KDE1 on Debian 13 | Hacker News Reader

KDE1 on Debian 13

ariasft.github.io

76 pointsindigodaddy33 comments

Something is seriously wrong with the fonts here; contrast this to the screenshot in Wikipedia which has crisp pixel-perfect fonts: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d9/KDE_1.0....

The article's screenshots are using scalable fonts without hinting bytecode instructions built in. Many modern fonts don't have those because of anti aliasing and auto-hinting. You can see the terminal font is fine because it's a bitmap font. At the time, you generally stuck with bitmap fonts or TTFs with binary bitmap blobs built in.

This was my first Linux desktop (on Red Hat 6.2, no less). I really miss these looks. I may not care for the oversized status bar, but I loved the window decoration, the color scheme and the widget style.

Now there's a way to recreate more or less the look, with the Reactionary theme/style. But the window decoration is not native, the color scheme gets quirky in some places, and inconsistencies appear everywhere. I had to settle for Breeze, but I'll always miss the good KDE1 looks.

KDE2 on Mandrake 8 for me. The look and feel of that desktop was a big part of what made me want to start using it over Windows. Whereas XP had just launched the Bozo the Clown-inspired theme, KDE offered something that somehow looked more real, and lived-in.

The other part, of course, was that the tools it shipped with were far and away better than the ones on Windows. Konqueror (way faster than Netscape) and Gaim (way more functional than AIM - I know that wasn't part of KDE) are two that came to mind almost immediately. Nowadays I live my life in a Web browser, and I'm not sure I'd have had the same impressions there.

For those missing kde2, try Trinity aka TDE, a kde2 fork.

Trinity is actually a fork of KDE3, not 2.

OK then, I see you are correct.

Correct, and I'm not sure whether I could recreate the KDE1 windeco and colorscheme with it.

I switched from TWM to KDE, I was running MkLinux on a Apple PowerMac. It took a while to build but when I started it up, it seemed amazing at the time.

I always preferred the look and feel of KDE1 over all other GUI environments. Glad to not be alone.

Eh, if we need to go "retro", I'd choose the Windows 98 or Windows 2000 UI. That was the apex of low-res design, and GNOME/KDE have never even got close. And I say that as a life-long Linux user that started with KDE1 (though soon moved to GNOME and Window Maker).

Just look at how terrible the font rendering or icon design was compared to its Windows contemporary. At the time Microsoft spent a ton of money in usability research, that no free environment could afford.

> At the time Microsoft spent a ton of money in usability research, that no free environment could afford

It was a combined effort with IBM. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access

Note that even the obsolete parts of the CUA is still supported on modern Windows! for example, CTRL+C and CTRL+V might have won as the favored keyboard shortcuts for copy and paste, but CTRL+INSERT and SHIFT+INSERT still works! The CUA design documents had a very large impact on the approach taken at Microsoft in designing GUI software and standardizing interactions.

Of course, standardizing keyboard shortcuts are but a tiny part of the ambitions behind the CUA. It's still a very good read to this day for anyone interested in the design of user interfaces. Here's an excerpt of one of my favorite points made in the documents :

>The user interface should be forgiving. User actions should be easily

>reversed. When users are in control, they should be able to explore

>without fear of causing an irreversible mistake. Because

>learn-by-exploring environments involve trial and error, users should be

>able to back up or undo their previous action. Actions that are

>destructive (that may cause the unexpected loss of the users' information)

>require a confirmation. Users should feel more comfortable with a

>computer when their mistakes do not cause serious or irreversible results.

>To users, the unexpected loss of their information is the most frustrating

>and destructive application occurrence. When you allow users the

>opportunity to change their minds about an action that would destroy

>significant data, you provide a forgiving interface, even if you are

>unable to allow them to undo the action after it is completed.

that is not how the font rendering really was, something is broken there.. look at the screenshots on wikipedia. This kinda puts into question the "life-long linux user started with KDE1", that, or some memory issues :)