Blue95: a desktop for your childhood home's computer room

metadat · 2025-03-30T16:14:15 1743351255

This looks nice and easy to use.

My hypothesis is today's "modern" OS user interfaces are objectively worse from a usability perspective, obfuscating key functionality behind layers of confusing menus.

voidfunc · 2025-03-30T16:25:07 1743351907

I got in an argument with an accessibility engineer about this recently...

The whole UI as branding thing has utterly killed usability.

pwg · 2025-03-30T16:28:06 1743352086

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/21810-it-is-difficult-to-ge...

esafak · 2025-03-30T16:29:00 1743352140

Microsoft Windows programs hid functionality under layers of menus and the registry. MacOS, at least, surfaces much less functionality, because it offers sensible defaults. I never had to do anything akin to fiddling with the Windows Registry.

bsnnkv · 2025-03-30T16:24:05 1743351845

This still remains the absolute pinnacle of cohesive desktop environment design in my books.

emidln · 2025-03-30T16:22:05 1743351725

This looks neat. I remember the various fvwm95 and icewm themes doing a similar number in the late 90s and early 2000s.

It would be fun to pair this with Gambas[0], a free VB6 clone that works with GTK.

[0] https://gambaswiki.org/website/en/main.html

OsrsNeedsf2P · 2025-03-30T16:25:07 1743351907

Does this project offer anything besides Chicago95's UI pre-installed?

jemurray · 2025-03-30T16:24:17 1743351857

My childhood home would need DOS. Maybe deskview for multitasking. :)

rbanffy · 2025-03-30T15:41:12 1743349272

How cute… imagine my childhood home would have a computer with a graphical desktop…

I feel so old now…

cmrdporcupine · 2025-03-30T16:18:28 1743351508

Yeah as far as GUIs go, Win95 isn't in the "nostalgia" category for me, I was already well into adulthood.

I kind of get the appeal, but it's also unnecessarily skeumorphic/fake-3d and there were some UX things that made little sense especially lumping all the window controls all together (including the destructive "close" X) where MacOS smartly separated them.

abraxas · 2025-03-30T16:24:59 1743351899

The fake 3d is actually very useful in communicating what is a button or another interactive piece of the interface and what's not. The modern clean uis where everything is a thin rectangle or just text that you are supposed to click are a nightmare.

alabastervlog · 2025-03-30T16:28:40 1743352120

Old screen caps of UIs with depth feel so relaxing to look at, and I don’t think it’s just a nostalgia effect.

It’s like there’s always just a little extra brain power and attention being used by modern flat UIs, and you get to shut that off when you look at a depth-enhanced UI.

rbanffy · 2025-03-30T16:28:43 1743352123

I agree. Early Macs had to give buttons a 2D distinctive look. A good thing was that the look and feel were part of the OS and not the application, so everything would be consistent.

mrweasel · 2025-03-30T16:26:06 1743351966

> where MacOS smartly separated them.

Interesting that modern macOS now have them next to each other, like Windows.

You'd be hard pressed to call the Window 95 UI pretty, but it is really functional. I'm still a firm believe that the majority of the work we do with computers today could be done within the Windows 95 shell. We need 64bit, more memory, faster CPUs, GPUs all that, but the modern UI aren't really "better", if anything many of them are more confusing. I think a lot of office works would be happy to just have kept the Window 95 era UI for Windows and Office.

anthk · 2025-03-30T16:20:35 1743351635

It needs the BSOD screensaver from XScreensaver, for sure. And, maybe, DOSBox-X or DOSEmu2.

Also:

- Pan

- Sylpheed

- Audacious with the WinAMP theme

- Hexchat kinda has a MIRC vibe

- Parole looks like WMP from < v9 releases

- You can't simulate a dialer, but with trickle you can mimic a 56k/ISDN connection pretty well

- SyncTERM for BBS's

- ScummVM, with just a bilinear filter, because I played tons of adventures

- There's an SDL2 reimplementation of Space Cadet Pinball at github.

- Trigger Rally would look like a great shareware game

- Pidgin, hands down. Either you were an AOL user in America, or a MSN user in Europe. It has emoticons, not emojis. Add that annoying notification theme with a sound and that would be the very late 90's/early 00's (my early teen years)

esafak · 2025-03-30T15:33:59 1743348839

I'm trying to forget that horror show and you want to put it under a spotlight! If I never see a bsod or windows registry again it'll be too soon.

stavros · 2025-03-30T16:12:51 1743351171

Well, at least buttons looked like buttons.

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