Also, if you want a 'modern' Motif desktop mimicking the mid-90's, install emwm, xfile, classic-colors, xpdf (the old Motif) one, XImaginag and Nedit for XFT.

https://fastestcode.org/emwm.html

For a 'browser' you can use BFG, it runs gopher/gemini and gopher://magical.fish, gemini://gemi.dev and gopher://hnhgopher.com will look fine:

https://codeberg.org/luxferre/BFG

For IRC and Usenet, just use any terminal IRC client against libera.chat (it will look the exact same under XTerm) and... SLRN against the servers from https://eternal-september.org

And, as for Emacs, just install/build Lucid Emacs, get a nice Unicode font such as Go for sans as monospaced variants, it will look 100% close to Lucida fonts.

At ~/.Xdefaults:

emacs.pane.menubar.font: Go-9 emacs.font: Go-9 emacs.fontSet: Go-9

At ~/.emacs:

    (set-face-attribute 'default nil :family "Terminus" :height 100)
    ;; Proportionately spaced typeface
    (set-face-attribute 'variable-pitch nil :family "Go" :height 1.0)
    ;; Monospaced typeface
    (set-face-attribute 'fixed-pitch nil :family "Terminus" :height 1.0)

Oh, 'links -g' can open HN perfectly fine,fore sure. Not so mid-90's, but close.

All these desktop environments start out blank. By contrast modern desktop environments help you understand what you can do by showing always-present visual guides, cues to what’s running now, & launchers. Windows 95’s Start Menu is the most iconic tipping point for the trend of making it easy to see what you can do with your computer.

Current LLMs show a blinking cursor. Yes they can call tools, run code, and generate images in styles you’ll only know to ask for it you’re an art expert. But right now you have to know those capabilities exist. Even experts forget to use them at times. And novices get frustrated that an LLM can’t sort a list of names - even though all they have to do is ask it to write code for itself and the task will be easy.

What will the AI “Start Menu” be!

SunView with NeWS was a powerful 2D graphics engine. It ran Adobe Display PostScript. The Sun workstations ran BSD unix, had good networking, protected memory, virtual memory and so on. And it did all that with 16 MB of memory. That's not a typo... 16 megabytes. Today our computers have 1000 times more RAM, but do our computers work better? Hardly. The NCD terminals from 1990 worked just as well as Chromebooks today. What have we accomplished in the last 35 years? Computers back then weren't powerful enough to play movies. Other than that I can't think of much I would miss if I had to go back to the old NCDs.

https://galeriawm.hol.es

In Spanish, but the screenshots speak for themselves.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33398600

142 points by zdw on Oct 30, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 74 comments

I think so too. But this time with modern drawing primitives. Instead of lines an circles we need shaders and textures.

In the end, even the most modern UI is nothing more than a terminal: Low bandwidth input from keyboard and mouse events and low bandwidth output (like draw checkbox at x,y). The rest is done by some drawing or blit routine which can be entirely managed on the GPU.