[mrabcx]

Some of these old style themes are interesting for nostalgic reasons but then after a while you do realize that there are reasons why the world has moved on.

[pluijzer]

Seriously wonder what you think the reasons the world moved on is? Everything was so clear, neat and discoverable back then. Now everything needs to be hidden behind labels that may of may not be a button. And that is on a good day because many times I need to learn a new language where a rocket means pipeline and to download an artifact from it you obviously need to press the pinkish two squares thingy. But that is actually still a good day because nobody knew that to do [useful feature] you need to click the triangle next to the lightning bolt so nobody used it. Next update it will be removed. This update will also make the now remaining three buttons two times bigger because our CAD software needs to be mobile first.

[KnobbleMcKnees]

I kind of agree with this in that WIMP is a good philosophy for desktop UI design, and I feel that mobile has never really had the equivalent (hamburger menus falling out of fashion being the apotheosis of chasing rainbows IMHO)

But I feel we need only point to Microsoft Word as an example of how the statement.

>Everything was so clear, neat, and discoverable back then

just isn't true. The only difference now is that we have dozens of pieces of software in our lives now instead of the half dozen we used in the 90s, and we don't have one company monopolistically decreeing what the status quo of UI design is.

Meaningful competition is also why I think there is no WIMP in mobile. And that's a double-edged sword.

[WesolyKubeczek]

I can name only one thing that has been massively popularised since then in "professional" tools and which I wouldn't mind the older software had: command palette.

Press some hot key, and then type the name of your command in a pop up window with full-text search, autocomplete and a hint what the hot key and toolbar icon for that particular command is. Probably single most useful thing that became mainstream roughly after the ubiquitous CLI-phobia mostly went away.

[Pannoniae]

I dunno but there's only a few things missing from those old-style UIs. (Notably, hiDPI support for example)

This is probably a niche opinion but I think we have been steadily devolving and going backwards in terms of user design. We waste so much space, require so many clicks for worse usability than we started with. With the death of skeumorphism and textual UIs we regularly have to guess or hover buttons to find out what they are. Even scrollbars are starting to be unusable - I can barely see some of them because they are small, low-contrast and auto-hiding.

[xp84]

100%. And all of this regression is either in the name of pure vapid trendiness, or an attempt to supposedly make things “easier for non-technical people” — and yet these people still have no idea how to use their devices any more expertly than they could Windows 95. The only difference is back then people knew what a file was and where it was located. Now there are a lot of people who don’t.

TL;DR millennial shakes fist at cloud

[drougge]

These modern useless scrollbars really anger me.

I can theme some things (unless some modern packaging tech makes the app ignore my theme), I can make the ones in Firefox usable but ugly (with widget.gtk.overlay-scrollbars.enabled and widget.non-native-theme.scrollbar.style), and so on. But I can see where we are heading. Scrollbars are one of many UI features that were too useful, so they must be destroyed.

I did not expect to feel so old at such a young age.

[jtode]

I wish I could have a very long discussion of this. It is my belief that people think they want new stuff because marketing has told them that. The corporate internet is like someone took that process and welded their finger to the fast forward button, endless iterations of pointless redesigns, galaxies of UXes that only a few people in Boise Iowa ever visited, it's nuts.

I want the internet back where everything looked like that phpbb stuff. You just got the information then. Now you have to solve the CCS/JS puzzle first.

[nonethewiser]

Phpbb had a very windowsxp style. Im always trying to pinpoint what that is.

I think it includes smaller, denser text.

And something about the borders. Chunkier, more ornate, or griadients/light or something.

[Sakos]

I'm not sure I agree. I used the Chicago95 theme (with some added 98 icons) for a good 2 years. The only reason I stopped was because I left the job I was at and couldn't be bothered to replicate the experience on my private device and haven't really been using Linux as my main driver. My team found it hilarious and I thought the theme was quite usable. I find modern Windows windowing far more egregious and unusable. I can't even think of anything you might mean that would justify moving away from the 90s themes or UI concepts.

edit: I've recently been using Chromafiler (https://github.com/vanjac/chromafiler) and I'm realizing we've gone off in completely the wrong direction since the 90s.

[CalRobert]

Moved on to dark patterns and dumbed down interfaces. Personally, I really miss mnemonics. Alt+underlined letter for_everything_. But having an underlined letter for everything died out and keyboard nav means a lot more memorization.

[accrual]

I'm going to miss when the ability to double-click the top-left corner of a window will close it (and right-click brings up the window menu). This has been around since the Windows 3 days and still persists in 11, but it's going away in some places - e.g. you can't do this in most browsers, and the new file Explorer in 11 dropped it to support tabs.

[_dain_]

Office still has this.

[anthk]

Yeah, to worse.

On Windows XP, beside the childish theme, the window buttons were very usable.

Ditto with XFCE with some xfwm4 with a round-surface squared buttons on yellow, green and red, you can find it under the last items of the list.

Let's talk about the icons and usability. On overy modern Gnome3/XP icon theme, the icons seem contrastless and very hard to see.

Meanwhile, the Tango icons are still standing a lot on the file manager's white background, with clear outlines.

[xp84]

People hate on the default blue Luna theme, but there was a perfectly professional Silver version, and the later (black with orange accents) Zune Theme was one of the most attractive UIs I ever got to use.

[antegamisou]

Personally Windows 8 UI and after is the reason I'm never going to touch this specific OS again. In fact, I find it an even bigger hindrance than the monstrosity Windows Updates is.

[Paul-Craft]

I agree. I think Windows XP is where the windows UI peaked.

[mountaineagle]

Can you name a few of them?