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Comment by srvmshr | Hacker News Reader

Getting reminded of late 90s & early 2000s design choices, the glassy feel of Bluecurve icon themes of Redhat Linux looked way ahead of their competition [1] Most people didn't have access to Classic Macs OS 8.5~9, which probably had beautiful icon sets too (Aqua?). As a highschooler, this looked so futuristic & colorful as compared to 2000/XP desktop themes & icons.

EDIT: Adding as postscript: Is there anything similar which would come close to Bluecurve today? TIA if there is anything in reader's minds.

1. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/71/GNOME_2....

2. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b8/Fedora-y...

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> As a highschooler, this looked so futuristic & colorful as compared to 2000/XP desktop themes & icons.

Exactly my experience. The first time I installed Linux when I was around 15 I was surprised how modern, "sharp" and professional everything looked compared to Windows XP.

(The default Windows XP design was really the beginning of a downward curve for Windows designs. Windows 98 looked like a tool, Windows XP looked like a toy, which is a shame because Windows XP was a vastly superior (and in my experience ridiculously stable) OS. I always used the "classic" Win 98 design).

Windows 2k was the pinnacle of Windows. Basically same OS as XP, but with a spruced up Win 98 design.

I had a Win2K cd-rom with a license key that I dragged around with me for almost a decade for this exact reason. It was all downhill for Windows after that.

I still have mine. It's the "Advanced Server" edition because damn that is just extra cool to run.

Windows 2000 startup screen (as well as the ill-received Windows Me) was very elegant for its time. I think the Windows 7 GUI emulation in 8.1 was also pretty good.

What do you mean by Windows 7 GUI emulation in Windows 8? I didn't use Windows 8 much, but I thought all apps, including those that run on Win7, had a Win8 look, title bar, etc?

Windows 8 Metro UI and its flat glyph-inspired iconset (similar to minimalist signage, e.g in EU traffic signs) was such a disaster that 8.1, that soon followed, allowed options to toggle between Metro (for those who preferred) and the classic Windows 7 look & icons. It was called Legacy UI in their options.

Wow. TIL. Thankyou!

> Windows XP looked like a toy

Hence it was and still sometimes is being called Fisher-Price. Microsoft had to drastically change their flagship project so it would be attractive against OSX. The Whistler's Watercolor theme that existed during beta period was good but wasn't enough for the final release [1][2].

That period was full of candy/toys/glass/acrylic GUIs. Apple had Aqua, and Linux distros had Keramik and Plastik window/widget themes with Crystal icons in KDE. The latter become preserved in the Trinity envirnoment [1] since KDE moved to Plasma in version 4, which looked to me like a Vista's Aero step-sister [3]

[1] - https://www.betaarchive.com/wiki/images/7/77/Windows_Whistle...

[2] - https://guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/desktop/full/whistler2...

[3] - https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ee/KD...

Heh, I used to get the best of both worlds with a patched uxtheme.dll... Took a bit of digging, but yeah, SlanXP was a theme I used a lot. https://images-wixmp-ed30a86b8c4ca887773594c2.wixmp.com/i/4b...

Bluecurve was amazing. For me, nothing in the Linux world has equaled it since. It was so nice and polished with thoughtful colors and design. It was quite similar in colors to Mac OS 8 & 9 (the platinum gray, the purple-ish blue).

I sort of agree with that. That was the peak Linux GUI we saw (at least so far). Sadly after the Gnome GTK2 vs GTK3 forks, none of the child products carried the same finesse as Gnome 2.4/Bluecurve. They were sharp, colorful and vibrant. Windows icons seemed more 'classic' versus the KDE-inspired Bluecurve, Clearlooks which were more playful.

Reminds me a bit of BeOS as well.

It's the icons angle and that thin black border around images, I believe

Yeah I loved the beos icons too

> Classic Macs OS 8.5~9 [...] Aqua?

Aqua is (was†) Mac OS X, Mac OS 8~9 was Platinum.

† While the current design continues to be called "Aqua" I personally consider the last iteration of Aqua to be Mavericks. While Cheetah, Puma, and Jaguar had the filling lines, Panther and Tiger had brushed metal, and the brief touchdown with skeuomorphism in Lion and Mountain Lion, they overall consistently carried the colourful glossy-watery "lick-it-candy" theme throughout - including icons - all the way, until Yosemite happens... Then it gets all silky with frosted glass, desaturated colours, and muted gradients, which just does not have the Aqua feel to me.

https://www.mailvita.com/kb/list-of-all-versions-of-mac-os-f...

> Then it gets all silky with frosted glass, desaturated colours, and muted gradients, which just does not have the Aqua feel to me

The JonnyIvification of Apple interfaces starting with Mavericks & iOS7. Although it has grown on us, the flat designs were very jarring back then. Our brains were so used to pill shaped buttons & then everything felt flat

I’d love to be able to run my current version of Sonoma with a Cheetah “skin” ?

You can take a look at https://wiki.trinitydesktop.org/Icon_Sets But note that most of these icon sets will scale quite badly to modern HiDPI resolutions. (Though you could scale them manually using Lanczos upscaling, which usually gives a nice 'watercolor' effect preserving the broad look of pixel art.)

Bluecurve was fitting with the overall candy-like interfaces style at that time and yet, still giving a nice and professional, serious looking GUI for Redhat and later for short time Fedora.

I even skinned my XP with theme that was most close to the original - sadly, on Windows it was always a hard task and in few spots GUI was falling back into 9x widgets, not mention the usual problem with icons and other resource files.

Although the icons looked nice and alost every other element did, the whole composition of old Linux UIs nevertheless looked slightly ugly. Somehow it always felt like Windows UI designers did a better job polishing proportions, borders, margins/paddings and other things like that.

That style has a very BeOS / OS/2 vibe.

Truthfully Haiku/BeOS was closer to Bluecurve and OS/2 pretty much inspired Windows 95 & 98.

It was Linux that brought me into icon design. I did it pixelart style, manually. So not (good) scalable to different sizes, as was starting back then.

The main thing about windows icon (and overall) "design" as can clearly be seen in TLA is how ridiculously inconsistent it all is. Perspective, shape, colors, level-of-detail, layout, style. It's mind boggling that no-one hit the brakes in Redmond, hired an intern, just to polish out the worst offenders.

I mean, I get the complexity and business flows in place that produce this terrible mess. But in the end the software is packaged as one thing.

Is it their stronghold on the market (monopoly) that makes they can afford not to care? Or did their customers really not care (I mean, I did, and it was one of many things that made me fall in love with Linux back then)

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