Of course, in those days we were used to rebooting often, so that wasn't an issue. But if the idea had caught on, then by now we'd probably also have a "Revert" option that copies from disk to memory and activates it.
chuckadams 5mo ago
My favorite is when I click a button to cancel an operation and a confirm dialog pops up where clicking “cancel” cancels the cancel.

CalRobert 5mo ago

I still want alt+underlined letter for menus. Ubuntu is great for resizing - alt + middle click anywhere on the window. If only other OS'es could do the same.

andai 5mo ago
Yeah, this is the one thing about Linux I constantly miss when using anything else. I wonder how hard it would be to make a thing for that...
- isityettime 5mo ago
  Here's a maintained fork of one I used to use in another life: https://github.com/RamonUnch/AltSnap https://github.com/RamonUnch/AltSnap
Measter 5mo ago
Microsoft's PowerToys did add that in (I think) the last version. Alt + Left click moves, alt + right click resizes.
- c-hendricks 5mo ago
  Oh my gosh they actually did! https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/pull/47024 https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/pull/47024 https://learn.microsoft.com/en-ca/windows/powertoys/grab-and-move https://learn.microsoft.com/en-ca/windows/powertoys/grab-and...
lelanthran 5mo ago
> Ubuntu is great for resizing - alt + middle click anywhere on the window. If only other OS'es could do the same. Not Ubuntu -specific. On all my setups alt+LMB moves, alt+RMB near any edge resizes that specific edge. No need for pixel-perfect grabbing.

Unai 5mo ago

Have you been unable to find a DE or a DE theme with that type of UI/UX? I haven't looked into it, since I don't have these issues and prefer a more modern look, but surely there must be options out there if that's what you want.

dijit 5mo ago
I think the parent is lamenting the lack of this in a commercially viable DE, like MacOS or Windows. As much as it pains me to say it: custom Linux distros are not often deployed en masse. Especially not the ones that “look old”.
zozbot234 5mo ago
SerenityOS is the most well known but it's a fully custom operating system of its own. For Linux you can install the chicago95 theme (includes a widget set for GTK+3) and the b00merang GTK+4 theme (doesn't help with excess padding unfortunately, but it still has proper high-contrast 3D for the widgets and color for the headerbar. The mobile-friendly responsive UX of new GTK+4 apps actually works great with the traditional 3D look.)
red_admiral 5mo ago
The latest KDE with a suitable theme actually comes quite close.

Liftyee 5mo ago

I'm curious - how often do you use the scrollbar? For me, almost never (or only as an indication of progress through a document). I'm scrolling only with wheel or arrows or PgUp etc. Perhaps though this is learned behaviour from scrollbars being tiny. I'd rather have the extra screen space. The scrollbar is usually a nuisance when I accidentally touch it (touchscreen) and the page jumps away.

bityard 5mo ago
For mouse users, clicking and dragging the scrollbar is the fastest and most intuitive way to scroll through a large document or list. (The scroll wheel, if you have one, is much slower.)
- red_admiral 5mo ago
  Until some dolt decides to build "infinite scroll" - I've seen dragging the scrollbar with the mouse cause JS exceptions to be thrown on some pages. One for the UI hall of shame.
  - abanana 5mo ago
    I don't think I've seen a JS exception like that, but it drives me nuts when I'm dragging the scrollbar down for a quick scan of the page contents (especially if it's images or huge product tiles), and at some point it suddenly loads more in, scrolls down a chunk further before I can let go of the mouse button, and then I don't know where the hell I was.
criddell 5mo ago
You can do interesting things in the scroll bar. Some coding editors (like Visual Studio) cram a lot of useful information into the scroll bar. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/ide/how-to-track-your-code-by-customizing-the-scrollbar?view=visualstudio https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/ide/how-to-tr...
foobarbecue 5mo ago
When reading a document in a browser, I rely on the scrollbar to know things like: how long is it? Where am I in the document? How much of the document is on my screen right now? This is critical for decisions like: "Should I read the whole thing?" and for building a mental map of the whole document. I use the scrollbar to scroll between parts of the document if I need to flick back and forth quickly, say between the data and the interpretation, once I have that mental map and know where things roughly are. While reading, I'm dragging or wheeling.

bartread 5mo ago

I agree. There's something about those 80s and 90s interfaces with their visible affordances, grab points, etc., that just makes them instantly comprehensible. Many of them are also beautiful. The absolute peak, for me, though are those early releases of MacOS X. Cheetah and Puma were both incredible, both in appearance, and in use. They looked fantastic but they still had all the affordances and comprehensibility of earlier interfaces. One thing that's also very noticeable to me: title bars are title bars and nothing else. It's just easy to grab windows and move them, resize them, etc. Nowadays I really struggle sometimes to find a place in (what should be) the titlebar to drag a window in many application. We have lost indeed.

julenx 5mo ago
In Mac I use: defaults write -g NSWindowShouldDragOnGesture -bool true in order to enable dragging windows via `Cmd + Ctrl + Click`.
- bartread 5mo ago
  YOU are awesome - thank you, that's a great tip!

infinet 5mo ago

It is very difficult for people with impaired vision to find the scrollbars, buttons et.al. on windows 11. The scrollbars are too narrow and often auto hidden. The buttons are flat and not easy to separate from normal text. Tell one window from another is also quite challenge.

arjie 5mo ago

I don't think we've lost these things so much as our preferences have now become a minority where once we were the majority. It seems completely normal. With the barrier to entry dropping, designs now match what is appealing to the largest number. Linux DEs are still quite customizable, and we're fortunate that niche desires can still be met there.