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Comment by Quitschquat | Hacker News Reader

You might be looking at these old Unix GUIs thinking they're shit compared to now, but actually, at the time, they were shit too.

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Yep even the later ones. I used to sit in front of a Solaris CDE desktop locked in a basement. Made me want to slit my wrists. The colour scheme, how it worked, the peformance. All horrible.

I used RISC OS at home. Was wonderful to come back to that.

Ooo, a rare fellow home RISC OS user! I had an A3000 at home myself so I didn't have the benefit of using RISC OS with a hard drive, and we never upgraded to an ARM3, but we did use both RISC OS 2 and 3.

Still love the old Acorn machines. I mostly use Arculator[0] nowadays for that nostalgia though.

[0] https://b-em.bbcmicro.com/arculator/

Brilliant. Yeah there were a few of us back in the day! Had an A440 then a RiscPC 700 here. Hard disk made all the difference even if it was only a 40MB one!

There's a nice emulator here, a WebAssembly RiscPC one. Works quite well: https://rpcemu.m-h.org.uk/

I have a local version of RPCemu too, but I never had a Risc PC myself so it's not as interesting to me; we got a PC about half a year after Windows 95 released.

Have you come across the Stardot[0] community yet? I feel like you'd enjoy it. Fair warning: it's more focused on the Acorn computers themselves (both 8-bit and 26/32-bit) than the continuing development of RISC OS. That said, I personally think it's great.

[0] https://www.stardot.org.uk/

> I used RISC OS at home. Was wonderful to come back to that.

Same here.

Windows 2 and Mac System 6 at work, RISC OS 2 at home -- faster, more responsive, more capable and flexible, and much better looking.

Some of my friends had Amigas and to me, oh wow was AmigaOS 1.x fugly.

40 years later, KDE still is.

GNOME is beautiful but it's so limited it feels like trying to operate a mouse and keyboard with my feet while sitting on my hands.

COSMIC feels fast and powerful, but it is not easy on the eyes, and the keyboard UI is poor.

No bloat was good! Snappy responsiveness on early CPUs.

Even xterm on a sun sparcstation running openlook was sluggish at the time. cde made it hopeless.

Yeah some of them just ran bad even on fully speced systems. The vision of the software was far beyond the hardware for a long while.

The network is the computer.

Relevant:

"Trust Me, You Want SunOS 4.1.4 on Your Older Sun Boxes"

(May 4, 2026)

https://oldsilicon.com/technologies/sunos-414-older-sun-boxe...

Heh, I still remember how, as undergrads, we thought we all wanted those "pizza box" workstations that grad student were using.

But when I was assigned an Ultra (1?) workstation at my first full-time job, I found that it was a better user and development experience to ignore it and use Linux on my Dell notebook, which I think was a Pentium MMX running somewhere around 200 MHz.

Actually no, CDE, NeWS and NeXTSTEP are my favourite UNIX GUIs.

On FOSS side, I would vote for afterstep, windowmaker, original GNOME with sawmill, and KDE.

They're getting better with time relative to modern GUIs.

I wasn't a big fan of Windows 3.1 or Motif in their heyday, but compared to the visual chaos we have nowadays they're looking pretty good.

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