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Comment by tigerlily | Hacker News Reader

Vaguely related I'm finding UIs are so flat, we must be getting close to single gold atom thickness. I wonder when bevels and skeumorphs will be back? These days there's tons of nostalgia for 90s magazine style serifs, but without the gonzo UI. What gives?

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Bring back Blue Steel on Enlightenment!

https://i.redd.it/2ua33higrtic1.png

For the youngsters out there: Enlightenment was released at a time when Unix desktop environments were mired with twm and Motif, or OpenLook if you were adventurous. These were very sparse (twm), or trying to ape the Windows 3 look and feel (in the case of Motif). This was a time where many display drivers only supported 256 colors, and your entire X desktop would shift colors when hovering over windows that had different palettes.

Enlightenment was one of the first window managers that used bitmapped assets for window decorations. IMO, it was one of the first UI things that distinguished Linux and its community from that of the older corporate UNIXes.

It also made less sense on those corporate OSes because they usually used X terminals over the network where sending all those bitmaps would slow things down.

I always preferred HP VUE. It looked great for its day. It was later boringified by Sun and IBM to make it more corporate and released under the name CDE. Because of course IBM wouldn't stand for nice colours.

> I always preferred HP VUE. It looked great for its day. It was later boringified by Sun and IBM to make it more corporate and released under the name CDE.

TIL - I have used CDE in the past but didn't know that it's origin was HP VUE.

> Because of course IBM wouldn't stand for nice colours.

I remember starting with DOS and then SunOS. The setup we used had both basically in terminal mode all the time (don't know if SunOS had its own DE). Then came Windows for Workgroups and for some reason, even after coming from an all-TUI setup, I wasn't blown away with the UI.

However, later we ordered a beefy Solaris machine (it came with its own tray that had wheels) - thats when I saw CDE for the first time. Don't know what it says about my aesthetic sense, but I thought it was the most beautiful DE I had seen; I loved exploring it. Also, the DE colors were in alignment with the color palette used for casing/monitor/mouse - a cohesive package. Also remember the positively giant 17" CRT with Sun mouse which felt much more precise compared to the cheap desktop mice we had. I was very impressed - maybe that was the start of my bias towards *nix.

I always hated CDE. It was so muted. HP VUE was super fruity loop: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_User_Environment#/media...

Also, HP used mostly sans-serif font and CDE the (in my view) more boring serif ones. It was really like the IBM business suits had screwed it all up. Unfortunately HP refused to support VUE any longer. I still have it here though on a HP-UX 10.20 machine.

Sun was good at design of their machines (much better than HP) but not the UI in my opinion, their java desktop was also super ugly.

Of course tastes differ :) So your mileage may vary.

If memory serves well (I only have 3583 bytes free ;) Enlightenment was one of a generation of X window managers that implemented bitmapped theming, for example fvwm, fvwm95, aftertep, windowmaker, icewm... it's just that Rasterman took the bitmapping to the next level.

Still waiting for them to drop Magnum.

Been like twenty years since IceWM was my daily driver but as I recall things like that were relatively easy to implement.

Seems they still have similar examples on their screenshot page: https://ice-wm.org/screenshots/

Oh man that was my desktop for about 3 years.

Had an already fairly obsolete dual Pentium 3 Dell precision workstation which was spray painted black because it had gone embarrassingly yellow and looked like someone had peed up it.

Edit: looked it up, Precision 420. Matrox, ECC, dual P3, SCSI disks. Felt like royalty owning that.

Oh, nostalgia.

I remember rotating between Enlightenment, Fluxbox and WindowMaker.

Came to say almost exactly that. It’s interesting how much nostalgia there is for peak 90s UI, but not even Linux distros can escape the flat, uncontrasting, large padding interfaces.

I don't know about anyone else but in my mind the best UIs of the 90s were all pretty much created by or heavily influenced by Kai Krause.[0][1] The interfaces for Kai's Power Tools[2] and and Bryce[3] are pure 90s nostalgia for me.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kai_Krause

[1] http://kai.sub.blue/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kai%27s_Power_Tools

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryce_(software)

I love when people activate regions of my brain that have been dormant for 30 years.

Probably because most people actually prefer them, now that the vast majority of people are past the point of needing skeumorphic metaphors to understand user interfaces, because we grew up with computers. I would certainly throw my computer out and go live in the woods if I had to deal with beveled, gradiented garbage with dense, tiny interfaces cluttered with stuff with no proper spacing to let it breathe. When I upgraded mg family computer from Vista to 8 as a kid, or when iOS went from skeumorphic to flat a bit later, I was so relieved, it was like getting a cold glass of water.

I've gone full Chicago '95[1] mostly because I struggle so much with parsing flat GUIs. Having the UI be a carbon copy of Windows 95 is mostly a side-effect, it's simply the easiest way I've found to get a user interface where I'm not constantly confused as to whether UI elements are interactible or not, which elements are resizable, and where icons have easily distinguishable colors and details instead of being elder futhark line-art. I've gotten it to do a surprisingly good job of applying this theme, not just to GTK widgets but also Qt widgets (although they pull a bit more toward Windows XP).

Only apps that refuse to comply with native styling is web-browsers and IntelliJ.

Although I've found an old qtwebkit based browser called Falkon that, despite running an outdated engine, does a decent job of rendering most websites I visit, while having a working native scroll bar and mostly not fucking up the native controls with CSS crap. It's what I daily drive for most of my surfing.

My eyesight is kinda garbage and this theming is mostly an accessibility accomodation, not so much a nostalgia thing. For all the attention accessibility gets in UI/UX circles, it's kind of ridiculous how Windows 95 absolutely takes most modern UIs to school in that regard. 100% of the software I struggle to use is born out of state of the art design sensibilities.

[1] https://www.marginalia.nu/uses/screenie.png

You may want to supplement Chicago95 with an experimental GTK4 theme from the b00merang project https://github.com/B00merang-Project/Windows-95 You will have to install it manually by overwriting your user-level GTK4 config, but then it will give you proper styling with the latest apps, including full support for mobile UX 'convergence'.

(Since it seems that the b00merang repo has gone mostly unmaintained, it would be nice if it got imported to Chicago95 itself.)

It really is kind of amazing that we have spent so much time and effort on the "UI problem" for desktops when really, whether we want to admit it or not, Microsoft nailed it with Windows 95. By the end of the year we'll probably have another new desktop environment project going somewhere in Linuxland by someone who just swears that they've picked up on something everyone else, through 30 years of daily use, missed.

Its not that amazing. The reality is that this is simply your personal taste that the waste majority of humanity wouldn't agree with you on.

Frankly, almost nobody in the world uses that type of Desktop Environment anymore. So if its so great and perfect and superior, you would think it would be more popular.

Hard to base an argument on popularity when there isn't a choice.

You have to fight hard to get access to this type of desktop environment. With the singular exception of SerenityOS, no operating system offers an easily accessible paradigm that isn't 14 shades of flat, low density and low contrast.

All the padding is because of touchscreens. It's ruined the web and now ruining desktop. Low information density, superfluous animations, icon-ese everywhere, losing tooltips, it all sucks.

Touchscreens don't really need that much padding, anyway. You need some padding around active areas for touch actions, but a touch target can still be pretty small, e.g. consider your on-screen keyboard, where each key counts as a separate target. Areas of the screen that simply display information or content should be totally unaffected.

It's kind of crazy that Gnome only went "full flat" in september of 2022, with Gnome 43. Such a stupid move, in addition to making it harder to actually change the theme.

Even though Cosmic has a similar flat look, I'm still looking forward to it since theming does seem to be something they're open to.

You mean like Goldene [1]?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40071956

Looking back, one of my regrets is that I didn't make my own Window manager, or at least customize or skin one with longevity and stick to it. I am pretty much tired of being jostled around by UX engineers repeatedly reinventing the wheel in dozens of lumpy ways. The fads just keep going around and around and around.

Thanks to your comment I finally understand what flat means in the context of UIs :)

> I wonder when bevels and skeumorphs will be back?

I don't really understand the purpose to be honest. With the exceptions of interfaces that are explicitly designed to simulate physical environments, what's the point? Flat designs are a logical consequence of form reflecting function, you're interacting with digital, binary elements that are on or off. Skeuomorphism existed because familiarity of mechanical or analog elements was maybe useful for someone who didn't know digital interfaces, but we've grown out of this.

> Flat designs are a logical consequence of form reflecting function, you're interacting with digital, binary elements that are on or off.

A finger or mouse is not a "digital, binary element", it needs to be actively pointed at and grab stuff. The whole point and "function" of 3D depth in UI is to highlight things that you can aim at and grab.

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