127 pointsby FinalDestiny2 hours ago22 comments
  • bmurphy197634 minutes ago
    I want more stuff like this. The era 20 years ago (e.g. Enlightenment) was way more fun than the bland monotonic design we have these days. If you like bland modern design, great, that should be an option as well, but we should still have good variety.
    • Sohcahtoa8213 minutes ago
      > If you like bland modern design, great,

      I don't know why anybody would. It takes all the lessons we learned about UX from user testing in the late 90s/early 00s and throws it all away to produce something that looks "clean" and "sleek", at the cost of being useful. Discoverability? Who needs it?

      EDIT: Though I do enjoy skeuomorphism, I do think the TFA goes a bit too far.

      • Zigurd6 minutes ago
        Debatable. IIRC Bell labs conducted a study of whether Unix command names should be changed to something more meaningful than cat, sed, grep etc.

        They found that words that convey some meaning related to what the command does had little or no effect on the user remembering what the command does. I strongly suspect skeuomorphism similarly has no claim on functional advantage.

        Discoverability is good, but it's probably got a little to do with the icon.

    • anonzzzies15 minutes ago
      I look back at my Enlightenment desktop with joy. I guess many people hated all the tinkering with drivers & settings etc, but I loved it. Spending a few weekends getting a computer running with Linux and Enlightenment exactly like I wanted it to and then actually using that as my main driver for years are very nice memories.
    • Beijinger11 minutes ago
      What do you mean 20 years ago? I still use enlightenment today (Moksha Desktop)
    • javier212 minutes ago
      e16/e17 was a lot of fun, and it was fast.
  • Retr0id30 minutes ago
    > the kind iOS 6 had

    > The room is ray-traced

    imho, part of the charm of iOS6 was that everything was baked into native-resolution textures.

  • uolmiran hour ago
    This is very funny. But I think it would make me feel like I was working inside of Papers Please or some similar game.
  • seemazean hour ago
    Man, first Felix Reiseberg[0], then OpenCode 2.0[1], and now this in the last 24 hrs. Really giving off heavy Myst vibes. They are briefly interesting encounters, buy I deeply hope this isn't a legitimate UI trend.

    It's hardly even skeuomorphism, it's a almost digital twin with rendered with Phong.

    [0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50082470

    [1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50094994

  • bovermyer42 minutes ago
    I love this. Hopefully we start to see more experiments like this.
    • cr125rider9 minutes ago
      I like when designers are creative.
  • brink39 minutes ago
    This is lovely. I really hope society returns to chasing beauty again. We need it.
  • DonHopkinsa minute ago
    [delayed]
  • ragazzina9 minutes ago
    > Windows are sheets of paper on a walnut desk.

    The calculator is a sheet of paper..

  • nntwozz43 minutes ago
    Flashback to TabWorks.

    Compaq Presario 486 1994, I was 10.

    And yes, played Myst on it.

    Tempus fugit…

    • xbar33 minutes ago
      Did it have that tiny rollerball on the side?

      We bought a bunch of TabWorks-based Compaqs back then for a medical office where I was doing IT work. I thought it was slick at the time.

  • acheron43 minutes ago
    Fantastic. Giving me memories of MS Bob. Put a talking animal assistant in the corner and you’ve got it. Oh, and you could connect the assistant to an LLM of course.
    • cogman108 minutes ago
      Exactly what it reminded me of. Although a lot more functional.
  • Beijinger8 minutes ago
    memory 4 GB (DEsk itself 200-450 MB)

    This makes it interesting. I may try it out. Moksha uses 200 MB to 300 MB of RAM

  • shaolinspirit11 minutes ago
    fascinating, I recently was also exploring various skeuomorphic design pattern in Flutter and now this!
  • RugnirVikingan hour ago
    the "paper windows" idea doesn't seem to have been done with as much soul as the rest of the ui. Just a turned up corner. I reckon something done there could really tie this togetjer
    • alehlopeh36 minutes ago
      A “dog-eared corner” in fact. The readme is painful to read if you have an aversion to Claude prose.
      • 12 minutes ago
        undefined
      • Retr0id28 minutes ago
        fwiw that is the standard term for that kind of fold (to the extent that it has its own wikipedia article), but I agree that the claude prose is gross.

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

  • iamnothere42 minutes ago
    This is neat, it’s not for me (I prefer extreme minimalism) but I could see how some would prefer it. I like how we’re getting more desktop options now thanks to wlroots.
  • esperentan hour ago
    I love this, at least from the screenshots. I'll test it out tomorrow. I hope this kind of design makes a comeback.
  • jacknews21 minutes ago
    How come the 'documents' are floating above the wood surface creating such deep drop shadows?
  • xbar35 minutes ago
    Love it. Maximize skeuomorphic design.
  • PanicAdminan hour ago
    I see that this very bad idea is returning from the 90's.
    • ChrisMarshallNY7 minutes ago
      Personally, I found skeuomorphic design to be something that I really enjoyed, for a couple of days, but rapidly got sick of.

      That may have more to with the skills of the implementors, as opposed to the concept, as a whole.

      I do find modern "flat" design to be less "fun," but I get a lot more done with it.

    • austinthetaco39 minutes ago
      I reckon a lot of the people clamoring for these things are gen z or younger first discovering the idea of customizable OS's and are now going through all the awful decisions that were made before. Pretty sure I've seen a version of this skeuomorphic desktop like 15 times at this point.
    • brink40 minutes ago
      What's so bad about it?
    • atoniorobbert42 minutes ago
      [dead]
  • ranger_dangeran hour ago
    Yes! Please bring back the soul we had with retro OS GUIs (and the speed)... it's time for a resurgence. Especially with new systems/RAM/GPUs/etc. not being a thing for quite a while for a lot of people now.
  • KerrAvon18 minutes ago
    okay, now use this for a month and report back

    I don't hate skeuomorphic design but come on man

  • poontangpoo36 minutes ago
    [dead]
  • adamWow43 minutes ago
    [dead]