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flowerlad

> It was beautifully coherent.

And that's because it copied heavily from NeXTSTEP of the late 1980's.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTSTEP#/media/File:NeXTSTEP_...

That beveled look was invented by Steve Jobs's team, and copied by Microsoft.

I would much rather use NeXTSTEP look & feel than Windows 10 or even OS X.

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It's besides the point where the ui style came from; It was coherent because it used the same ui patterns and styles everywhere.

But your enthusiasm for NeXTSTEP really makes me think of this Steve Jobs anecdote:

https://twitter.com/imranchaudhri/status/1374934903188414467

I want to go to the alternate timeline where a major distro actually picked up the GNUstep ball and ran with it, and built out a full desktop based around WindowMaker. It's still faster and more fun than most modern desktops.

What is so special about NeXTSTEP and WindowMaker? I see it often brought up and I actually used WindowMaker briefly at some point in the past, but I don't "get it". Could someone explain?

> It's still faster and more fun than most modern desktops.

And doesn't even look (too) dated when paired with a compositor: https://i.imgur.com/YJkDMjr.png

If Wayland could just give me this I'd switch to it in a heartbeat, versus possibly-never :(

Hi Lammy, perhaps this project works with Wayland? https://github.com/trunkmaster/nextspace

This looks wonderful, thanks for the link! I'll spin up a Linux VM and play around with this when I have some time.

NextStep was awesome but the computers were high-end expensive workstations. Windows 95 works on a 486 without FPU.

Check out the hardware info in this screenshot:

https://infinitediaries.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/NeXTS...

"High end expensive workstations" with 25-MHz 680x0 processors.

OpenStep ran on a 486 without FPU.

exactly. it would be a bit anachronistic but you could conceivably run NeXTSTEP on a 486 without a FPU right now https://github.com/trunkmaster/nextspace

You don't need an fpu at all to draw those bezels do you?!

No, but the Nextstep UI was generated with PostScript, so lots of floating point and rasterizing. It basically treated the screen like a PDF.

I remember seeing the early peeks at Windows NT in Byte magazine. Jaw dropped. Reading about features had me drooling over the future. It was similar to Win 3.1 at the time but with a much more serious look. As a pre-teen I was obsessed with the asthetic and the idea of having a multi-user security model and built in networking. This was during a time when you had to buy expensive products like Lantastic (hardware and software) to have a network in your small business.

Some are still going for this kind of "physical" look : https://factorio.com/

I can't belive no has yet mentioned Litestep

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiteStep

It was my favorite ui replacement on Win98/95 until Win2k come out.

I remember Litestep. It was very good. You would edit the wm config using notepad and then do hot reload. Unheard of in the Windows world.

Feel free to contribute to GNUStep. :)

That looks like AmigaOS in higher resolution?

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