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Comment by 1_player | Hacker News Reader

If you like the Windows 98 era of UI design, I recommend you having a look at the GUI for the UNIX-like embedded operating system QNX. The care, tactility and readability of that interface is in my opinion unparalleled, and hidden behind a operating system few have heard of, and fewer even used.

https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/qnx621

I honestly think anything else produced since is worse than this, and since flat design has taken root, UIs have fallen off a cliff both in usability and style.

I tend to get very Patrick Bateman-like when appreciating old UIs, the colour combination and choice of fonts on off-grey backgrounds, while modern interfaces just feel like there's no personality or warmth to them. Just flat uppercase #222 sans text on flat white background.

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Looking at those screenshots, I can definitely see your point.

For me, all the greys date it a little, but other than that it’s a simple, clean, elegant and highly consistent UI!

The consistency is most notable. We’ve lost so much of that in modern operating systems (mainly Windows and macOS).

It feels very approachable.

EDIT: Now having watched the SerenityOS video(!) all the same comments above apply. Really nice work.

Looks a lot like Haiku OS.

Yeah, while I haven't spent enough time in Haiku[0] to get familiar with really it's design language, it is so responsive, readable, and discoverable that it forced me to remember all that we have lost in personal computing because of... I'm not entirely sure who to blame, a lot of people who aught to be shot out of a cannon into the sun, I reckon.

[0] sadly it doesn't even quite meet my relatively minimal almost-never-used laptop use case due to the only RDP client that worked at all being so horrifically out of date that it can't understand modern RDP authentication mechanisms.

> the only RDP client that worked at all being so horrifically out of date that it can't understand modern RDP authentication mechanisms.

Do you mean rdesktop? Indeed it's pretty old and probably should be disabled, so I just did that.

Did FreeRDP not work, then? It seems we had a 3-year-old version, so I just spent the morning updating it to the very latest (2.4.1). Seems to work fine here for me, I connected to a remote Windows machine successfully. (The port is missing a bunch of features, but the basics seem to work.)

In the future you can report issues to HaikuPorts directly, or feel free to ping me on IRC/Matrix/XMPP.

Thanks, I will take a look when I get home. I was using rdesktop via BeRDP and on its own, but it choked on the auth portion. IIRC FreeRDP failed to launch. Also tried the KRDC port but it never gave me the option of using RDP despite its claims.

I was a little annoyed at the gigantic pile of packages that came along with those last two options, but there's no need to rehash rehash that argument. I do wish there had been an obvious way to clean those up after removing the applications they supported though.

FreeRDP is CLI-launch-only, so if you tried to start it via the GUI, that may have been your problem. We should probably rework BeRDP to use FreeRDP instead of rdesktop, but that's more involved.

I think KRDC may be hardcoded to use "xfreerdp", so it won't find the Haiku variant.

Yeah, "autoremove" isn't implemented unfortunately, nobody has gotten around to that yet. It would indeed be nice to have.

I was launching it via the CLI. As I said, I'm afraid I do not recall the reason it failed to launch. If it does so now that you have updated it I will forward what information I can through the appropriate channels.

Which itself is a carbon copy of BeOS, as far as UX is concerned.

An operating system a want on my laptop for so long now (native boot)...

BlackBerry's tablet (which I loved; combined with a cheap Curve and a $40 AUD a month prepaid plan, I had unlimited internet access on both devices, super neat) was based on QNX if I recall correctly! Though it had its own touch UI on top of it.

ive seen first hand at an amazon sortation/distribution warehouse i worked to construct just last year used QNX for their automated conveyor and barcode sortation system, i guess since its a real-time OS? I love the UI as well and it was really neat to see QNX in the wild.

Loved it when it came out. I tried the floppy demo a few times. It was impressive.

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