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Comment by guidoism | Hacker News Reader

This is kind of a dumb article. It's not like those of us in the computer industry don't already know about ARM. Before Apple's announcement you could run Risc OS on Raspberry Pi — It is one of the more prominent install images for RPi — It's not like Risc OS is what Mac OS on ARM is going to look and feel like.

Ugh. These kind of articles annoy me.

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For what it's worth, I wasn't even aware Risc Os existed and I'm in the industry. Just a little perspective.

I had heard of RISC OS but never used it. The screenshot looks pretty ahead of its time for 1989. Nicer looking than NeXT for example, though similar aesthetic.

[Edit: After some digging around it seems like perhaps the screenshot features the visual style introduced in the 1999 release or thereabouts?]

Seems like on HN of late there's some interest in 1990s UI revival. I'm thinking RISC OS looks like a good candidate for that.

> seems there’s some interest in 1990s UI revival

NeXT and BeOS being the ones that really stick in mind.

I also didn't use RISC OS - I came close in school, but the ancient machines always got replaced the year before me.

However, I have use ROX for a long time - called RISC OS on X - it is/was basically a file manager based around RISC OS, as well as some associated desktop technologies (like app directories). I think it's fair to describe it as a dead as a doornail (I just upgraded to Ubuntu 20.04, and since it no longer comes with pygtk2, various tools are dead). Some of its innovations found their way into other Linux desktop technologies, such as shared-mime-info.

But if you want to see what once was, it's a place to begin.

(ROX was actually a lot nicer than RISC OS, when I finally installed it on my RPi.)

ROX was so good. I had it on my first Linux machine - a Mandrake install that I only ended up with because it was the only distro I could find with an installer that would give me working video card settings. I lived in that UI.

Time for a resurrection, maybe?

In the days when computers were places you stored your data, ROX was great. It was the first GUI that made me manage my files using a mouse. Nowadays, computers are mostly glorified web browser containers. And the way Gnome is so integrated into itself now means you can kinda either use a good window/session manager and Nautilus (with a good file manager on the side), or a crappy window manager, no session manager, and a good filemanager.

(In the olden days I had Sawfish set up so that it had a button that would take a look at the path it displayed or interact with the app via whatever scripting it provided, and show the active document in the ROX. Ah, so great. Sawfish is, nowadays, too primitive for me - I want an expose style feature to find my window.)

I still like to switch to ROX to rename or move files in my codebase rather than do it in IntelliJ. I had a plugin for that for a while but I never quite got around to setting it up again on some migration or upgrade or something. Nowadays it's only VIM/gVim that responds to F12 and shows the document location.

I have given some thought to porting it to Gtk3 and Gtk4. I guess getting an infrastructure around it isn't going to happen - but the Filer was the centre.

It's still part of the default desktop for the antiX distro (ROX-IceWM).

Only the file manager -- not the whole desktop environment.

The desktop manager is called ROX-Session and provides an icon bar, a pinboard and so on as well as the filer windows.

> I have use ROX for a long time - called RISC OS on X - it is/was basically a file manager based around RISC OS, as well as some associated desktop technologies (like app directories). I think it's fair to describe it as a dead as a doornail

Yep. That the project basically langusihed in obscurity and died out is emblematic of why I can't take Linux Desktop seriously.

I don't understand that sentiment. There are dozens of UIs on X. Some have had recent development and some haven't. A lot of the ones that haven't are still pretty usable, they're just kind of "done".

There are dozens of UIs on X and all of them behave pretty much the same way re: applications and file management. Hell, there isn't even a maintained spacial file manager anymore.

This page was on HN a couple of months ago. It shows the 1992 version (RISC OS 3.11), the 1991 version (RISC OS 3) is almost identical, and the 1989 version mostly differs in functionality rather than appearance.

The final section (Decoration) shows part of the re-skinning/theming possible in 1992. Different icons (e.g. 3D appearance) were also a standard part of a custom theme, but proportional text under icons, on menus and on titlebars was introduced in 1994, with RISC OS 3.5.

https://telcontar.net/Misc/GUI/RISCOS/

From memory, the default RiscOS was kinda flat looking, but there was some application you could run that added a theme to it that made it more like the screenshot. This would have been in the mid-90s ('96 or so) when I was using them.

I do remember if you ended up in a mode that wasn't running that theme and got the default, it felt pretty old and boring, but the theme jazzed it up quite a lot. Can't remember the specifics about it though.

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