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

by elvis70 • 1 year ago

568 313 1 year ago

esafak5• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

Well, at least buttons looked like buttons.

rbanffy4• 1 year ago

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

I feel so old now…

cmrdporcupine3• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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.

mrweasel• 1 year ago

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.

fallsoffbikes• 1 year ago

Though Apple has forgotten or ignored this in products like the Apple tv where restart and factory reset are right next to each other.

spacedcowboy• 1 year ago

Yeah. My first computer I soldered the chips/resistors/capacitors/etc to the PCB... It had 1K of RAM, and the screen memory had to come out of that too...

Someone wrote chess for it.

[aside] It was a Sinclair ZX-81, and I was 11 at the time. My parents bought the kit and a second-hand black & white TV with a dial-tuner (no pushbuttons to change the channel) as an Xmas present ...

I loved the TV, it was my TV when we only had one other in the house. I watched everything on that TV (even snooker and swore I could tell which ball was which)... After a couple of months, my dad started to get annoyed I'd not bothered to build the computer, so I was dispatched to the shed to build it.

A few days later (hey, I was in school), the thing worked and I was working my way through the (rather excellent) manual that came with it, getting to know it. One of the logic chapters had an example:

[P]RINT 1+1=2

(It was tokenised input, so you just pressed P and PRINT would come up in the built-in BASIC). Anyone here can see that the answer would be logical-true because 1+1 does equal 2, and indeed the computer printed "1" on the next line.

Anyway, flush with this futuristic knowledge, I set it all up using the family TV in the lounge, and we went through the same thing, just to prove to everyone that it worked...

[P]RINT 1+1=2

"I knew it. You've buggered it", said my dad in disgust as he got up and walked out the room. I tried to explain the (new to me) concept of logical truth to him and how the computer represented it, but I don't think he ever really believed me...

[/aside]

Anyway, that Sinclair ZX81 fundamentally changed my life. Computers and computing opened up a whole new world. Some 45 years later I'm about to retire from Apple as one of their most senior engineers, having been here for the last 20 years. Anyone with any Apple device is running some of the software I've written over the years which is kind of cool, but it's time to bow out.

metadat• 1 year ago

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.

It reminds me of these "OS popularity since the 70s" time lapse views:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=cTKhqtll5cQ

The dominance of Windows is crazy, even today, Mac desktops and laptops are comparatively niche

voidfunc• 1 year ago

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

The whole UI as branding thing has utterly killed usability.

pwg• 1 year ago

"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...

hyperbrainer• 1 year ago

It's interesting especially because it seems like companies today pour tens of millions into "accessibility", but I never see a thing's usability in terms of simple and easy-to-do-what-I-want UX fall in to the same category.

cosmic_cheese14• 1 year ago

It’s a completely predictable result if you think about it.

Old style UI was developed with the findings of countless man-hours of UX research performed by field experts, while branded UI is typically whipped together purely based on trends and vibes in an evening by a visual designer who’s probably never performed an ounce of serious research or user trials. It’s natural that the latter is only going to be good at the most superficial of purposes. UI as branding is the McMansion of UX.

burnte4• 1 year ago

The whole UI as branding thing has utterly killed usability.

This is caused by a change in who is hired as UI/UX developers. In days past it was HCI experts and engineers, now it's graphic designers. "Pretty" is the order of the day, not "useful". "There are too many menu items" is now answered with "So let's hide them" when it used to be "How can we organize them in the UI us a simple, discoverable manner?" But then that "overflow" menu (really? Needed menu commands are now OVERFLOW?) gets crowded so they start just removing features so the UI is nice.

Lorkki• 1 year ago

It's also repeating what the hellscape of inconsistent skinned UIs did in the late 90s and early 2000s. People are looking back at those times with a rather selective memory.

WarOnPrivacy2• 1 year ago

The whole UI as branding thing has utterly killed usability.

Imagine if Active Desktop had taken over.

I eventually came up with a not-awful use for AD but that was a few years after it went away.

esafak5• 1 year ago

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.

I did like some Windows things, though, like the ribbon, and reconfigurable UIs. Today's UIs are more immutable, for the worse.

bbqfog• 1 year ago

MacOS is pretty cursed. The equivalent to registry fiddling is doing anything in ~/Library/Application Support

It still has "Services" as a hold over from Next that is completely broken and unused (but still present in every app for some reason). Now you also have the joy of diving deep into the Settings every time an app needs some sort of permission.

I'd say something about .DS_Store files, but that's not really UI.

brandon2722• 1 year ago

There is an entire ecosystem of free and paid Mac apps meant to augment the Mac experience because MacOS does not provide functionality or configuration needed for a sensible computing experience out of the box.

zamadatix• 1 year ago

I'd agree macOS surfaces much less functionality but I feel like it's more "because they don't want you to feel like there is a choice to make in the first place" rather than "because the defaults are ideal for everyone". Over time it feels like "layers of menus" have definitely made their way into Apple's software anyways.

The replacement to the registry seems to half be "magic CLI incantations for settings which can't be found in the GUI for some reason" and half "here's a $4.99 app to 3 finger tap to close tabs".

diggan2• 1 year ago

I never had to do anything akin to fiddling with the Windows Registry

If I recall correctly, when I got my first Macbook, I had to edit plist files or something similar in order to do basic things like permanently showing hidden files, showing the full path in Finder, show file extensions for all file types, increase the animation speed so the computer didn't feel slow as molasses, etc, etc.

Maybe these things are now easier to configure via GUI on macOS?

cosmic_cheese14• 1 year ago

It’s not a 1:1 mapping, but much power user functionality in macOS is designed to progressively reveal itself as the user becomes more technically capable, a type of design known as progressive disclosure. This allows newbies to not feel overwhelmed while also allowing power users to feel at home.

The problem is that way too many people approach macOS with the Windows way of doing things firmly planted in their minds as “correct”, which interferes with this process. For example, over the years I’ve encountered numerous posters complaining about how macOS can’t do X thing, after which I point out that X thing is right there as an easy to find top level menu item, but the poster in question never bothered to take a look around and just assumed the functionality didn’t exist since it wasn’t surfaced the same way as under Windows or KDE or whatever they were coming from.

Of course there are things macOS just doesn’t do, but there’s plenty that it does if users are willing to set their preconceptions aside for a moment.

exiguus9• 1 year ago

Selecting the appropriate tool for the task at hand is crucial, in my opinion. However, I believe the choice is often influenced by companies mandating the use of Microsoft and Mac systems due to cost and maintenance considerations, rather than allowing employees to choose between Mac, Windows, or Linux based on their preferences. Proprietary software that only runs on Mac or Windows, never was an argument, because you can just RDP stream remote desktop apps or use the browser.

burnte4• 1 year ago

I never had to do anything akin to fiddling with the Windows Registry.

I don't believe you. You have never, EVER, NOT ONCE run a terminal command to change an option on MacOS? I just refuse to believe anyone on HN hasn't altered preferences in the terminal on MacOS.

mananaysiempre2• 1 year ago

This looks nice

These kinds of things almost always give me an uncanny-valley feeling. Here I'm looking at the screenshot and can’t help noticing that the taskbar buttons are too close to the taskbar’s edge, the window titles are too narrow, the folders are too yellow, and so on and so forth. (To its credit, Wine is the one exception that is not susceptible to this, even when configured to use a higher DPI value so the proportions aren’t actually the ones I’m used to.) I’m not so much criticizing the theme’s authors as wondering why this is so universal across the many replicas.

mouse_• 1 year ago

Computing is largely a cargo cult thing these days.

The problem is that the interfaces these bootleg skins draw "inspiration" from were designed on the back of millions of pre-inflationary dollars' R&D from only the best at Golden-Age IBM, Microsoft, Apple, etc.. BeOS, OS/2, Windows 95-2000 do not look the way they do because it looks good, they look the way they do because it works good, countless man hours went into ensuring that. Simply designing an interface that looks similar is not going to bring back the engineering prowess of those Old Masters.

j45• 1 year ago

Someone having spend too much time using the original replicating it would likely notice these things.

Still it is hopefully a nice introduction for some.

Tade0• 1 year ago

To be fair at least the title bar height was configurable and I recall at least one original Windows theme taking advantage of that.

bowlofhummus• 1 year ago

The text is the worst. The icons are nice and pixely but the fonts are baby butt smooth anti aliased

goosedragons• 1 year ago

It can look better. This is basically a distro with Chicago95 out of the box and not well configured. If you take the time it can look more like 95. The Chicago95 screenshots IMO look better:

https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95

zestyping• 1 year ago

Ouch. That screenshot is uncomfortable to look at. The window title bars are painfully narrow, the frame borders have inconsistent thicknesses, the Start menu overlaps the taskbar, the vertical centering of text is wrong.

The answer to your question is that these replicas are of low quality. This one looks like the whole thing was made by someone (or a committee of people) lacking attention to detail.

toast0• 1 year ago

Honestly, I don't think anyone has done real user research on basic interfaces since Microsoft did it for Windows 95. I'm pretty sure that was the last publication I've seen.

It's a lot of time, effort, and expense to run user research, but the potential benefits to the users are big.

exiguus9• 1 year ago

What do you mean exactly? Like the Menu-Issues in Windows 10? Because from a UX perspective, basically nothing has change. UI of course, but UX is the same like in the 90's following "The Design of Everyday Things" by Donald A.

I think its more about the change management, expectations. For example in Win XP you had the option to use the NT theme. As a user: "I can decide when to move on to the new design."

Usually around 50% of your users are conservative about change. You have to keep this in mind when u change design. On the other hand, if you sell a product with subscription, you have to introduce new feature, else user will move to another product. But, when you introduce new feature, UI gets more complicated and user will blame you for that.

myself2483• 1 year ago

Like making window borders 1px wide, even as screen pixel density increases. It's darn near impossible to resize a window anymore.

Like making buttons auto-hide unless you mouse-over them. I don't remember when this came in, but the default PDF viewer in something did this, and I spent _weeks_ being baffled that some jerk made a PDF viewer that couldn't zoom in on the page, until I randomly waggled the mouse for some reason and the missing buttons magically appeared. I have no words for how upsetting this was.

Like having icons-only for many functions, with no text-and-icons or text-only option to replace them. I'm sure some people are fine with that, but other people can scan a screen for a desired word MUCH faster than they can scan for a desired icon, and removal of text labels is just an insult to that segment of the userbase.

Like no longer highlighting, or even having, hotkeys for many menus. I can alt-space or alt-menukey my way through a late-90s menu tree _way_ faster than I can mouse through it, even with today's better mice, but that simply doesn't work anymore in a great many programs.

It's one thing for people who've never known a different UI to just be slow in this one and that's all they've known, and that's fine for them I guess, if it's pretty and they prefer that, or if keyboards frighten them.

But for people who have DECADES of reflexes invested in these shortcuts to suddenly find that they don't work anymore, and we're forced to SLOW DOWN and be less productive than in the past, that's a high insult.

Microsoft spilled tankers of ink in the 90s talking about how their new GUI patterns would make people more productive by unifying these things across programs (which was true; in the DOS era every program made up its own shortcuts and ways to access them), and folks who learned them are now being punished for trusting MS with our loyalty.

"Basically nothing has changed" my ass.

selfhoster114• 1 year ago

I'm sorry, but absolutely no. Fuck no. Nothing from Microsoft has even been in the same building as a copy of "The Design of Everyday Things", or as a copy of any old-school UX book from before UX meant "Electron". UX is just as much about the "how" as it is about the "what", and Microsoft has been failing everyone lately on this count.

floundy• 1 year ago

Have you used Windows 11? When right clicking, there's now a context menu within the right click context menu. To see what you could see in Win10, you have to right click, then select "See more options" or something. Which just opens up the "old" Win10 context menu with a totally different visual appearance than the Win11 one. Talk about jank and bloat.

TacticalCoder• 1 year ago

The dominance of Windows is crazy, even today, Mac desktops and laptops are comparatively niche

But for whom and to do what? People around me, like my wife and mother in law, are happy with an Android phone. If they use a computer, the only thing they need is a browser.

I wouldn't be surprised if 90%+ of all Windows users would use Windows for one thing: click on a browser icon.

That's why after one malware too many I confiscated my mother-in-law's Windows laptop and got her a Chromebook.

I'd say that's why the shit UI/UX doesn't even matter anymore for most users: the only use a browser anyway.

herbst2• 1 year ago

So much this. Just make sure their browser is working and updating and that office files automatically open with a fitting software.

I have way less work since everybody just gets Linux

breadwinner• 1 year ago

Agree that "modern" OS user interfaces are objectively worse from a usability perspective. That's thanks to Flat UI, mostly.

In my opinion, nothing beats the 35-year-old NeXTSTEP interface (which W95 is a weak imitation of):

https://www.gnustep.org/carousel/PC_1300x650.png

hnthrowaway03153• 1 year ago

For modern Windows operating system, i.e. >= Windows 10, getting rid of ads, weather, auto-update and search bar can improve UI usability significantly.

Windows 95 was not stable enough back then. I believe Windows 2000 was the first OS that was easy to use and relatively stable. XP and 7 are both solid options too.

I have used both MacOS X and modern MacOS (15) and the UI of X is definitely way better than the UI of 15. It is more clean cut.

epolanski2• 1 year ago

98 was a very good os. I don't think many got 2000, XP was the major windows for millennials.

leonidasv• 1 year ago

When I used XFCE as my daily driver, I once tried installing Chicago95 just for nostalgia and it stick as my daily driver for almost a year! The UI is less distracting than modern UIs and there's something to it that makes it easier to just know which window is open over which window that's lacking in modern UIs (I think it's the over-reliance on soft shadows and the borderless windows).

Eventually, I stopped using it because: 1- it was always annoying to send an screenshot to someone and have to explain that no, I wasn't using Windows 95, and why; 2- the grey-ish look of everything started to bother me over time; 3- I wanted a more integrated desktop experience and moved to KDE Plasma. Still, I configured my Plasma to work like old Windows: window titles on taskbar, zero to none animations, etc.

caseyy• 1 year ago

I also dailied it on XFCE. The UI was very utilitarian and purposeful. I suppose aesthetically it is unimpressive and not streamlined, but it serves the purpose of being a good interface to do a task.

Same as you say, people have asked me a lot about it and even asked me if I could set it up for them. The theme is evangelizing Linux a little bit, and that is interesting. In the right hands, these UI principles could convert many people to some product.

P.S. You can now change the grey-ish look with Win95-style theming support. I've not used it, but here's more info: https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95/blob/master/Plus/READ...

keyringlight2• 1 year ago

and there's something to it that makes it easier to just know which window is open over which window that's lacking in modern UIs (I think it's the over-reliance on soft shadows and the borderless windows).

I think this started with Vista, I remember watching a video criticizing the new love of glass effects on UI chrome as it got rid of or minimized the color/shading difference between focused/unfocused windows. The example the video used was 6 notepad windows and pick which one was focused, and the main cue you'd need to look for is that the window with focus had a close button colored red.

Thin borders and minimalist/hiding scrollbars is another one that annoys me, give me something graphical for my gaze to grasp.

fc417fc8024• 1 year ago

This entire comment section has me repeatedly thinking to myself "you don't run into that problem with i3-alikes" over and over. My choice not to put up with modern UX bullshit is feeling strongly reaffirmed right now. Not that it needed to be.

it was always annoying to send an screenshot to someone and have to explain that no, I wasn't using Windows 95

That's not a negative, that's a fringe benefit as an endless source of entertainment.

trbutler• 1 year ago

Yes. I'd love to see someone take the basic design of Windows 95 or even early OS X and reimplement it not so much visually, but tactilely. Make something that works as well, is as simple but isn't nostalgia.

In any case though, this particular attempt at giving a complete Windows 95 experience is quite cool.

hx8• 1 year ago

The dominance of Windows is crazy, even today, Mac desktops and laptops are comparatively niche

I was actually surprised that macOS/Linux/ChromeOS together are >20% of all desktop/laptops. I would have expected Microsoft machines to be closer to 90% than 80%.

everdrive2• 1 year ago

I'm surprised by the breakdown as well. At least according to these two citations in Wikipedia, the breakdown is:

---

For desktop computers and laptops, Microsoft Windows has 71%, followed by Apple's macOS at 16%, unknown operating systems at 8%, desktop Linux at 4%, then Google's ChromeOS at 2%.[3][4]

---

[3] "Now more than ever, ChromeOS is Linux with Google's desktop environment". About Chromebooks. 1 August 2023. Retrieved 25 September 2024.

[4]"Desktop Operating System Market Share Worldwide". StatCounter Global Stats. Retrieved 9 March 2025.

hi_hi• 1 year ago

As a kid, the OS's supported me in learning. They were simple, intuitive and rewarding. I'd click around and explore, and discover cool things like a Wheezer music video, or engaging puzzle games.

There was no one who could help me when I got stuck, beyond maybe an instruction manual. I just had to figure it out, mostly by trial and error. I learned so much, eventually being able to replace hardware, install and upgrade drivers, re-install the entire OS and partition the hard drive, figure out networking and filesystems. It built confidence.

Now my kid sits infront of an OS (Windows, Mac, it doesn't really matter) and there's so much noise. Things popping up, demanding attention. Scary looking warnings. So much choice. There's so many ways to do simple things. Actions buried deep within menus. They have no hope of building up a mental model or understanding how the OS connects them to the foundations of computing.

Even I'm mostly lost now if there's a problem. I need to search the internet, find a useful source, filter out the things that are similar to my problem but not the same. It isn't rewarding any more, it's frustrating. How is a young child meant to navigate that by themselves?

This looks like a step in the right direction. I look forward to testing it out.

underlipton• 1 year ago

There're also performance issues. Building muscle memory (which means offloading tasks from working memory, leaving it open for learning) can't happen if you're constantly trying to figure out when the system is going to actually respond to your input.

accrual3• 1 year ago

Things popping up

This is one of my biggest frustrations with modern GUI computing. It's especially bad with Windows and Office, but it happens on iOS and macOS too to an extent. Even though I've had Office installed for weeks I still get a "look over here at this new button!" pop-up while I'm in the middle of some Excel task. Pop-up here, pop-up there. It's insane the number of little bubbles and pop-ups and noise we experience in modern computing.

Andrex• 1 year ago

Humans hate being bored but only dick-around and learn things like this when they're bored. Speaking personally, I guess.

Since the 90s we've found "better" ways at "curing" our boredom. Put this UI on a modern OS in front of a kid today and they would just download Steam, Chrome and Discord. And be assured, they're very proficient at the in-and-outs of those platforms.

Just some random thoughts I had, not sure any of it tracks...

girvo3• 1 year ago

I learned so much, eventually being able to replace hardware

As a young teenager in the early-mid 2000s, I learned the hard way what the little standoffs are for by killing a motherboard by screwing it directly into the steel case :')

Never made that mistake again, that's for sure. And I share all the same experiences as yourself

hulitu• 1 year ago

Actions buried deep within menus.

Maybe they are though in CS school that every layer of abstraction is better. I don't see other explanation for this level of stupidity.

brulard• 1 year ago

I share your nostalgia. I did learn a lot by exploring Amiga OS and later Windows 98 without anyone to help or an internet connection. It was fun, but we had time to spend back then. Today time feels much more scarce and I no longer appreciate if I have to learn by trial and error. Now it feels like you have to keep up with the tech progress, which is crazy fast. And youth has too many things to do that are more appealing, like social media, youtubes, loads of games etc. For them the exploration of OS or some software is not attractive anymore.

epolanski2• 1 year ago

Mobile too, I'm sick of those OSs updating every 18 months because some product person along marketing decides the wheel has to be reinvented otherwise there will be no buzz.

I have a harder and harder time navigating both iOS and Android as time goes, should be the opposite.

Same for Windows or MacOs.

walrus01• 1 year ago

Give today's XFCE4 a try, on debian stable or testing. It's a remarkably no bullshit GUI for use with xorg. You can of course still install all the gnome and kde libraries and run all the gnome and kde applications, though things will look a little bit mismatched.

interludead5• 1 year ago

The Windows dominance really puts things in perspective... Even with the rise of mobile and Macs making some headway, it's amazing how entrenched it still is on the desktop.

happyopossum• 1 year ago

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

I think if you went back and actually tried to use these old UIs you would realize that one of the reasons stuff isn't hidden behind layers of menus is that in a lot of cases the 'hidden' features just didn't exist back then.

anthk5• 1 year ago

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)

esafak5• 1 year ago

Trillian > Pidgin. What's Pan?

anthk5• 1 year ago

A news reader (NNTP). OFC, geek people would use SLRN, but we are mimicking Windows.

brandon2722• 1 year ago

Emoticons! I completely forgot about that term.

emidln• 1 year ago

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

ThinkingGuy• 1 year ago

qvwm was another window manager that sought to emulate the look and feel of Windows:

https://qvwm.sourceforge.net/index_en.html

bsnnkv• 1 year ago

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

InsideOutSanta2• 1 year ago

I think the desktop operating systems of that era were at a sweet spot. They were technically advanced enough to render good-looking, crisp color user interfaces. However, most people were still novices at using computers, so OS designers consciously designed their operating systems to be as clear as possible. Applications tended to be written for each individual platform and to follow its UI guidelines.

Windows 95, NT, System 7 and System 8, BeOS, and NextSTEP all had really clear UX. You always knew where to drag a window, what was clickable, where to find settings, etc.

cosmic_cheese14• 1 year ago

An aspect of System 7/Mac OS 8/9 that I find criminally underrated is how flexible it is.

For those versions, a good bulk of the “system” isn’t part of the system proper but instead implemented by way of extensions and control panels loaded at startup. The OS itself is extremely minimal, basically just enough to provide a barebones desktop and act as a substrate for apps to run on. Everything else, including “core” functionality like audio and networking, was implemented in an extension.

This meant that you could pare back the OS to be extremely lean and only have the exact functionality you personally needed at that precise moment and nothing else, and doing so didn’t require you to recompile a kernel or anything like that — just create an extension set that only loaded what you needed. This was excellent for use cases like games and emulators where you wanted every last ounce of resources to go to those, and nice for single purpose machines too (no point in loading game controller support on a box that only ever runs Photoshop and Illustrator).

Of course the way it was implemented is awful by modern standards, but the concept is golden and I think there should be OS projects trying to replicate it.

vanschelven• 1 year ago

However, most people were still novices at using computers

It has (to my surprise, initially) been my experience that "kids these days" are more novice at (desktop) computer-usage than the people of the 90s

stonogo• 1 year ago

"I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: 1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. 2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. 3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things." -- Douglas Adams

jemurray• 1 year ago

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

esafak5• 1 year ago

DESQview with a Q for Quarterdeck :)

xtracto• 1 year ago

Dosshell ha! Or xtree gold . Great times.

OsrsNeedsf2P• 1 year ago

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

fsiefken• 1 year ago

would be nice if it would have wine installed so it can run most windows apps for where there is no good linux alternative. xyplorer, sumatra, irfanview

perhaps a shell where root is mapped to C:\

doright2• 1 year ago

I like themes like this. The only thing that hampers the authenticity for me, and this isn't the fault of the author really, is the super high resolution fonts compared to what was available back then. There's just something charming about low resolution fonts that are readable enough on screen, probably nostalgia.

I think any type of pixel font authentic to a couple decades ago won't look good on a 4K monitor, unfortunately. It got to the point where I ordered a 1024x768 monitor just to play old games with a period system.

wobfan• 1 year ago

I actually would think less of this as a look back into the past but hopefully as a real alternative to the current DEs, which obviously then needs to have high res fonts. That would be nice.

selfhoster114• 1 year ago

I wouldn't say that's so "obvious". I for one would prefer the original pixel fonts, but size adjusted to fit my screen density. By hand, if required.

dfox• 1 year ago

Another issue with modern recreations of old UIs is that the dimensions are usually subtly wrong, which for me ruins the feeling. Some of that is related to the fonts having different height, but in many cases it is just that something is one-pixel off and just looks wrong. For the 95-style UI the common issue are control borders (especially the high-light side of "3d" controls), of which there is a huge amount of examples on the screenshot.

selfhoster114• 1 year ago

For 4K monitors, why not just pixel-double? Integer scaling will solve many issues introduced by pixel fonts.

doright2• 1 year ago

You're right in that there's nothing stopping one from doing so (I even use an integer scaler for old games on my main computer), it's just a tradeoff between "doing what's possible" and "having the most authentic experience one can".

If we're talking about the subjective experience of recreating "a child's bedroom computer" from the mid 90s-early 00s, a widescreen aspect ratio alone would be jarring, since my conception of a monitor for such a system is a 4:3 CRT. So for me, little else would reach that level except a system with the same aspect ratio and a similar DPI.

Not only that, but UI design itself has undergone many shifts since that era to account for the types of monitors those UIs are being designed for. There's not as much of a need for pixel-perfect design when vector-based web UIs dominate the desktop application space nowadays, relegating those that go back to older UI paradigms to enthusiasts who still remember earlier times. Or maybe people who develop for fantasy consoles.

I should mention while I'm at it that those sort of faux-pixel art shaders used in some games come off as quite jarring to me since I expect UIs to be meticulously laid out for the original screen size, not just for blowing up arbitrary content 2x or 4x on a huge widescreen monitor. I sometimes feel those are meant to represent a nostalgic feeling of some kind, being pixelated and all, but really it just makes me wish there were some alternate reality in which people still designed games and desktop applications for 800x600 or 1024x768 monitors again.

It's interesting at present how there's stuff like 4K and then there's the playdate with a relatively tiny handheld resolution, but relatively little interest for new content for those types of resolutions in-between.

jeroenhd• 1 year ago

Pixel fonts don't accurately represent the 90's UIs because we don't use CRTs anymore. The poor souls buying the very first terrible flat screen monitors may have used computers like that, but most of that era was experienced using smudgy, edge blurring CRTs.

You could probably create a CRT-filter-based font for high resolution screens (though you'd probably still need to optimise for subpixel layout for accuracy, even on 4k monitors).

Gormo8• 1 year ago

Most people vastly overstate the effect that CRT displays had on the appearance of legacy software.

Yes, very early on, when people used TVs or cheap composite monitors as the display devices for their computers, there were blurry pixel edges, bloom effects, dot crawl, color artifacting, and all the rest.

But by the '90s, we had high-quality monitors designed for high-resolution graphics with fast refresh rates, with crisp pixel boundaries and minimal artifacting. CRT filters overcompensate for this a lot, and end up making SVGA-era graphics anachronistically look like they're being displayed on composite monitors.

creatonez• 1 year ago

libpango's removal of bitmapped fonts in 2019 did serious harm to retro theming.

interludead5• 1 year ago

I love that you went all-in with a 1024x768 monitor

mfro2• 1 year ago

Is it really necessary to spin up an entirely new distro for an XFCE+GTK theme?

grayhatter2• 1 year ago

Stop spending time on things I don't care about

It's ok for people to waste time building stuff they think is cool. Did it need to be a distro? No but it also didn't need to exist. I'm glad it exists though, I think it really whips the llamas ass!

charcircuit2• 1 year ago

This attitude is why Linux based operating systems have such poor market share on the desktop. Opportunity costs are real. Friction is real. You don't see Windows creating a new OS for a single theme. You don't see macOS do it either.

corank• 1 year ago

I wouldn't call it an entirely new distro. It's just an Fedora image bundled with the necessary changes to create the UX. It doesn't provide its own software repositories. It's more like an unofficial Fedora Spin.

mfro2• 1 year ago

I see, it still seems like the kind of project that would be much better suited to a DE packge-group style release. I think very few people will want to reinstall their OS just to try it.

bitbasher• 1 year ago

It's not complete until you have a comet cursor and several IE toolbars that were somehow installed.

hybrid_study• 1 year ago

Or Microsoft Bob somewhere

vardump• 1 year ago

My childhood home's computer said 38911 BYTES FREE.

myself2483• 1 year ago

SYS 64738

jhbadger• 1 year ago

And mine just said ]▩ as it waited for you to type an Applesoft command. It is always weird when people say something is from "your childhood" as opposed to theirs. I remember the 1990s, sure, but I was already an adult.

ipcress_file• 1 year ago

Was that a C64? My VIC-20 had about a tenth of that!

WarOnPrivacy2• 1 year ago

Computers from my childhood wouldn't fit in my bedroom but I did bring punchcards home.

probably_wrong• 1 year ago

Mine said C:\>, because I was cool enough to have a 34MB hard drive.

herrherrmann• 1 year ago

This looks great with some apps that have matching themes, but I wonder if it quickly falls apart once you rely on apps with very non-consistent UIs (audio/video software, Discord, Spotify, Slack, and basically all other Electron-based apps). Although I guess there might be some matching CSS injection hacks available for the Electron ones?

haunter2• 1 year ago

A better modern middle ground imo is the KD3 continuation project https://www.trinitydesktop.org/

haunter2• 1 year ago

*KDE3

ranger_danger2• 1 year ago

Why are recreations of old UIs always differently wrong? Is pixel-perfection too much to ask for?

rikthevik• 1 year ago

Well, it is difficult and a lot of work.

Maybe _you_ can help.

ranger_danger2• 1 year ago

I have made pixel-perfect renditions before, but I would be worried to release them for fear of legal problems.

qwertox2• 1 year ago

`/var/home/afidel/`

There are some pretty good desktop environments for Linux which emulate the Windows desktop, so that old Windows users would feel at home immediately.

But I've never seen them emulate the filesystem, which is what took most old Windows users the biggest effort to understand. And the Linux filesystem raises it to a new level of complexity, which makes every old Windows users want to go back to Windows immediately.

With "old" users I don't mean experienced users.

Is there some kind of overlay which does all this `C:\User\afidel\Desktop` mapping for those users?

account42• 1 year ago

Surely you mean C:\Documents and Settings\afidel\Desktop

Or maybe it's not actually a real problem for users if these paths change.

qwertox2• 1 year ago

My Windows 11 C:\ no longer has a `Documents and Settings`. It still works, though. Windows 8 has it as a hidden junction targeting C:\Users, so it was already deprecated there.

nostrademons• 1 year ago

My childhood computer was a Mac. Anyone have a theme that emulates System 6.08?

theandrewbailey• 1 year ago

Not System 6, but 9:

https://github.com/grassmunk/Platinum9

MarkusWandel5• 1 year ago

Three modern desktop environments that I use:

- Windows 10/11. Especially in 11, it's easiest just to type the start of an app's name into the search box. As opposed to the two clicks it takes to get to the "traditional" menu where you still have to scroll to find it.

- Gnome (only on fresh Linux installs, usually replaced with Mate pretty soon). Has a smartphone-style app grid, but here, too, its quickest just to type the start of the app's name.

- Mate: Modern, but still has the Windows 95 paradigm (easy enough to collapse the two toolbars into just one bottom one). Still my favourite desktop environment.

Not all fancy graphic stuff is good. And don't even get me started on how hard it is to drag an app window to another screen these days - on Windows. You really have to find the 2% or so of the top bar that's still draggable and not cluttered up by other stuff.

teamonkey• 1 year ago

How do you get Windows to launch an installed app after you type the first few letters, instead of searching the web with Edge and Bing?

hn92726819• 1 year ago

You can download openshell and it will replace the start menu from the start menu from whatever era you want (XP, 7, 8, I think 10 too). It's open source as well

MarkusWandel5• 1 year ago

Type into the search box and when the app icon comes up, click on it.

Mogzol• 1 year ago

I used winaero tweaker [1] to disable web search, the search is infinitely better now.

You can do the same tweak by editing the registry [2] if you don't want to download an app for it (though the app includes a lot of additional useful tweaks).

[1] https://winaerotweaker.com/

[2] https://www.tomshardware.com/how-to/disable-windows-web-sear...

wavemode• 1 year ago

The decline in usability and organization of the Windows start menu over the years has been frankly staggering.

Whenever I see screenshots of the old menu I get pangs of nostalgia.

MarkusWandel5• 1 year ago

At least you get the right-click menu that has a lot of handy stuff in the old format.

MarkusWandel5• 1 year ago

I think they drank the Macintosh kool-aid and expect you to have all your commonly used apps pinned. In Win11 this even looks sort of like a Mac dock. Still made no sense to ruin the usability of the start menu which they invented.

leptons• 1 year ago

I use two free programs to return my computer usability to Windows 10 days.

https://open-shell.github.io/Open-Shell-Menu/

https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher

Without these I would probably give up on computers and go live under a bridge.

interludead5• 1 year ago

Sometimes I wonder if the people designing this stuff ever actually use dual displays day to day

geor9e• 1 year ago

I remember a couple kids with Windows 95 PCs at home. They seemed like such richie rich's. We'd all play Wolfenstein when we'd sleep over at their houses. My childhood computer was a WebTV, hacked to get dialup internet for free, on a 100 lb CRT TV from Goodwill. I finally scraped up the money for an actual PC some time in highschool.

brundolf• 1 year ago

Based on the description I was hoping it would include some classic DOS and Windows games to play via wine :)

jwitchel• 1 year ago

Usually the observation that “a widely used thing is objectively bad” is strong market signal for entrepreneurial opportunity in a big tam.

I for one would welcome a set of deeply integrated ui improvements in a Mac that included a better file manager, better window management, better desktop search, a contact manager just that worked, a messaging client that just worked, audio and camera controls that just worked, a calculator that didn’t suck, etc.

I’d pay at least $100 a year for that tool set.

deadbabe• 1 year ago

This looks neat, but the problem with all these nostalgia fueled projects is that if you use it seriously you’re basically LARPing being in a kinder past. Eventually it just gives an empty feeling, and you long for days when interfaces didn’t just look like this for fun, it’s because that’s what they simply were, and this was the state of the art. But you can never go back to those days.

aantix• 1 year ago

This looks wonderful to use. Is there video playback?

I’ve been thinking lots about the YouTube algorithm, how it’s based on engagement, not educational value, and how it’s such a huge missed opportunity for our kids.

So I’ve been building my own YouTube exploration app, for my own kids.

Email me if you’re interested in testing.

jim.jones1@gmail.com

flas9sd2• 1 year ago

seen the win32 aesthetic used for higher-order reasons: separating "work mode" from playtime. An extra user to do so on the same machine helps.

Connect the dots reading https://www.marginalia.nu/log/99_context/ and seeing the ui change in old vs new screencasts https://www.youtube.com/@ViktorLofgren/videos

fc417fc8024• 1 year ago

I get significantly more work done when I unplug my computer from the Internet.

I tried this, but documentation is often a huge problem. Increasing amounts of it are primarily online and not particularly straightforward to mirror locally.

flas9sd2• 1 year ago

you could try Zealdocs - it was a reason to go reading more of the projects own documentation pages. There are converters for whatever-doc/ssg-framework a project uses to Docset, the packaged format it relies on. Though ignoring that, how approachable the docs are to different levels of experience is another thing.

I learned heaps from treating a REPL as an (offline) escape room, in terms of how to get inline help, variable introspection and debugging tricks. Not every language offers a convenient one though.

haswell4• 1 year ago

Lately I've been strongly considering helping migrate my parents to Linux. Their needs are primarily web-based with some basic productivity tools mixed in, and Windows has just been getting more and more hostile. On top of this, they're at an age where they're now more susceptible than ever to various scams/attacks, and shutting down an entire category of problems by removing Windows from the picture is increasingly attractive.

I had forgotten that Chicago95 exists, but this might be exactly the right thing. They'd immediately find it familiar, and while the theme isn't the whole story, this would go a long way in easing the transition I think.

I miss this era of computing.

arcmechanica3• 1 year ago

My parents run linux because mom likes coupon websites and I can't repair the thing every week

veqq• 1 year ago

What are coupon websites / you can get free coupons from them(?)

ianmcgowan• 1 year ago

A chromebox mounted behind the monitor did the trick for me. Haven't had an emergency wipe/reinstall in years. Also, a tablet with keyboard takes some of the pressure off having a "computer" and you can go with iOS or Android depending on what phone they use.

haswell4• 1 year ago

I've been evaluating a Lenovo ThinkCentre m920q tiny I picked up for not very much money on eBay (the m720q models are even cheaper) and they seem like perfect machines for the task.

My parents use some tools and hardware that require a full OS so the tablet route isn't an option, but I'm starting to really like the idea of deploying a couple of these micro PCs.

mixmastamyk4• 1 year ago

Out of the frying pan, into the fire. Exposing your parents to total surveillance (from one corp to another) is not what I'd characterize as safe or friendly. Linux is fine these days if the hardware is supported, and you can use an immutable distro if extra reliability is warranted.

cryptoegorophy• 1 year ago

Why not just iPad?

haswell4• 1 year ago

I may have understated their needs somewhat. Most of what they do is browsing and document editing, but a few key use cases make a real computer necessary (or at least highly desirable):

- Document scanning

- Label printing (my mom buys/sells stuff on eBay)

- My dad still works and writes proposals/manages invoices/does complex taxes

At a minimum, they need a full desktop environment. Most of these things have decent 1:1 Linux alternatives, but one or two might necessitate a single-purpose Windows VM when all else fails.

Two pretty decent used micro PCs will also cost less than a single iPad.

txdv• 1 year ago

I installed ubuntu for my mother, she just needs to download pdfs and read pdfs, look at images, use gmail. Sometimes she opens a document with LibreOffice, but no power usage.

Seems to work, the maintenance is also now super easy, ssh, update. Something wrong and she needs support? I ssh, open up a tunnel and connect via remina to her desktop to explain.

I had a situation once when Ubuntu did literally not go into the Desktop Environment anymore, but all I did was update and upgrade packages and it started working again.

dpflug• 1 year ago

IMHO, Fedora's Atomic Desktops[^1] are the way to go for that. Automatic upgrades you can roll back if something breaks? Yes, please.

Universal Blue[^2] has some spins that got a glow up, but their dev team gives a bit of the "everything old is bad" vibe.

OpenSUSE's MicroOS[^3] desktops aren't ready for nontechnical people, but their atomic upgrade strategy is much faster and simpler (btrfs snapshots). I'm keeping an eye on it.

^1: https://fedoraproject.org/atomic-desktops/

^2: https://universal-blue.org

^3: https://microos.opensuse.org

haswell4• 1 year ago

Good call on Fedora's Atomic options.

My daily driver is NixOS and part of me really wants that level of predictability and rollback for them. For a brief period, I had started thinking through what it might look like to remotely manage this for them. But my ultimately goal is to help them achieve autonomy, and only step in when necessary.

acyou3• 1 year ago

What are the benefits/drawbacks of using this vs. actually running Windows 95 or XP?

I'm assuming the PC will be mostly used for "educational software" (games), which you would want to run on XP. What benefit is there to running Fedora?

ha1zum• 1 year ago

Fedora is a modern Linux desktop distribution with active development and support for modern softwares. While using an old OS such as Windows XP is a huge security risk, with very minimal possibilities of running modern softwares. Even major browsers like Firefox and Chrome won't run on XP anymore.

mixmastamyk4• 1 year ago

95 and XP are different in terms of software selection.

Linux Benefits: Security patches (safety), software updates (convenience), hardware support, freedom, and privacy. Not to mention a modern browser, terminal, TLS, and filesystems like exfat.

Fedora runs Wine as well. Maybe not every 95/XP program will run, but I'd guess a lot of them do. You could also run the others in Virtual Box when needed.

acyou3• 1 year ago

Ok, but you don't need any of that if you're just running 1990s/2000s Windows educational software on an air gapped OS with no Internet access, which is what you would want for this application.

Why would you want to mess around trying to get programs to half work on Wine when you can just have the real thing?

If you want your kid to have a web browser for educational purposes, I feel like you had probably might as well just hand them the iPad.

Gormo8• 1 year ago

Well, this is a modern OS capable of running modern software, for starters.

It's just Linux with a Win95-lookalike theme.

rauli_• 1 year ago

That Git GUI got my attention. Does anyone have an idea what it might be? The titlebar says aurora but when I searched for it all I got was an commercial product with AI nonsense stuck into it.

hexmiles• 1 year ago

From the look i suspect it is gitg: a git frontend for gnome.

https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Gitg

priteau• 1 year ago

Looks like it. The aurora title comes from the Git repository they are viewing: https://github.com/ublue-os/aurora

trts• 1 year ago

anyone remember XPDE? I'm not sure it was ever finished / packaged in any major repo but came across someone doing a walkthrough of it the other week and it looked pretty complete.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFKx8nCl1Vw

It is hard for me to distinguish between the functional simplicity of desktop computing in that era, with the overall excitement that the explosion of connectivity brought to the world. The internet was a lot of fun and had so many surprising corners. Practically all of it was personal, niche, or experimental content for awhile.

I wonder if Windows 9X was really all that exceptional, or if it was just what people remember driving with as they navigated the new world.

The best modern equivalent to that desktop paradigm I've found is LXQt, although when I use it I find I kind of miss some of the accouterments of the modern desktops.

grimgrin• 1 year ago

well this is simply adorable, down to the neocities hosted website

this already is my stack, tho I need to get over to the immutable variety. i'm on fedora 41 i3-spin, using chicago95. been using it for years, with the plymouth bit that gives you a proper win95 startup background during boot

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Plymouth

DiggyJohnson• 1 year ago

Sweet! I have a very similar desktop that I’ve shoehorned support for i3 into as well. Will do likewise with this.

zeroq• 1 year ago

This really resonates with me.

Every time I try desktop linux it feels like it's 30 years behind in usability.

fc417fc8024• 1 year ago

That surprises me. The major DEs (KDE and Gnome) have felt reasonably polished to me for quite a few years now, they haven't felt buggy to me for even longer, and they always felt like they catered to power users unlike Windows and Mac that actively get in your way when trying to customize things.

Several times they've been ahead of the curve and I've been surprised to learn that Windows or Mac were only just getting a feature that I'd had access to for years or more.

Of course at present I only use i3-alikes. I'd characterize those as a return to the sanity of the past.

eldjee25• 1 year ago

Sounds good

overgard3• 1 year ago

Neat! It's probably just nostalgia, but I still don't think any modern desktop has been as good as Windows 2000 was. Perfect blend of minimal without hiding things (well, excluding the Office 2000 menu hiding disaster which we will conveniently ignore)

skissane• 1 year ago

A Windows 3.x UI theme would get the childhood nostalgia going much stronger for me than a 95/NT4/98/2000/Me theme does.

Occasionally I boot up Windows 3.1 in a VM and play a game of Solitaire, for old time’s sake - I can run Windows 95 in a VM too, but it just doesn’t have the same pull.

Gormo8• 1 year ago

Win3.1 works great in DOSBox, and you can get an even more authentic '80s-'90s IBM-compatible experience using PCEm or 86box, which emulate a wide variety of PC motherboards, graphics cards, and sound cards.

karunamurti• 1 year ago

Nice. I use KDE + Kvantum + Expose theme and various Windows XP themes myself for Windows XP Experience.

CapsAdmin• 1 year ago

I've done something like this with the windows 2000 look from time to time, but something I found frustrating with theming xfwm4 window decorations is the non existent ability to create a horizontal gradient across the top of the window like in Windows 2000.

I believe this is the reason you cannot find a proper windows 2000 theme for xfce.

hattmall2• 1 year ago

What about the old school Packard Bell OS. With Kidspace and other "areas"

keyle• 1 year ago

How messed up is the current state of play than half the population yearns for the late 90s?

calvinmorrison• 1 year ago

if you're interested in golden era UI computing, check out Trinity Desktop which is a fork of KDE3.5

0dayz• 1 year ago

While neat, I would love to see a desktop that has similar design to either Windows XP/2000, classic Mac OS, or mac OS x cheetah.

Turns out they do have Windows XP: https://github.com/winblues/bluexp

interludead5• 1 year ago

I love that it's not trying to be a 1:1 clone of Windows 95, but more of a vibe-match

guest__user• 1 year ago

If we could get tabworks I would love that

mg794613• 1 year ago

That's just the chicago theme I'va had for years now on my XFCE, I think it's a bit lame to steal that theme (not from Microsoft but the maker of that xfce theme), put it in a repository, give it a different name, and pose it as your own work?

The repo literally adds nothing, just a name change.

bobbyraduloff• 1 year ago

I think the main difference is that it’s a fully set up installable ISO of Fedora Atomic XFCE with the theme and other tweaks preloaded which is a convenient thing to have, I guess. Also they do credit Chicago95 pretty much at the top of the README.

zild3d• 1 year ago

a bit lame to steal that theme

Do you mean reuse/copy/redistribute? Which is what the GPL-3.0+/MIT license that the theme uses is meant for?

Based on Fedora Atomic Xfce with the Chicago95 theme.

The readme has a direct link out to it in the 2nd sentence, that's pretty clear credit

qalmakka• 1 year ago

This is awesome. IMHO the Windows 2000 UI was the pinnacle of UX, it's still unmatched to this day. I'd love to see the SerenityOS UI ported on Linux+Wayland someday.

benrutter• 1 year ago

I love the niche of enthusiasm that exists for the Windows 95 UI. It's not an original point that aside from nostalgia it's a really clear and usable design; but that leads me to wonder, are there any modern UIs/themes/etc that are inspired by (rather than necessarily directly mimicking) Windows 95?

Would be interesting to see what a modern version of Windows 95 would look like, or what general design lessons can be learned from it's niceties.

forgotmypw17• 1 year ago

I can testify that Xfce+Chicago95 is great as a daily driver, and one of the most consistent GUIs across different distros (some differences in defaults still exist)

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

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