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Comment by asveikau | Hacker News Reader

> As amazing as OSX seemed when it was launched

This reminds me: There was pretty interesting community of Linux users customizing X11 desktops in the late 90s and the very early 2000s... When the first screenshots and demos of OS X and Aqua came out, almost immediately, people tried to imitate that.

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The frustrating part is that OS X was NeXTStep under the covers, and that had the late 90’s look down better than any OS. http://toastytech.com/guis/ns332.html

I ran windowmaker on my linux systems around 2000 to get that same look, but I had serious NeXT envy.

I liked NeXT and GNUstep in those days too.

I'm not sure they had it literally "better" than everybody else, but they certainly had something unique, well executed, etc.

You can still recognize NeXT patterns in modern Mac GUIs. They're usually not surface level anymore.

Still upset that I don't live in the timeline where GNUStep/Windowmaker became the defacto DE for Linux.

I feel like BeOS was even cleaner. And it made my old PC feel really snappier than win98.

https://www.howtogeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/beos-1....

Oh, man, NeXTstep was an amazing UI, easily the best in the Unix world.

Still a disaster compared to System 7, 8, or 9.

Yeah I remember when putting your desktops on a cube and spinning it around was a thing. Compositors also had a bunch of weird and interesting effects.

It started as apple's knockoff but quickly spun out of control with amount of stuff you could setup with compiz/beryl.

Then people figure out most of it while very cool is not all that practical.

I remember WindowBlinds and an MP3 utility (but just vaguely) that used a theme similar to Aqua on Windows.

There were/are Winamp themes that looked like Aqua.

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