Hacker News Reader

Comment by canbus | Hacker News Reader

Bragging about wobbly windows was the best thing ever. I'm glad I'm not alone!

Multiple desktops on a rotating cube tho. Shit was straight fire

I don't see why Apple couldn't introduce this to its desktop switching routine. The cube animation already exists for switching users. It would be nice to have the option when switching desktops.

That's just it. Apple would rather provide One True Way to do it. On Mac, cube = switch user, and slide = switch desktop.

Apple is about the minimum amount of features. It's approach is minimalistic to the extreme and that's also good.

It's more or less the same reason why I like Gnome's minimalistic approach.

I have ADHD and everything I DON'T need is an OS that distracts me. FFS, I'd work from a VT-100 (even though I'd prefer a 3278-2 or 3279) if that was possible.

Apple hates options of any kind. Their core ideology is "opinionated software". Meaning the software does things one single way, the way they intended, and it does that really well.

It sucks though if you really want things another way. Then you have to mess around with third-party addons that break every time there's a major upgrade. It's the main reason I moved back to KDE (and the OS being closed off more).

I would never choose to use Gnome for this reason because it does the same thing. But at least on FOSS we have many options available, to each their own!

For the pro level you had to make the cube transparent so you could see it all the time.

the cube was straight up useful as a visual cue since you can animate it faster and still know what's going on - I find the slide more confusing at speed.

It wasn't just a gimmick either. Mapping workspaces on to a physical cube makes navigating between workspaces more intuitive and natural. It provides a useful spatial metaphor to latch onto.

Then there was this one screensaver that made the cube slowly rotate while all your windows from all the faces blew around like leaves in a gentle whirlwind in the middle.

I really really want to see this come back. Even back then it was never released to stable and I got it from a script that grabbed and compiled all the bleeding edge stuff. It worked for a few weeks and then an update somewhere broke it and I never saw it work again :(

I still use wobbly windows on KDE and it fills me with warm nostalgia.

I'm almost ashamed to admit how large of a reason wobbly windows working out of the box is for my continued preference for KDE in most cases. Does anyone know what the status of '00s desktop effects is on other common DEs? I'd guess it'd be easier to achieve on MATE than Cinnamon for example, though I've always liked Cinnamon.

There's a comment above saying that wobbly-windows is available as a gnome-shell extension.

Just found this! This thread has really let me compiz out my Gnome, between the flames and wobbly windows!

https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/3210/compiz-windows-e...

And that multiple-desktop cube thing!

What about the fire effect?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com