• wreckedcarzz@lemmy.worldEnglish
      151·
      2 months ago

      I am a fan of Vista, but 95 was my gateway drug to tech. I remember when I was like, 4? And I discovered that exes were like, huge! But lnks, tiny! Why do we have all these space-hogging exes anyway? Begone! Look dad, I saved us so much drive space! Why does nothing work now?

      And that’s basically been my method of learning ever since. How much can you really break, before it’s broken, and why? Let’s find out!

      • devfuuu@lemmy.world
        8·
        2 months ago

        I used to mess with my windows Millenium so much and deleting random files and changing regex and understanding how things worked that tech support guy was almost every 2 weeks there reinstalling the system for me. And that was how they started to give me copies of the cds to install myself so I wouldn’t bother them so much.

        • criticon@lemmy.ca
          3·
          2 months ago

          Getting the windows ME installation disks (floppys) was how I started learning my way around computers. I could experiment with the registry and other files and if I broke something I could just to re install the OS

        • dan@upvote.au
          3·
          2 months ago

          Vista did a bunch of great things… It added BitLocker drive encryption. It added the Snipping Tool for screenshots. It added a newer driver model that end up making drivers far more reliable than on Windows 9x. It required drivers to be signed, which helps a lot with security. It added UAC, which was initially painful but also really helped improve security (no more running every single process with admin permissions). It moved C:\Documents and Settings\ to C:\Users so we didn’t have to type that long path any more. And probably a bunch of others I’m forgetting

          It was kinda half-baked at the time, but these are all major defining features of Windows. It just took a while for them to become stable.

      • kautau@lemmy.world
        9·
        2 months ago

        Apple is really the only company that did serious research on building their initial UIs with their human interface guidelines. It’s clear they don’t anymore, and everything is about driving engagement or whatever, but like during the golden era of OS X, Tiger, their UI was far superior, and most desktop environments borrow much of that stuff stuff to this day. I now want a hat that says “Make macOS Tiger again”

      • Blaster M@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        2 months ago

        I prefer to make MATE look more like Windows, with the taskbar on the bottom… otherwise, I leave the Applications Launcher Menu as is.

  • ArcaneSlime@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    8·
    2 months ago

    I’ve been using Fedora (Gnome) on my laptop, but I’m going to try the KDE spin when my Framework ships. From what I hear it’s possible to theme KDE like, infinitely, including iirc a windows 95 theme? Ideally I’ll be able to keep that theme and a more “regular” theme and swap at will, only time shall tell. I don’t think I could do it 24/7 though.

    • HakFoo@lemmy.sdf.org
      1·
      2 months ago

      I always leaned into “Commercial Unix Workstation Circa 1993”. I’ve considered CDE/NsCDE, but a lot of the pack-in software is of limited value, so I’m going for FVWM on the desktop and MWM on the laptop.

      I should mod my big tower case to look like a brother of a HP 712.

  • ikidd@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    2 months ago

    I had to convince my cousin I bought him a Mac, but I didn’t want to support a Mac, so I tweaked KDE to look like OSX. He thought it was great how cheap he got a laptop, and was surprised Dell made Macs now. Had him fooled for about 2 years until he asked some kid to help him do something.

    I just shrugged and asked him if he’d have known if he hadn’t been told. Yah, cuz knows cows, not computers.

          • ikidd@lemmy.world
            02·
            2 months ago

            I run Manjaro on about a half dozen systems for the last 5 or so years. I’ve had very few problems. I’ve used a lot of distros over the last 30 years, it’s been the least maintenance.

            There’s a lot of unfounded Manjaro hate on this site, probably by people that have never used it and just parrot the Manjarno narrative. It’s pretty sad to see how it gets maligned at every opportunity.

  • Dizzy Devil Ducky@lemm.eeEnglish
    3·
    2 months ago

    I mean, if I had the time, skill, and drive, I’d probably go to Hell and back customizing my laptop to look like it’s running xp since I think that look still holds up to this day.

  • Marduk73@sh.itjust.works
    1·
    2 months ago

    i used to tweak windows to look like Linux.

    you mean move the task bar to the side or top?

    yep. and a wallpaper too.

  • RustyNova@lemmy.world
    1·
    2 months ago

    On the contrary, if you do that, some users wouldn’t even notice they switched to linux!

    Or you can do a little trolling