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

This looks nice and easy to use.

My hypothesis is today's "modern" OS user interfaces are objectively worse from a usability perspective, obfuscating key functionality behind layers of confusing menus.

It reminds me of these "OS popularity since the 70s" time lapse views:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=cTKhqtll5cQ

The dominance of Windows is crazy, even today, Mac desktops and laptops are comparatively niche

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.

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.

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.

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.