[floam]

Stimulates a bit of an impulse I had as a teenager and wanting to experience that on my PC, or get into BeOS or QNX, based just on witnessing screenshots and something deeply striking my fancy. Before I got into Linux (which was before I got a Mac in 2006), I used WindowBlinds and LiteStep to do exactly that, and more. I used to really care more about certain trappings of my experience, and I didn't have any actual work to do. Now I settle for whatever in my 30s.

Let's see, what is my first extant contribution to the Internet… oh yeah, I thought this was handsome. It was a theme for an explorer.exe shell replacement.

https://www.wincustomize.com/explore/litestep/154/

https://skins14.wincustomize.com/1/53/153855/6/154/preview-6...

[floam]

"542 lines of code" (a configuration file), "best viewed in tahoma size 7"... cringe.

In my defense, it was 2001-2002, I mostly had MS Paint at my disposal, and I was 14 (and not like a smart 14).

[laputan_machine]

For some reason when I was that age I loved tiny fonts, too. Actually a nice theme, I probably would have used it!

[floam]

I know my vision is still good, but there is no debate that my vision back then was a lot better. And focusing for tens of hours certainly wasn't any kind of effort.

[Joeri]

I used BeOS as a daily driver for a few years back in the day. It was a great OS, wonderfully smooth and powerful. But I was forced off of it because of the lack of applications. Applications make or break an OS. Microsoft had to learn this lesson several times already (windows phone, windows rt).

[GekkePrutser]

Qnx was pretty unique. We no longer have any RTOS with a desktop GUI sadly

[floam]

You can posix_spawn there without tcsetpgrp races, that is pretty cool. Still leading the way!

https://www.austingroupbugs.net/view.php?id=1044

https://developer.blackberry.com/native/reference/core/com.q...

[zozbot234]

Linux with the PREEMPT_RT patchset is pretty much a true RTOS nowadays. Though you still need to be careful in developing userspace to achieve true "hard" time bounds, and that's largely incompatible with a "desktop" workflow.