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

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Reactions to a Windows 95-Style Desktop

  • Some see Win95-era UI as horrifying to revisit (BSOD, registry), others as deeply comforting and “relaxing.”
  • Several say they could happily do most of their current work in a Win95/2000-style shell; modern UIs feel more confusing, less discoverable, and more distracting.

Old-School UI Design vs Modern Flat/Branded UI

  • Depth/skeuomorphism is praised for clearly signaling what is clickable; flat UIs are described as cognitively taxing and ambiguous.
  • Early systems (Win95, NeXTSTEP, System 7, BeOS) are remembered as highly coherent and consistent; controls were standardized and UX research-driven.
  • “UI as branding” is widely blamed for killing usability: visual designers and PMs prioritize aesthetics, marketing, and metrics over HCI principles.
  • Complaints include: 1px borders, hidden controls that only appear on hover, icon-only toolbars without labels, vanishing keyboard shortcuts, and constant UI churn driven by “newness,” not improvement.

Windows, macOS, Linux: Usability and Configuration

  • Windows criticized for registry hell, ad cruft, inconsistent menus, and degraded start/menu usability; nostalgia centers on 98/2000/XP/7.
  • macOS seen as cleaner but increasingly buried in layers of menus, invisible “defaults”/CLI switches, and permission prompts; its menu bar partially shields it from hamburger-menu minimalism.
  • Linux desktops (especially XFCE, KDE, Mate, i3-alikes) are praised as “no bullshit” or power-user-friendly, though some still find desktop Linux “30 years behind.”

Nostalgia, Authenticity, and Pixel-Perfect Recreation

  • Many note uncanny-valley issues: wrong spacing, borders, titlebar heights, anti-aliased fonts, and high-DPI screens break the illusion.
  • CRT-era appearance and bitmap fonts are hard to reproduce convincingly on 4K LCDs; some resort to low-res monitors or integer scaling.
  • There’s tension between wanting a serious, modern, high-res daily driver and wanting pixel-perfect historical fidelity.

Desktop Linux, Distros, and Theming

  • Some question whether a full distro is needed vs a theme/meta-package; others argue preconfigured images reduce yak-shaving and are “just for fun.”
  • Fragmentation and endless “slight variant” distros are seen by some as hurting Linux desktop approachability, though others defend this as a feature of freedom.

Learning, Distraction, and Nontechnical Users

  • Older OSes are remembered as great learning tools: simple, stable mental models; minimal popups; kids could explore and understand the whole system.
  • Modern systems are criticized for constant notifications, focus stealing, sluggish UIs, and complexity that overwhelm children and older users.
  • Several discuss moving parents to Linux or Chromebooks to reduce malware, noise, and maintenance, sometimes themed with Win95-like UIs for familiarity.

Security, Legacy OSes, and Retro Use

  • For true retro gaming/educational software, some advocate air-gapped real Win95/XP; others prefer a modern Linux base for security, updates, and browsers, using Wine/VMs where needed.