> Man, the desktop was so beautiful and refreshing.
I get the same feeling when doing a fresh install+boot of both OS X 10.9 Mavericks and Windows 7. They're just so much more pleasant than what we have now.
It'd be nice if modern desktop operating systems took a lesson or two from their past selves.
I feel the same way about Unix desktops. The newer stuff just.. looks gross? And it's difficult to use. I'm very thankful for Mate, especially the Alt+F2 behavior, but also the simple menu layout vs some horrible combination of search and popups.
For me it's the difference between "this is a computer" vs "this is a computer trying to be a cell phone". I think that's what everything from the last 15yr is trying to be--a phone. And not everything is a phone. On a computer we have a keyboard and a mouse, which are much, much more precise tools than vague gestures on a touchscreen.
EDIT: I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say this is basically everything that's wrong with the computer(-adjacent) industry. We can appreciate the problem statement by asking "why would anyone want to make a computer be a phone?" The answer is a terminal case of a particularly defensive form of groupthink. It goes something like this:
(1) "everyone is talking about the iPhone"
(2) "i need to feel relevant, ergo i must make phone noises too"
then they rub these two neurons together, and since it's the only two they got it isn't hard for them, and this process repeats a few generations and like a nuclear chain reaction soon enough the entire industry is trying to make everything be a fucking phone.
It shouldn't be like that.
EDIT2: As a species we don't play these games with other tools. Cars--some super early attempts had weird shit like tillers for steering but we quickly outgrew that idea and settled on the steering wheel, levers for the other hand, and pedals
for the feet. Same with airplanes and tracked vehicles (bulldozers, tanks, etc). Same with machine tools. This stupid game people are playing with computer interfaces these days is fundamentally inhuman.
It's so obvious now that you wrote it, but it never occurred to me as such. New desktops, be it macOS, Gnome, Win.. they all look like damn phones and not computers.
If you're under 25ish, you probably had a smartphone while still in diapers. When/if you later learn to use a desktop, it being like a smartphone makes it familiar.
Sucks for us geezers that learned things the other way around though!
People seem to forget that "smartphones" (in the post-iPhone sense) are barely old enough to drive. The first iPhone came out in 2007, android doesn't drop till the following year, and the first iPad doesn't come out till 2010.
If you were a kid with a video-playing smartphone before about 2012, your parents were pretty damn well off, and likely early adopters too
I don't think that helps support the argument, though. Despite using a stylus-driven touchscreen, the Palm Pilot UI had a lot more in common with the desktop UIs of the 90s than with today's smartphone UIs or even today's smartphone-tainted desktop UIs.
Palm pilots had ui/ux more closely resembling today’s smart phones than you think. The swiping keyboards, for example, more closely resemble the script used for fast typing on a palm pilot. The ui was meant for touch, not for precision. At least the games didn’t have ads back then.
Today's swiping keyboards are nothing like the original Graffiti or Graffiti 2. Those used shapes/gestures derived from the actual letter shapes, while the swiping gestures supported by the on-screen keyboards of today rely on gestures derived from the QWERTY layout of the on-screen keyboard. Because both were simplifications of the completely different input methods they were emulating: pen vs keyboard.
Meanwhile, the rest of the Palm Pilot UI (all the parts that were actually on the screen instead of below it in the dedicated writing area) looks thoroughly 90s: the basic buttons, drop-down boxes, tabs and dialog box layouts, scrollbars that aren't trying to hide from you. The main UI elements missing from the Palm Pilot that were present in eg. 90s Mac OS or Windows are the free form desktop layout (instead of the smartphone-like app launcher grid), and the persistent on-screen menu bar or taskbar.
The Palm Pilot UI was unquestionably designed around the assumption of higher precision than today's touch-oriented UIs. The stylus was not considered optional. The lack of capacitive touch sensing for gesture recognition meant the UI was much more reliant on precise button taps where today's smartphones would use swipes and other gestures for stuff like scrolling or "back".
Um. Swiping is almost exactly like the gesture letter shapes, except now they are word shapes. Swiping “shape” is always the same gesture on the keyboard, you can learn these gestures and type really fast.
To your second paragraph: of course it looks “throughly 90’s”. It was the 90’s. Did an LLM tell you to say this? I have no idea what scroll bars have to do with anything. I can tell you they were a pain to use. That hasn’t changed.
To your third paragraph: the stylus wasn’t optional. They didn’t just “lack” capacitive screens. It didn’t exist yet at scale. This was what Apple brought to the market. You couldn’t really have them if you wanted them. That being said, I used these interfaces while walking, riding in a car, and sitting still. I never had trouble tapping the right thing because the buttons were huge in the UI.
You do bring up a good point about there not really being swipe gestures to go “back”. I don’t use them today, so I’m not as familiar with that type of behavior other than to say it is really annoying when done by accident, usually while picking up the device.
>If you're under 25ish, you probably had a smartphone while still in diapers
Circa 2004, when 25 year olds would probably be migrated out of diapers, smartphones were palm treos and Sony Ericsson K700s. I don't think they would be great distractions for kids, there certainly wouldn't be any endless Spiderman/Elsa YouTube to lock them in.
More like ~18 and under. The post-2007 zoomers and nearly all alphites are ipad kids, but that drops off dramatically as you get to the older zoomer segment and millennials.
Regarding your second edit, there was 100 years of automobile development (or more, depending on how far back you consider things to be in the lineage of a car, vs the predecessors of them) before the first car had a steering wheel. It's just ahistorical to say we quickly outgrew the tiller. We're less than 100 years from the first emergence of digital computers and screens, let alone putting those two together and needing an interface on them.
I think your broader point is accurate, but computers aren't old enough yet to really compare the evolution of their interfaces to other technologies.
Once we settled on the steering wheel, though, we didn't keep trying to make tillers work. That's what I was trying to get at--in other examples of human-machine interfaces we generally don't regress once we've figured it out. But with computers that's exactly what we're doing.
Yeah but we can take lessons from that 100 years of car experience of how humans interact with objects and apply a lot of it to computers. Its not like we are starting from scratch like we were 200 years ago.
They weren't starting from scratch 200 years ago either. Tillers were standard in boats for thousands of years, it was a perfectly reasonable way to steer a vehicle.
Likewise, at first a purely textual interface was a perfectly reasonable way to interact with a computer terminal, but the addition of mice changed the game, as did higher resolution displays and widespread adoption of touchscreens. We're 80 years into screens, 60 years into computer mice, and 20 years into touchscreens. Clearly lots of interface changes are just to keep the designers at a company busy, but it's also silly to be confident that we've nailed UX/UI standards.
what would you say makes a UI look as if it's for a computer (genuine)? aside from purely(!) cosmetic things, like the skin on the windows 11 taskbar vs. 10. i think to windows <= xp, or tiling window managers (bar hyprland, probably) as the two most popular evolutions of mouse- vs. keyboard-based UIs (plan 9 probably fits well under the former, too). i guess i'd prefer if macos looked like dwm, but i wonder what else would need to change for the friction i feel with it to disappear.
Font rendering with the same hinting as the system you grew up with. Whitespace in the same proportions.
Can't learn an evolution of the UI paradigm if you subconsciously feel your eyes are working wrong.
Hence, the person afraid of the computer changing who was described upthread.
(I was entirely surrounded by such cases when learning computing. So it was a moral and emotional battle at every step besides the sheer figuring things out - on dated, semi-functional miracles of engineering.
Now consider how, them people somewhere who "keep changing da computah", it's their job. It's us, in fact. And we're more knowledgeable, better organized, and make more than the average user. Plus chances are we're an entirely different part of the globe now where we follow an entirely different culture from our consumers, so things with the baseline mutual comprehensibility are so-so at best.
And... that's always been the case? And it's what's been giving our computerphobe friends all the right to be afraid. What reason does a FAANG dev even have, to care about your Grandma's eyesight, user experience, or sanity? Or yours? They gotz plenty to care about already, as exhibited by all the thoughtful comments poured into this site.)
These massive ""finger-friendly"" buttons don't make any sense on a traditional desktop with a mouse, but it makes a ton of sense when you realize the designers were likely designing for mobile and/or touchscreen integration at the same time.
A system which embraces the abilities of the mouse and keyboard without pandering to the limitations of the touchscreen. To wit, you have the ability, with a 3 button mouse + scroll wheel, to trivially select any nearby point in 3-space and label it with any one of 3 colors. More if you also allow your other hand to operate a keyboard. I dare you to attempt this with a touchscreen. I doubledare you motherfucker. Say what again.
I've settled on XFCE. It just works. You have to turn too many knobs to make it work on weird DPI / screen sizes, but other than that, it's fine.
Recently, I fired up Win 3.11 in 1600x1200@256 mode to run SimAnt, and was pretty shocked at how much better it felt than most modern operating systems.
I kind of feel like the start menu + task bar were a mistake now.
It is nice having the bluetooth + network icon somewhere accessible, but maybe <ctrl>-space should just pop up a thing that lets you type program names + also temporarily hide all windows over 10% of the screen or something? That'd solve the problem of trying to find program manager to run a second program. Also, the windows in windows approach of program manager wasn't great. Still, it's better than most things out there these days. The icons are so... clean.
XFCE is also my go to. But I have moved on from caring too much about desktop environments as long as they don't get in the way. I went through a phase of trying pure openbox and all kinds of things and settled on XFCE. It doesn't do everything like I want but that's fine. I mostly open a terminal, a browser, thunderbird, some programming environment and a latex editor these days.
In my opinion, the versions of Mac OS with the Platinum theme (8, 8.5, 9) have aged quite gracefully. It's clearly not modern, but it also doesn't feel particularly old or kludgy or anything, and it's quite clean relative to modern desktops.
Same as Windows 3.1, and Windows 95, up to 2000. After some point computers began to be optimized for a non-technical person and here we go... Ads, auto-updates, pop-ups, bright colors, all this fucking desktop circus.
The older OS's with their simple interfaces and clear buttons were easier for non-technical people as well. I'm not certain who they're really optimising for now, exactly... shareholders?
Otherizing your users like this IS THE PROBLEM. Every technologist was once a "nontechnical person" (for whatever definition of that useless term you like) who learned and grew and thereby became "technical". The very minute you start thinking of your users in these terms you have lost the entire fucking game.
I broadly agree with your point, but I think the causal root of the problem is this industry arrogantly treats it's users as, to quote Mark Zuckerberg, "dumb fucks." We didn't always do this. It used to be better.
Not sure I understand you - what game, market capture? There are environments that remain more or less sane (e.g., FreeBSD, Xfce, etc) that don't play this game, if I got you right. I guess treating users so helps capture more of the market share, but it looks like there's only so much dumbfuckery one can inject into the environment until the curve begins to drop and dumb fucks themselves begin to run.
Philips just screwed up my TV. They've updated the firmware (of course, it was automated) to make home screen more of a dumb fucking experience with everything animated and self-playing movies jumping out at you for no reason, and so on... But the interface is now completely unusable - literally can't even launch YouTube. No amount of resetting helps. They also hid all the previous firmwares and I can't even roll back from a USB stick. I am a dumb fuck when it comes to TVs. And I will most likely be considering another brand next time.
I don't know how being empathetic to users correlates with market dominance, but I'd like to believe that doing sociopathic things like putting ads in the start menu or what you've described with your TV firmware would have a negative impact on adoption. At least that's how it should work in a sane market? But the market can remain irrational longer than we can remain solvent.
I think Apple struck a good balance for a while--and to some extent still does--at least in the OS X era of treating users with a bit of respect. Not trying to make an interface for "power users" or "nontechnical users" but instead just making one for "computer users".
It used to be that we made tools for people, and endeavored to make them well. Now we make tools that treat people (their attention in particular) as a cash crop to be harvested. Everything is about "engagement" and the like. I prefer using tools that had effort spent on making them useful, not effort spent on "monetizing" the user.
I think the thing tech nerds do of trying to distinguish between "technical" and "non-technical" users is extremely arrogant, and in a way adjacent to the downright sociopathy of "monetizing" a user base. If you care about making something good, don't start down that road. That's the game--making good tools that help people do good work.
>I fired up Win 3.11 in 1600x1200@256 mode to run SimAnt, and was pretty shocked at how much better it felt than most modern operating systems.
Maybe for older people who used it back then and have nostalgia for it, but I think at 35 even I'm too young to find that UI appealing for daily driving when linux has WMs/DEs targeted for minimalism, efficiency and productivity but in a modern way.
There are people who believe that KDE 3 was the perfect desktop. They forked it when KDE 4 was released (initial KDE 4 releases were really rough), called it the Trinity Desktop Environment (TDE). I actually really like modern Gnome but every once in a while I try out TDE and it does give me a nice cozy feeling, like looking at old album photos.
I have a friend who refuses to use anything other than CDE and still manages to compile and run it on modern Linux distros.
I have an older computer running Ubuntu with Unity 7 DE, I think it looks beautiful. It’s a computer that barely connects to the internet and I use for playing with electronics. I think that was the most intuitive DE on Linux.
Installed and activated Windows 7 yesterday on the laptop I was preparing to sell. Surprised to learn something my brain offloaded long time ago. We had Apple Glass in 2008 on Windows!
My PC is unfortunately on Windows 11, but I recently purchased StartAllBack which lets you replace the start menu with a Windows 7-era sensible one, and you can even change the Start icon and various chrome in the OS (the task bar, file explorer, etc) to revert back to Windows 7 style. Maybe I'm just nostalgic but it's made Windows 11 so much better.
I feel the average HN user though might be a bad representation of the general population. Personally I prefer the aesthetic of windows 11 over 7, it’s about the ONLY thing I prefer about windows 11, but windows 7 looks extremely dated to me now.
That is, until you try to use windows 11. And it gives you bing results instead of the option in control panel you want, even though you spelled it exactly.
It’s like you didn’t read the rest of my comment. However I can’t confirm. I wack that windows key on my keyboard and start typing all the time and can’t remember it ever opening the wrong thing.
I'd prefer Windows 2000, myself. Relatively light weight, no bling or junk in the UI. Windows XP was okay, but the default UI looked like a toy. I know you can turn it off, but most people didn't. We won't mention Vista...
i don't have a w11 supported machine, but when I see the OS in videos or screenshots, I always thought it looks surprisingly pleasant and fresh, compared to 10. Really miss Vista though, that one was amazing visually.
You probably do, I thought I didn’t but if you just disable the warning about TPM 2.0 with a simple command it lets you install it just fine. Had no problems for years now.
In terms of functionality, 8.1 isn't bad but I can't stand the flat square theme that could've dropped straight out of the DOS era. It's so ugly.
I understand why Aero didn't continue on in its Vista/7 form, but Metro swung way too far in the other direction. The Fluent look used by Windows 11 is a nice middleground that I wish 8, 8.1, and 10 could've adopted instead. Too bad the rest of 11 sucks.
I get the same feeling when doing a fresh install+boot of both OS X 10.9 Mavericks and Windows 7. They're just so much more pleasant than what we have now.
It'd be nice if modern desktop operating systems took a lesson or two from their past selves.