Win95 was a simple elegant desktop, very much controllable with mouse or just the keyboard alone.
Everyone copies copies of Win95.
In 1996-1997 the US DOJ was threatening to split MS into separate companies. To demonstrate that its web browser, IE, was integral to its OS, Windows, MS hacked together "Active Desktop". Window content was rendered as HTML using IE and the help system became a browser.
KDE copied that, without understanding why it was how it was.
It also failed to copy the keyboard UI.
The result is a mess. Every major version since, from KDE 2 to KDE 6, made it a bigger and bigger mess.
My thesis is that the devs do not know the UI they are copying so they bolt widgets onto their widgets.
I can't stand it.
GNOME, OTOH, copies iOS, badly. It's a stripped out fragment of an accessory part of Mac OS X called Dashboard.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dashboard_(macOS)
... Designed for use without a keyboard or a mouse.
Result, a pretty, clean, simple UI, but deeply and profoundly crippled if you know how to drive a computer with a keyboard.
Cinnamon and MATE fake other later versions of Win9x.
Xfce at least fakes Win95, the original and the best.
But you need to know the differences between the different iterations of MS Explorer to know who is copying what:
v1: Win95
v1.1: Win NT 4
v2: Win98
v2.2: Win ME/ 2k
v2.3: XP
v3: Vista
v3.1: Win7
v4: Win8
v4.1: Win8.1
v4.2: Win10
v4.3: Win11
It has been degrading slowly since v2 appeared and rapidly since v4.
no subject
It is hard to briefly summarise what I mean.
The deal is this:
Win95 was a simple elegant desktop, very much controllable with mouse or just the keyboard alone.
Everyone copies copies of Win95.
In 1996-1997 the US DOJ was threatening to split MS into separate companies. To demonstrate that its web browser, IE, was integral to its OS, Windows, MS hacked together "Active Desktop". Window content was rendered as HTML using IE and the help system became a browser.
KDE copied that, without understanding why it was how it was.
It also failed to copy the keyboard UI.
The result is a mess. Every major version since, from KDE 2 to KDE 6, made it a bigger and bigger mess.
My thesis is that the devs do not know the UI they are copying so they bolt widgets onto their widgets.
I can't stand it.
GNOME, OTOH, copies iOS, badly. It's a stripped out fragment of an accessory part of Mac OS X called Dashboard.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dashboard_(macOS)
... Designed for use without a keyboard or a mouse.
Result, a pretty, clean, simple UI, but deeply and profoundly crippled if you know how to drive a computer with a keyboard.
Cinnamon and MATE fake other later versions of Win9x.
Xfce at least fakes Win95, the original and the best.
But you need to know the differences between the different iterations of MS Explorer to know who is copying what:
v1: Win95
v1.1: Win NT 4
v2: Win98
v2.2: Win ME/ 2k
v2.3: XP
v3: Vista
v3.1: Win7
v4: Win8
v4.1: Win8.1
v4.2: Win10
v4.3: Win11
It has been degrading slowly since v2 appeared and rapidly since v4.