We’ve moved on from “back in my day, the 80s…” computer UI nostalgia to 90s it seems.
10 more years we’ll have Mac OSX Snow Leopard clone project get abandoned (have had a lot of young Millennials and older GenZ hackers talk it up at me as peak computing)
Just because they’re not grumpy doesn’t mean they aren’t nostalgia driven iconoclasts making serenity out of disdain for status quo
i mean, thank god windows now has three distinct and clashing UI styles in different parts of the OS, i don't know how we ever managed to live with just one.
Win 95 had the basic UX down, and Tiger made it look very pretty, but it didn't need any more fixing.
I don't understand how anyone could say that mess was good.
Yes I can. Most OSes these days have a OS level fuzzy searching functionality. This has been my preferred way of launching applications on Windows (Win key), Linux (Win key) and MacOS (CMD+Spc).
I press a hotkey, type the first few characters of the program I'm trying to go to, and press enter. This is also common in text editors and even some web apps. Improves the UX of discovering commands, as compared to endlessly nested menus like the 90s.
There's loads of other things that have improved but this one is just so basic that I couldn't live without it.
Let's not live with rose tinted glasses. Yes, there's backsliding in terms of UX but don't ignore the improvements.
1. Tabs in browser and other applications.
2. Font rendering, hinting, anti-aliasing and subpixel rendering. Together with high-resolution screens for more people.
3. Better multi-threading for applications. Back in the day, one application crashes and everything is stuck. Improvements here are part of user experience, though not directly UI.
4. Less crashing and vague errors in my experience, much more refined software (if you pick your choices right).
5. Smooth audio and video, together with much better support for codecs out of the box.
6. Better plug-and-play, no internal isa cards anymore, external all usb or similar.
7. Many more options for free software and gratis software, but choices for commercial still exist.
8. App stores which makes discovery and installation easier for users.
That many things have turned for the worse, does not mean there are no things that turned better.
They aren't building it for "modern users", they're building it for fun.
To build a usable operating system you need manpower. To get manpower you need money or you need to build a community around an interesting project that people will work on for free. Andreas has managed to do both of these things.
Serenity is not just another UNIX clone, it's a unique project with the idea of doing everything from scratch. The project uses modern tools like GitHub and Discord so there's a larger pool of people willing to join the project. Had it been all on mailing lists it would be nowhere near what it is today.
If it’s not for modern computer users and lacks a meaningful ecosystem of software and purpose its first worlders avoiding contributing to real work they externalize on others
There’s enough academic wank in the world. Better to focus on pushing computing forward for the aggregate than serve personal ego
And I mean from my reference you (and the downvoters) just complained about someone having a different opinion than yours so shrug
I only downvoted you for whining about downvotes.
In contrast, many of us treat computers as a magic black box. The abstraction is great for productively building web apps. But, we've lost sight of how things work and I think that's led to steep decline in performance and, perhaps, security. I don't pine for manual resource management in all things, but knowing how syscalls work can help build context on when and why you should use them. Revisiting how to build an OS that isn't rooted in decades-old Linux or BSD code could be really instructive.
You’re highlighting how subjective things can be and I don’t disagree.
What isn’t subjective is the generations of the 1900s are the first to leave behind an existential threat driven by wasteful economic choices and they seem to be indifferent to doing so just to have fun.
Myself and lot of other software engineers I have worked with feel our jobs are meaningless; the future won’t care about these technologies. They’re hardly regenerative medicine or something so life changing daily life itself is improved forever like indoor plumbing and electricity.
But we feel captured by nostalgia for this work and form of economics, and apathy for a whole lot of people who will be dead before climate change is real problem
Most people aren't solving deep societal needs in their free time. If you want to limit it to software, most of us have jobs that hardly improve society or the planet. Most open source code isn't advancing society. What I don't understand is why you've singled out the participants of this particular project for your ire.
I don't know any of the individuals involved personally. My guess is they're not the ones that built physical products with PFCs, ran coal-powered factories and operated strip mining operations, designed nuclear weaponry, or even fly personal jets. I'd hazard to say your average front-end developer chugging through batteries with inefficient frameworks is doing more harm than this project.
If your aim is to clean up the tech industry, I think that's laudable. I believe tech people have for the most part shirked their own contribution to our carbon footprint or other societal needs. But, I think you'll find there are much bigger targets actively doing harm (or certainly not helping things) regularly because it's profitable and/or convenient.
Nobody younger than an older millennial who grew up learning computers via Windows 95 has any interest in “retvrning” to this ethos of computing. Hell, I just described myself and even I could care less about this project other than a passing “huh that’s kinda neat” which is a rather tepid response proportional to the work that has been invested here.
There are far more interesting projects rethinking the OS right now that are actually trying their hand at unique architectures. This is just an homage to nostalgia (a technically impressive one, but still nothing inspiring here). The saddest part to me is I’m not sure the graybeards on HN will ever really get that.
Back then we were fighting tooth and nail to undermine MS's monopoly, and Linux as you see it today is the product of that.
I will admit the first times I saw the Win95 interface I found it appealing. Though they actually cribbed a lot form the NeXTstep UI, and I'm much more fond of that.
I prefer the Sun OpenLook UI for nostalgia value, myself.
But there are certain (non)usability things it introduced which I didn't think were great, actually. Window close button next to the minimize and other controls. Classic MacOS did it right by putting it on the far other side of the window where you couldn't accidentally click. The Start menu broke the whole OO metaphor by adding a deep tricky menu system. Right-clicking context menus all over the place. Task bar at the bottom dynamic depending on what is running means hard to use muscle memory and predict where a given tile will be.
Overall it was very good for the time. Though in fact I personally think the more 'flat' and minimalistic interface of Windows 3 aged better. This faux-3d bevels etc thing didn't age well. Was a novelty product of the time that NeXT kinda began and everyone followed for a bit.
The actual "operating system" (really a shell for MS-DOS) in Win95 was terrible.
I still don't think Apple made the right UI choices in their transition to OS X.
Something that looks more like the early Rhapsody copies would be nicer.
Sometimes the grumpy greybeard fuddy-duddies act as they do due to experience. One can have mailing lists which are very distributed and easy to put on a searchable web page somewhere. One could also tie everything to Github or Gitlab or Atlassian, and then have it pulled, or have rates jacked up, or whatnot. One can go on IRC, and easily migrate from Freenode to Liberanet if need be. One can also go into the walled garden of Slack or Microsoft Teams or some other proprietary format, so that some company can hike rates or pull the rug out at their convenience.