Not that I want the UX To _look_ like Windows 95, but I sure do feel nostalgic how fast and responsive the desktop “felt” back in those days. These days, it is a rarity to see a native app that is as responsive. It feels like all native apps burn through CPU cycles in cosmetic things and animations that it feels sluggish in comparison.
That's not how I remember it. Windows 9x was slow and constantly crashing. Booting and launching programs took ages. To be fair, the performance problems had more to do with the available hardware back then, but still.
Hard to believe that a few system crashes per day was the norm. You just hoped you hadn’t lost too much, would re-boot and go get a drink while you waited.
Due to that “training” I still hit CTRL-S obsessively even when it hasn’t been needed for years.
>Hard to believe that a few system crashes per day was the norm.
It certainly wasn't for me! At the time I had my first it job in a local pc repair shop and we had a series of 24h burn in tests. If the newly installed pc crashed during it, there was something wrong with the hw. My personal windows 95 definitely didn't crash more than once every few weeks of heavy use. Programs did crash, explorer did crash, but the actual BSOD was quite rare.
It was definitely the norm, but it seemed to have more to do with hardware and drivers and certain programs, so people's experiences varied dramatically.
Sounds like you just happened to luck into reliable hardware with well-written drivers.
For me, something about using CorelDraw with my video card led it to crash probably about once every twenty minutes of use.
On the other hand, if I just stuck to working in Word and wasn't trying to simultaneously play MP3's while also downloading files, I'd be fine.
I did a lot of optimization on my systems. Not drastically hacking crap, just obsessively pruning unnecessary services and software etc. Registry cleanup tools. Etc. Also always had as much RAM as I could afford.
I'm not sure if there was a correlation there but it sure felt like it. Seemed like folks with constant blue screens had PCs filled with crapware. Maybe the difference was purely hardware or, purely luck, I dunno.
> Due to that “training” I still hit CTRL-S obsessively even when it hasn’t been needed for years.
Same. I psychotically hit cmd-S or :w after every line of text I write; there was one time my computer crashed and I lost my entire 4th grade book report because I didn't save. I didn't know how to touch type then, so it took forever for me to retype it. Never again!
You better keep that habit when working in big MS Word files. It still randomly crashes and I've lost some amount of work several times due to this shit.
Same here, but because I used to forget to save before tabbing over to something else that depended on the changes I made. Now I never forget to save...
Contrast that to today, when you have editors like Sublime Text which will reliably keep your editor tabs (or "buffers") around for as long as you need them, even if you never save them (yourself - of course the editor does that behind the scenes).
A quirk in my config that I haven't bothered to fix makes it so my formatter runs post write. I've unfortunately picked up the habit of <esc>:w<cr>:w<cr> in rapid succession.
I had a carefully crafted 98SE CD that was created using a tool called (I think) 98lite. It let you remove components and set defaults. That was rock solid for me, and used so few resources. Boot times were very quick considering the hardware at the time. The all-important post-install defrag made a difference.
I didn't switch away from 98SE on my home computer until XP SP2 (which I immediately theme to look like 98 because I hated the primary colour nonsense).
Actually, every Windows installation from then until I switched to Linux was "shrunk" and tweaked (can't remember what tool I used, but it wasn't an official MS thing). Having a full licenced copy of InstallShield at work was extremely handy too - every app was repackaged into a fully automatic installer and bundled with the OS. It almost felt like a cloned PC. In fact when I got a job managing fleets of PCs, that XPCD Builder script was like a superpower.
Maybe you used nLite? I credit this tool for making me into a Windows power user. Taking the OS apart checkbox-by-checkbox gave me a good understanding of how the pieces fit together and what is required vs optional.
Chicago95 is a theme for XFCE. I run XFCE with i3wm on a SSD and it is insanely, perversely fast. Most of the default apps bundled with XFCE start instantly. The system boots within seconds, no need to consider any type of fast boot, hibernation etc. Native apps boot within seconds. Electron apps are slower, because Electron.
A typical XFCE system on startup will allocate around 500MB of RAM, but with the way memory management works on Linux I think it doesn't really need all of that and lets go of it if something else does.
It is kind of a barebones desktop environment, but certainly has a lot more stuff packed in than Win9x did and for a little extra disk space you can cherry pick whatever Gnome and KDE utilities you want anyway.
So I think this phenomenon of slow modern desktops is a Windows/Mac problem, if you want one that's lightning fast, they're out there.
The big one is desktops that I like, working out of the box: Cinnamon, XFCE or even MATE (can install more, of course, but these ones are supported and tested). XFCE is really snappy and lightweight, whereas Cinnamon is pretty polished and will also be familiar to folks coming from Windows (nice distro to recommend for that, for people with limited Linux experience).
Another big thing is not having snaps forced down my throat like Ubuntu increasingly seems to do. In that regard, Mint is closer to Debian, although if you want to, there is nothing holding you back from using AppImage, Flatpak or anything else (even snaps).
Compatibility that is otherwise pretty close to Ubuntu, as well as a long EOL period: after the demise of CentOS, Ubuntu remains one of those distros that you can just "install and forget about" (hopefully with regular updates), both locally on your workstation and in any of your servers. I can even base my containers on Ubuntu/run it on servers (pretty much every provider has support for it) but use Linux Mint locally and have pretty much everything work.
Now, frankly I could also opt for Debian without too many issues (they also have an LTS variety, albeit less advertised), but Mint is basically Ubuntu without some of the things that annoy me - boring and dependable, mostly just works.
Only annoying thing: if you ever need to setup an apt repo that points to packages that are compatible with Ubuntu and the script for doing that gets the release codename, it might get one that doesn't correspond to the correct Ubuntu release, but instead will grab the Mint name. Sometime need to fix that manually in the apt repository list with a text editor.
I install the system using the Xubuntu ISO. Presumably if you install the xubuntu-desktop package on some other flavor it will be similar but if for instance you installed it on top of e.g. Kubuntu you might still be getting KDE services loading when you log in.
Desktop became slow when windows and widgets became objects, as in the OOP sense.
The transition from hardcoded primitives to objects that would be created and destroyed on the fly slowed things down a lot, but that is the price to pay to have code that runs on very different platforms, also adapting itself to different screen sizes and resolutions, dynamic objects, etc.
I doubt it makes much difference. At least in C++ objects are just structs unless you’re using polymorphism, and tracking a few things like the position of a window can’t be very intensive anyway. It’s probably more things like loading assets and rendering effects and background tasks that slow it down
One of the interesting things about Apple vs. Microsoft in the early days was how differently the two companies handled the mindblow that was the GUI work at Xerox PARC.
Apple adopted the UI conventions, and refined, polished, and extended them to create first the Lisa system and then the Mac. But early Mac OS ("System" in those days) was very much based on a procedural, Pascal-based API without much in the way of object orientation. Your app had to handle the close button and the resize grabber itself, for instance -- actually listen for mouse events, determine if there was a click in the appropriate region, and close the window or buzz in a loop drawing the resize rectangle. Utility functions were provided to help with this process, but it still had to be part of your main loop. Dialog boxes were defined with Pascal records.
Microsoft, by contrast, hired some of the Xerox PARC engineers away -- guys like Charles Simonyi. The design of Windows reflects this, as Windows more closely reflects the Xerox PARC work at an architectural level. It had from the very earliest days something like an object system. A window belonged to a window class, which contained a single method (the window procedure or WndProc), that processed messages from a flexible and extensible message system. Windows could even be "subclassed" by substituting a different window procedure. This more flexible design allowed the system to provide the necessary decorations (minimize and maximize buttons, a system menu, resize grips and even scrollbars) and the client window would receive messages from them to let it know that, for example, it had been resized or scrolled. The actual mechanics of how these decorations worked could be delegated to the system. The API was still in C, not OO like we know it today, and was a bit cumbersome to use -- but it had more of those object-oriented ideas than early Mac did.
Of course, Steve Jobs didn't make the same mistake twice, and for his first post-Mac system, NeXT, he had it based all around object orientation.
In C++ it would still be very fast. I doubt you'd notice the difference.
The turning point was MS switching to C# for everything. Now built in apps load slow because the code is not JIT compiled yet, and I bet other issues...
That's not how I remember it. Windows 9x was slow and
constantly crashing.
It was like... both.
If you had a did your own clean Windows installs, had an extra $100 of RAM, defragged the HDD regularly, and disabled crapware and unnecessary services etc. the UI felt real sharp and instant.
However this was not the typical experience. Typical experience for most people was that you clicked the Start menu and then listened to the HDD grind away.
True that crashes were more frequent and annoying. However, that’s not what I was talking about. While it worked, the UX felt responsive. Moving the mouse around clicking things, opening files and folders, dragging stuff, scrolling, window switching, even the clicks felt responsive. These days the whole thing feels like “smooth” in a bad slow way. As if every action spends a good 20% of time first doing some animation and then doing what you really intended.
This. I was recently backing up some stuff from an old Mac OS 8 machine and it was amazing how snappy a lot of things feel.
But if something is not on RAM you can clearly notice it.
At least at the beginning not everybody had hardware that supported DMA for disk access (and those that had it, not always had it configured properly).
I think it largely came down to how much RAM you had in your system.. 4MB was mostly okay, and sluggish, 8-16 much more usable... 32+ was downright snappy.
I recall using an AMD 5x86@133 with 64mb ram with Win95 then NT4 and it was very usable at the time. It wasn't the best for gaming, my cpu/gpu weren't great, but for general work/productivity use it was pretty great for the time. I had received the wrong ram by mistake, and it worked... was supposed to be 16mb.
edit: I also recall paying extra to add in a cache module on that mb.
My Intel Pentium 4 machine usually runs reliably and responsively, but you have to be careful: the default Windows picture viewer instantly freezes the PC if you click 'next image' before the current one has finished loading!
Haha not Windows 10 :) Actually it was Windows XP... I cannot remember which Service Pack, but I believe it is the second. One day I'll try NetBSD on it...
The terrible performance you remember is from slow hard drives and just a couple megabytes of RAM. Retro computing enthusiasts today have win 95 running on solid state flash disks and 32 megabytes of memory and it flies.
My Windows 11 laptop at home is quite snappy. My Windows 10 laptop at work with more RAM, a better SSD, and a newer, faster CPU, is not. It's because they virus scan and authorization check every single file access, every time. Even starting small programs like Notepad takes at least 2 seconds at work whereas it's instantaneous at home.
Same story at my previous job. Actually, my work laptop had been faster than my personal one for a while because I had gotten a special purchase due to the nature of my work and IT didn't know what to do with it (we contracted IT services out to a 3rd party. We were a small non-tech company). But then someone caught wind and I was made to figure out how to get IT's tracking software installed for them. And that's when I started working from home all the time (a situation I could manage as the non-tech company wanted me to own the code personally. Yes, a little weird, but it was all a tiny sure other for the company).
I got a dell XPS 15 for work, 2022 one. 32gb 12700h. It’s slow and loud. Especially compared to my personal laptop. Not enough to be annoying tho. But then IT decided they want some software installed to make sure they can monitor for bad processes. Wow it’s annoyingly slow now for development because every process is analysised.
I find that doing almost everything under WSL is a much better experience, if you can spare enough ram to the environment. Mostly because the monitoring software doesn't run inside the WSL/Ubuntu env.
I think nostalgia might have rewritten your memory. Spinning rust disks meant apps would take 5-10 seconds to load, moving and resizing windows was laggy and left behind repaint artifacts, and anything network related took approximately forever
Yes - what he described was the experience using BeOS, which had an amazing I/O scheduler, but switching back to Win95 was noticeably worse on latency. A big problem was I/O deadlines - I knew so many people who burned “coasters” because Win95 and classic MacOS couldn’t reliably feed data to a CD writer with a small buffer. Audio capture and data acquisition were similarly fragile if you needed latency guarantees lower than hundreds of milliseconds.
One of the biggest things that contribute to the feeling of slowness today are all the animations /transitions etc. The very first thing I do when installing a new version of gnome is disable all of it. It suddenly feels 5x faster.
Windows 9x feels snappy and responsive -- on a VM on modern hardware. On the hardware of the day... yeah, it chugged. You needed about 16 MiB of RAM and a graphics accelerator for acceptable performance in 1995, and that was quite a beefy system for that year.
I got the wrong ram (64mb instead of 16) and will say it ran like a dream on a 5x86-133 with a cache module. NT4 ran really well on there as well for the time. OS/2 didn't behave quite right, after NT4 I never really looked back. Kept a 9x partition for games only.
Initial releases of KDE 4 were absolute pigs. They spent several years trimming fat from those until it started to be useful for me around KDE 4.9 or so. Plasma 5 and onward have been excellent.
My experience was different as my first Windows PC was already quite old when I got it, so I was used to random delays in UI feedback. My current M1 feels like what you've just described.
I tried to run DSL (damn small linux) on my P60 around 2003-4 and felt what you've just described. The UI seemed to respond before the interaction!
Then, a few months ago I spent a an evening or two messing with Microsoft Bob (Win 3.11) then Win 95 trying to code a simple website compatible with the tech of the time, using the tools available at the time. Everything felt so snappy.
I don't mind animations applied thoughtfully (e.g. short UI transitions emphasising the state change), but what annoys me the most is animation jank, drops in frame rate, unpredictable delays. Older Windows versions weren't that great in that regard either (do you remember how much time it used to take for the "Open With" dialog, or event file context menu to show up on Win, when you right clicked on a file in Win9x-7?)
I miss, when I had a jailbroken phone, briefly being able to set the animation time to zero. Everything is so much faster, even with hardware that can more than handle the GPU stuff. It’s now (on fast hardware) the actual animation frames themselves that are literally wasting my time.
I wish Apple would let me watch each of their oh-so-clever animations one time to give these “designers” their satisfaction, and just jump-cut to the final state from that point on.
I think Android KitKat 4.4 had an animation time slider hidden in some "Developer" menu that could be trivally enabled. It made my phone feel so much faster.
>for the "Open With" dialog, or event file context menu to show up on Win, when you right clicked on a file in Win9x-7?)
That's because you installed a ton of 3rd party shit which were registered as a handler for this/all filetypes so when the Explorer needed to show that menu it had to query every registered handler, extract an icon and if those .dlls weren't in the RAM, then you waited for the slow disk access.
