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[Repurposed from a Reddit comment here.]
Non everyone hates "jaggies" with a burning passion, or loves anti-aliasing. Well-designed GUIs for relatively low-res displays, even monochrome ones, can and did look great, and arguably, the fact that modern GUIs tend to need antialiasing, truecolour, transparency, scalable vector icons and so on is merely a sign that the former attention to detail in design has been lost.
Some of us miss the way 1990s desktops look.
Different display standards have different needs for good reasons.
Moving images are different to static ones. High colour depth has different needs from intermediate colour depth which has different needs to low colour depth -- my first computer had 8 colours, total, plus a Bright setting, and a resolution of 256*192 pixels.
The garish colour scheme of the original AmigaOS 1.x desktop -- white, blue and orange -- was chosen to deliver high contrast on an NTSC TV set, so it would be legible, because most owners of the early Amiga computers couldn't afford monitors.
The original Mac had 384*256 pixels, in monochrome, so every pixel in every icon was hand-picked and positioned for clarity. In situations like these, you very definitely do not want anti-aliasing even if it's possible (which of course it is not, in monochrome).
But by MacOS 8 and 9, most Macs could display 16-bit or 24-bit colour, so the desktop used it if you had it -- within the constraints of the same OS design, because the same OS could still run on machines with a mono screen.
The rounded rectangles of the original classic MacOS design were a feature that Steve Jobs insisted upon -- they were a hallmark of its design.
Look through a gallery of OS GUI design over the ages and see how it developed:
Compare and contrast the frankly clunky visual design of Smalltalk, the environment that inspired Apple's Lisa and Mac, with Susan Kare's hand-drawn mono icons. Each one is a miniature masterpiece, and she is justly famed for them.
The elegant pinstripes and bevels of Apple's Platinum theme in MacOS 8 and 9 are widely held to be the acme of traditional GUI design, from an age before flat screens, before graphics accelerators, before universal "true colour" on multi-megapixel hi-res screens, let alone HD or 4K screens.
Personally, I found the clear crisp greenscreen fonts of early IBM MDA screens, and even DEC VT-series terminals, on long-persistence phosphors for less flicker, more restful on my eyes than the glaring white Retina screen of the 27" iMac I'm looking at right now.
I gazed at those for 8 hours plus a day without eyestrain.
Colour screens were a step backwards from those for text-editing or coding.
So, no. Not everyone hates jaggies as much as you do. You will find plenty of people desperately trying to get non-anti-aliased fonts for programming under Linux, e.g.
https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/49jjky/how_do_i_get_noantialiased_fonts_on_my_terminal/
https://superuser.com/questions/130267/how-can-i-turn-off-font-antialiasing-only-for-gnome-terminal-but-not-for-other
https://geoff.greer.fm/2017/06/14/gnome-terminal-antialiasing-saga/
The person to whom I was replying said that "everyone hates jaggies" and "everyone prefers a smooth, anti-aliased display."
For clarity: while I am disagreeing with this, I am not saying it is only them. I am merely saying that not everyone likes or wants anti-aliasing. Some of us like clear, crisp, sharp graphics or text. I like CRTs. I like monochrome screens, especially monochrome CRTs. I love using classic Macs partly for this reason. Some just want to turn their 2560*1080 TFT into a giant tiled session of Vim and shell instances, and want it as crisp as can be.
Non everyone hates "jaggies" with a burning passion, or loves anti-aliasing. Well-designed GUIs for relatively low-res displays, even monochrome ones, can and did look great, and arguably, the fact that modern GUIs tend to need antialiasing, truecolour, transparency, scalable vector icons and so on is merely a sign that the former attention to detail in design has been lost.
Some of us miss the way 1990s desktops look.
Different display standards have different needs for good reasons.
Moving images are different to static ones. High colour depth has different needs from intermediate colour depth which has different needs to low colour depth -- my first computer had 8 colours, total, plus a Bright setting, and a resolution of 256*192 pixels.
The garish colour scheme of the original AmigaOS 1.x desktop -- white, blue and orange -- was chosen to deliver high contrast on an NTSC TV set, so it would be legible, because most owners of the early Amiga computers couldn't afford monitors.
The original Mac had 384*256 pixels, in monochrome, so every pixel in every icon was hand-picked and positioned for clarity. In situations like these, you very definitely do not want anti-aliasing even if it's possible (which of course it is not, in monochrome).
But by MacOS 8 and 9, most Macs could display 16-bit or 24-bit colour, so the desktop used it if you had it -- within the constraints of the same OS design, because the same OS could still run on machines with a mono screen.
The rounded rectangles of the original classic MacOS design were a feature that Steve Jobs insisted upon -- they were a hallmark of its design.
Look through a gallery of OS GUI design over the ages and see how it developed:
Compare and contrast the frankly clunky visual design of Smalltalk, the environment that inspired Apple's Lisa and Mac, with Susan Kare's hand-drawn mono icons. Each one is a miniature masterpiece, and she is justly famed for them.
The elegant pinstripes and bevels of Apple's Platinum theme in MacOS 8 and 9 are widely held to be the acme of traditional GUI design, from an age before flat screens, before graphics accelerators, before universal "true colour" on multi-megapixel hi-res screens, let alone HD or 4K screens.
Personally, I found the clear crisp greenscreen fonts of early IBM MDA screens, and even DEC VT-series terminals, on long-persistence phosphors for less flicker, more restful on my eyes than the glaring white Retina screen of the 27" iMac I'm looking at right now.
I gazed at those for 8 hours plus a day without eyestrain.
Colour screens were a step backwards from those for text-editing or coding.
So, no. Not everyone hates jaggies as much as you do. You will find plenty of people desperately trying to get non-anti-aliased fonts for programming under Linux, e.g.
https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/49jjky/how_do_i_get_noantialiased_fonts_on_my_terminal/
https://superuser.com/questions/130267/how-can-i-turn-off-font-antialiasing-only-for-gnome-terminal-but-not-for-other
https://geoff.greer.fm/2017/06/14/gnome-terminal-antialiasing-saga/
The person to whom I was replying said that "everyone hates jaggies" and "everyone prefers a smooth, anti-aliased display."
For clarity: while I am disagreeing with this, I am not saying it is only them. I am merely saying that not everyone likes or wants anti-aliasing. Some of us like clear, crisp, sharp graphics or text. I like CRTs. I like monochrome screens, especially monochrome CRTs. I love using classic Macs partly for this reason. Some just want to turn their 2560*1080 TFT into a giant tiled session of Vim and shell instances, and want it as crisp as can be.
