I've settled on XFCE. It just works. You have to turn too many knobs to make it work on weird DPI / screen sizes, but other than that, it's fine.
Recently, I fired up Win 3.11 in 1600x1200@256 mode to run SimAnt, and was pretty shocked at how much better it felt than most modern operating systems.
I kind of feel like the start menu + task bar were a mistake now.
It is nice having the bluetooth + network icon somewhere accessible, but maybe <ctrl>-space should just pop up a thing that lets you type program names + also temporarily hide all windows over 10% of the screen or something? That'd solve the problem of trying to find program manager to run a second program. Also, the windows in windows approach of program manager wasn't great. Still, it's better than most things out there these days. The icons are so... clean.
XFCE is also my go to. But I have moved on from caring too much about desktop environments as long as they don't get in the way. I went through a phase of trying pure openbox and all kinds of things and settled on XFCE. It doesn't do everything like I want but that's fine. I mostly open a terminal, a browser, thunderbird, some programming environment and a latex editor these days.
In my opinion, the versions of Mac OS with the Platinum theme (8, 8.5, 9) have aged quite gracefully. It's clearly not modern, but it also doesn't feel particularly old or kludgy or anything, and it's quite clean relative to modern desktops.
Same as Windows 3.1, and Windows 95, up to 2000. After some point computers began to be optimized for a non-technical person and here we go... Ads, auto-updates, pop-ups, bright colors, all this fucking desktop circus.
The older OS's with their simple interfaces and clear buttons were easier for non-technical people as well. I'm not certain who they're really optimising for now, exactly... shareholders?
Otherizing your users like this IS THE PROBLEM. Every technologist was once a "nontechnical person" (for whatever definition of that useless term you like) who learned and grew and thereby became "technical". The very minute you start thinking of your users in these terms you have lost the entire fucking game.
I broadly agree with your point, but I think the causal root of the problem is this industry arrogantly treats it's users as, to quote Mark Zuckerberg, "dumb fucks." We didn't always do this. It used to be better.
Not sure I understand you - what game, market capture? There are environments that remain more or less sane (e.g., FreeBSD, Xfce, etc) that don't play this game, if I got you right. I guess treating users so helps capture more of the market share, but it looks like there's only so much dumbfuckery one can inject into the environment until the curve begins to drop and dumb fucks themselves begin to run.
Philips just screwed up my TV. They've updated the firmware (of course, it was automated) to make home screen more of a dumb fucking experience with everything animated and self-playing movies jumping out at you for no reason, and so on... But the interface is now completely unusable - literally can't even launch YouTube. No amount of resetting helps. They also hid all the previous firmwares and I can't even roll back from a USB stick. I am a dumb fuck when it comes to TVs. And I will most likely be considering another brand next time.
I don't know how being empathetic to users correlates with market dominance, but I'd like to believe that doing sociopathic things like putting ads in the start menu or what you've described with your TV firmware would have a negative impact on adoption. At least that's how it should work in a sane market? But the market can remain irrational longer than we can remain solvent.
I think Apple struck a good balance for a while--and to some extent still does--at least in the OS X era of treating users with a bit of respect. Not trying to make an interface for "power users" or "nontechnical users" but instead just making one for "computer users".
It used to be that we made tools for people, and endeavored to make them well. Now we make tools that treat people (their attention in particular) as a cash crop to be harvested. Everything is about "engagement" and the like. I prefer using tools that had effort spent on making them useful, not effort spent on "monetizing" the user.
I think the thing tech nerds do of trying to distinguish between "technical" and "non-technical" users is extremely arrogant, and in a way adjacent to the downright sociopathy of "monetizing" a user base. If you care about making something good, don't start down that road. That's the game--making good tools that help people do good work.
>I fired up Win 3.11 in 1600x1200@256 mode to run SimAnt, and was pretty shocked at how much better it felt than most modern operating systems.
Maybe for older people who used it back then and have nostalgia for it, but I think at 35 even I'm too young to find that UI appealing for daily driving when linux has WMs/DEs targeted for minimalism, efficiency and productivity but in a modern way.
Apple has been doing personal agents for a while. They're crushing it so hard they must be tired of winning at this point.
For instance, the other day, the Siri button in maps told me it couldn't start navigation because it didn't know where it was. It was animating a blue dot with my real time position at the same time.
Don't get me started about the new iOS 26 notification and messaging filters. Those are causing real harm multiple times a day.
I was stuck on the part where they said neither party could provide cheap abundant decentralized clean energy. Biden / Obama did a great job of providing those things, to the point where dirty coal and natural gas are both more expensive than solar or wind.
So, which two parties could they be referring to? The Republicans and the Freedom Caucus?
He's few borders behind that bridge now. They've been injecting faults left and right, from hiding tweets and accounts as "unavailable" to sorting replies by spamminess and everything.
Oh crap. I just logged into HN to ask if anyone knew of a working alternative to the Claude Code client. It's lost Claude's work multiple times in the last few days, and I'm ready to switch to a different provider. (4.6 is mildly better than 4.5, but the TUI is a deal breaker.)
So, I guess it's time to look into OpenAI Codex. Any other viable options? I have a 128GB iGPU, so maybe a local model would work for some tasks?
Local? No, not currently. You need about 1TB VRAM. There are many harnesses in development at the time, keep a good look out. Just try many of them, look at the system prompts in particular. Consider DeepSeek using the official API. Consider also tweaking system prompts for whatever tool you end up using. And agree that TUI is meh; we need GUI.
I’ve noticed the opaque weekly quota meter goes up more slowly with 4.6, but it more frequently goes off and works for an hour+, with really high reported token counts.
Those suggest opposite things about anthropic’s profit margins.
I’m not convinced 4.6 is much better than 4.5. The big discontinuous breakthroughs seem to be due to how my code and tests are structured, not model bumps.
After playing around with vector db's for a bit, I got tired of this sort of thing.
There's a reason most of the industry has switched to letting agents grep + navigate within the results.
Come to think of it, it's probably the same reason "intelligent" search engines were so consistently hated by end users, and never really panned out during the early 2000's.
If we ever build another house, it's going to be attic-free with exposed conduits + hvac ducts / pipes on the ceiling. Every electrical box is going to have a 2" conduit (embedded in the wall) running up to a conduit that runs on the ceiling (if there's a basement, then down to the basement ceiling).
This would let us avoid stapling electrical lines + network cables to studs inside walls. Fixing shorts, adding circuits and upgrading network lines would be trivial.
We'd have to buy what, 1000' of conduit? There's no way that's a sufficient fraction of the cost of a house.
In Chicago, code requires EMT for all electrical, which can be annoying for adding a new run, but at the very least it makes it less likely for rodents to chew through or other interference.
After wiring my whole house with Ethernet and ceiling speakers, and now dealing with a couple leaky pipes and several problems from previous owners, I'm considering ways to make these things easily accessible/replaceable while keeping an eye toward aesthetics.
For nearly a decade, Chicago does allow MC cable in a number of circumstances, basically up to 25 feet branches where you don’t want to open up a wall.
Recently, I fired up Win 3.11 in 1600x1200@256 mode to run SimAnt, and was pretty shocked at how much better it felt than most modern operating systems.
I kind of feel like the start menu + task bar were a mistake now.
It is nice having the bluetooth + network icon somewhere accessible, but maybe <ctrl>-space should just pop up a thing that lets you type program names + also temporarily hide all windows over 10% of the screen or something? That'd solve the problem of trying to find program manager to run a second program. Also, the windows in windows approach of program manager wasn't great. Still, it's better than most things out there these days. The icons are so... clean.
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