Blue95: a desktop for your childhood home's computer room

As a kid, the OS's supported me in learning. They were simple, intuitive and rewarding. I'd click around and explore, and discover cool things like a Wheezer music video, or engaging puzzle games.

There was no one who could help me when I got stuck, beyond maybe an instruction manual. I just had to figure it out, mostly by trial and error. I learned so much, eventually being able to replace hardware, install and upgrade drivers, re-install the entire OS and partition the hard drive, figure out networking and filesystems. It built confidence.

Now my kid sits infront of an OS (Windows, Mac, it doesn't really matter) and there's so much noise. Things popping up, demanding attention. Scary looking warnings. So much choice. There's so many ways to do simple things. Actions buried deep within menus. They have no hope of building up a mental model or understanding how the OS connects them to the foundations of computing.

Even I'm mostly lost now if there's a problem. I need to search the internet, find a useful source, filter out the things that are similar to my problem but not the same. It isn't rewarding any more, it's frustrating. How is a young child meant to navigate that by themselves?

This looks like a step in the right direction. I look forward to testing it out.

There're also performance issues. Building muscle memory (which means offloading tasks from working memory, leaving it open for learning) can't happen if you're constantly trying to figure out when the system is going to actually respond to your input.

> Things popping up

This is one of my biggest frustrations with modern GUI computing. It's especially bad with Windows and Office, but it happens on iOS and macOS too to an extent. Even though I've had Office installed for weeks I still get a "look over here at this new button!" pop-up while I'm in the middle of some Excel task. Pop-up here, pop-up there. It's insane the number of little bubbles and pop-ups and noise we experience in modern computing.

Omfg I do not need national political news shoved into my face in on the left side of my taskbar while I'm trying to focus on work, thank you Microsoft, k thx bye!

Humans hate being bored but only dick-around and learn things like this when they're bored. Speaking personally, I guess.

Since the 90s we've found "better" ways at "curing" our boredom. Put this UI on a modern OS in front of a kid today and they would just download Steam, Chrome and Discord. And be assured, they're very proficient at the in-and-outs of those platforms.

Just some random thoughts I had, not sure any of it tracks...

> I learned so much, eventually being able to replace hardware

As a young teenager in the early-mid 2000s, I learned the hard way what the little standoffs are for by killing a motherboard by screwing it directly into the steel case :')

Never made that mistake again, that's for sure. And I share all the same experiences as yourself

This is so true. The most frustrating thing in the world to me is waiting for the UI to catch up to my actions… that should just never happen in 2025. Not only is it frustrating to wait, but as you elegantly stated it forces the menial task to enter working memory.

Yeah I just wanted to check the weather...

We largely abandoned an unbelievably efficient form of human input in favor of big fat dumb slow touchscreens. Can you imagine where we'd be as a species if we got our shit together 25 years ago and standardized a few of the most important keyboard shortcuts and layouts and that was the default everywhere? I won't advocate terminal-only, but even classical GUIs with windows and icons and all could have been much more efficient if keyboard input and navigation was given priority instead of the comedy of using a pixel-precise indirect pointer to fart around a virtual screen select some button when...there are buttons under my fingers.

I think part of it is that ubiquitous internet access.

Take that away so you have a standalone computer that you "run programs on" and it becomes simpler.

Even on gnome, I regularly have applications stealing focus when they decide they're the most important thing. As well as being really annoying, it's a security risk if an application steals focus while you're typing your password or otp key

You can turn that off, it’s the first thing I do on Windows. I agree you shouldn’t have to though.

Apple has kind of made things worse in the recent macOS, where my phone's notifications show up on the desktop now. Like, man, I was already drowning in them before anyway, I don't want them on two screens now.

You probably already know this if it was bothering you, but just in case: System Settings -> Notifications -> toggle off "Allow notifications from iPhone".

Win32 would buffer keystrokes so that a sequence of commands wouldn't be lost even if the UI took long to respond (e.g. if a dialog took long to open), but that has mostly been lost in the era of web apps and other similar bullshit.

I would also argue, regardless of what mobile OS you're on, quieting, delaying, or disabling notifications on a regular basis (and taking stock of what you let through) is prudent.

Google Android phones do so freaking much of this too. Open the Google app (or swipe left from the home screen on the Pixel Launcher), gone are the days where it's a copy of their original homepage and is just a search bar, now it has news... Go to the search bar, and it shows trending searches. Die in a tucking fire!

> if an application steals focus while you're typing your password

Definitely. Bitwarden does this ironically. It will pop-up "UPDATE AVAILABLE!" half way through typing a passphrase. Why not suppress the pop-up if the user is typing, or make it non-modal? Every few days I am interrupted just trying to unlock a vault.

> Actions buried deep within menus.

Maybe they are though in CS school that every layer of abstraction is better. I don't see other explanation for this level of stupidity.

You can definitely disable the "swipe left" thing on the launcher.

Microsoft has a similar thing on Windows with Phone Link.

We did standardize a lot of keyboard shortcuts and layouts. And it was fairly widespread, even, with both Windows and macOS retaining some bits of it (sadly, fewer and fewer with each new update).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access

Did you install an extension for that ? By default Gnome prevents this and shows a notification instead. It's extensions like Steal my focus that allows focus stealing

Modern web (and web-like) apps all too often don't even bother supporting keyboard for anything other than text field input. What I find especially infuriating are the dialog boxes where the only thing you have is a textbox and a button, and yet you cannot press Enter to submit the dialog once you finish typing - nope, you have to reach out for the mouse and click that button.

This is why I commonly have a trackpad in addition to a mouse when I use Windows. Literally, mouse on right, trackpad on left. It's much faster to use the trackpad for annoyances like these. I also find that trackpads are ten times better for scrolling.

I did the exact same thing - mounted a shiny new board straight onto the case, powered it on, and… nothing. Spent hours troubleshooting before realizing I'd basically shorted the whole thing

I'm always shocked whenever I see someone having hundreds or even thousands of unread notifications. It pains me to see that instead of controlling their feed to only what interests them, they've just let everything pile up forever, completely unread.

For example, on Discord, I sometimes see people with unreads for every server, and dozens to hundreds of completely unread DMs, just because they don't know that you can turn notifications off for the stuff you don't care about. Instead of doing that they just learned to ignore everything, leading to a disorganized mess.

I'm somewhat familiar with what typically leads to this (usually something like ADHD), but when you let it go for so many years it's such a big task to fix it that the fixing never happens and you're just kind of screwed for eternity.

In Discord, I have no unread servers and no unread DMs, despite being at the server limit. This is because all my servers are completely silenced and all my DMs are read immediately. My only unread email is one I marked as such because I still plan to reply to it soon. I have the attention for every single notification because I aggressively optimize the notifications I receive to the point where they all are typically things I care about. Back in the day I would instantly report every email to SpamCop, typically in under one minute, but I eventually stopped doing that because there's no point.

I simultaneously do and don't understand people who just submit to a flood of irrelevant garbage. Control it!!

Yea, but you can't make it a home screen like when you swipe right.

I used to think I watched TV or scrolled Reddit because I didn’t have the energy to pursue more interesting things. I blocked Reddit and TV. Turns out I have plenty of energy, those were just stealing it from me.

> Instead of doing that they just learned to ignore everything

Leading to notifications being ignored, and not mattering at all.

A well curated set of notifications that only gives you the things you actually need is superb, but incredibly difficult to get right.

Learning how to ignore all of the noise is probably a more valuable skill for a future where control is slowly wrestled away from the user. A certain Black Mirror episode (Fifteen Million Merits) comes to mind.

> Leading to notifications being ignored, and not mattering at all.

You found my point! Some notifications may be important, but if one has learned to ignore all notifications, then they won't catch the important ones anymore.

When I get important notifications, I can act on them immediately, because I have not learned to ignore all my notifications, because I don't need to. I have taken care to block any notifications I don't care about, leaving only the ones that I do.

> A well curated set of notifications that only gives you the things you actually need is superb, but incredibly difficult to get right.

Ehh... maybe it's incredibly difficult to fix once you are already drowning in them, but since I immediately nuke anything I don't like from orbit, and have done so my whole life, there are a lot fewer things I don't like than if I hadn't to do that.

> Learning how to ignore all of the noise is probably a more valuable skill for a future where control is slowly wrestled away from the user. A certain Black Mirror episode (Fifteen Million Merits) comes to mind.

I have a really hard time ignoring noise. I think that is because of my autism. Ignoring noise would be a nice skill, I guess, but I feel significantly better when the noise is simply not there in the first place. I'd imagine most would, but for some reason I seem to break a lot more easily when uncomfortable.

I share your nostalgia. I did learn a lot by exploring Amiga OS and later Windows 98 without anyone to help or an internet connection. It was fun, but we had time to spend back then. Today time feels much more scarce and I no longer appreciate if I have to learn by trial and error. Now it feels like you have to keep up with the tech progress, which is crazy fast. And youth has too many things to do that are more appealing, like social media, youtubes, loads of games etc. For them the exploration of OS or some software is not attractive anymore.

There should be a club for people like us: we learnt the hard way to double-check and never ever fully trust ourselves, especially with hardware connections.

The first Mobo I ever purchased with my own money was insta-fried exactly like that, it still hurts a little to think about that.

That sounds like a lot of work. Alternatively, I can just ignore them all. I don’t care if there’s a red circle with a number in it. I don’t notice it and it doesn’t bother me.

Yeah I agree. The trial and error mentioned in GP needed a good amount of focused time commitment, the sort of thing at a premium in the modern attention economy of tech.

The worst example of things popping up I've seen is Youtube's sponsored content warnings. These immediately appear above the active click target (video thumbnail) when you move your mouse over it, hijacking the expected action there. If you click things as a single action like every skilled mouse user does (rather than pointing and then clicking as two separate actions), it's physically impossible to react in time to avoid clicking them. And because only a part of the click target gets hijacked it's too inconsistent to learn to avoid it by intuition. I've clicked them accidentally several times and every time it's been disturbing because it feels like some serious and unexpected error.

> That sounds like a lot of work.

Again, it is a lot of work if you have to do it at once. If you've done it naturally over the course of your life, you would never have had a big pile of things to take care of at once.

> Alternatively, I can just ignore them all. I don’t care if there’s a red circle with a number in it. I don’t notice it and it doesn’t bother me.

Suit yourself. Personally, I care about responding promptly to certain things, like instant messages or emails, but I don't appreciate unwelcome distractions.

See: https://vxtwitter.com/AutisticCallum_/status/190533113360614... & https://vxtwitter.com/AutisticCallum_/status/190533113707064...

It's not really a matter of not knowing it can be done, it's that the mental effort of curating it is not really worth it (short term, anyway), because then I have to decide what's a worthwhile notification and what isn't.

> > Learning how to ignore all of the noise is probably a more valuable skill for a future where control is slowly wrestled away from the user. A certain Black Mirror episode (Fifteen Million Merits) comes to mind.

> I have a really hard time ignoring noise. I think that is because of my autism. Ignoring noise would be a nice skill, I guess, but I feel significantly better when the noise is simply not there in the first place. I'd imagine most would, but for some reason I seem to break a lot more easily when uncomfortable.

I share this discomfort, but only in physical space. I struggle with visual and audible noise in the real world, but my screen I’ve become very adept at ignoring. Giving up on inbox-zero in my personal life and ending up with 2000+ unread emails in my personal mailbox is where that started.

> my screen I’ve become very adept at ignoring.

I unfortunately don't share this ease. As an example, I have to use custom CSS to completely remove blocked messages from Discord, because once I know a blocked message exists I can not seem to ignore it. The only way to properly protect myself from blocked users is to ensure that I can never even know they're there.

I do a similar thing for muted DMs. Once I know that someone has sent a message, I cannot seem to avoid checking the message. The only way for me to properly take a break is to ensure that there's no way for me to accidentally discover the existence of new messages. So I have some JavaScript that completely removes muted DMs from the list so that I won't even see them jumping back up to the top every new message.

I don't know what causes this to happen or how to fix it, but I do know that ignoring things has always been nearly impossible for me. Whenever there is anything I need to protect myself from, I need to also protect myself from ever noticing any related activity.

Maybe this is some sort of OCD, I'm not sure. Pretty sure it would meet the criteria, I guess.

> Personally, I care about responding promptly to certain things, like instant messages or emails, but I don't appreciate unwelcome distractions.

Sure, if I’m being paid to respond right away then I will. The “instant” in “instant message” describes the delivery time, not the required response time. Email, IM are things I all treat asynchronous communications. Anything urgent should be a phone call, ideally. If there’s a particular email address I consider important I’ll make a separate inbox for it.

Otherwise, I find sort of fun to see how big the number can get.

On my work email I just mark everything as read at the end of the day so the number starts over each day.

I'm reminded of the aircraft crash investigations where the pilots would have a frequent warning, learn to ignore it, then miss the important one.

unnecessary notifications hurt us all. Wonder how many people have turned off the emergency/amber alerts because of non-critical use of the system?

do you turn off amber alerts? emergency alerts?

Discord is really awful about this, and that's one of the many reasons I dislike it. Its defaults are bad. I should be able to set, at the account level, the default that servers don't send me notifications. I believe by default, I only get @everyone and @role notifications, which is only a few taps per server. But every time I join a new server, I have to remember to do it. If I didn't actively care about notifications from one particular server, I'd just block Discord notifications entirely and stop managing them in their app at all.

I'm using PopOS, so there's a chance that it's related to that, but no I haven't. And I've tried the gsetting that supposedly helps prevent it. I've only ever seen Zoom and VSCode do this; I get the feeling that they don't quite follow the same conventions that 'native' Linux applications use, or use some trickery (as they see themselves as the most important thing on your computer).

> Wonder how many people have turned off the emergency/amber alerts because of non-critical use of the system?

I turned them off because I don't care about any of the things they consider critical.

I never had anything steal the focus and was highly confused to read gnome here. I highly suspect PopOS is doing something weird theire. No matter how bad vscode is and integrates that never happened to me.