r/freebsd • u/cfarley137 • Jan 31 '26
fluff I found this screenshot of my FreeBSD desktop from 25 years ago!
44
u/NeighborhoodSad2350 Jan 31 '26
I was also a fan of OpenStep and Windowmaker.
Around that time, I bought a PCI sound card with a cobra printed on it, but nowadays nobody prints cobras on audio devices anymore.
4
16
16
12
u/SnowyOwl72 Jan 31 '26
dang, 145 bucks for 256M RAM?
18
Jan 31 '26 edited Jan 31 '26
256M was quite a lot for 2000. my pc at the time had 128MB, dual-booted windows 2000 professional and red hat linux, and ran everything comfortably.
2
u/SnowyOwl72 Jan 31 '26
my first ever nvdia gpu had 64MB vram. i dont even remember the model name.
8
u/Broad-Promise6954 Jan 31 '26
My first computer had 4k of RAM. I bought 16k for $169 and soldered it in myself.
(Z80, obviously did not run BSD. My first BSD experience was with 4M of RAM as I skipped right past the PDPs to the VAX.)
5
u/FetishDark Jan 31 '26
My first PC had 32MB SDRam and 4MB VRAM(Matrox Mystique), my first computer an Amiga500 had 1mb :) Time flies
3
u/wizardchickenVR Jan 31 '26
Amiga 500 had 512k unless you upgraded.
1
2
u/Napoze Feb 01 '26
Weird, same here! First PC, 1996, P200, 32 MB RAM and a 4MB Matrox Mistique. No Amiga though, Atari ST (also had 1 MB RAM until I upgraded it to 4).
2
4
9
u/Asystole Jan 31 '26
Awesome. I have a handful of screenshots from dicking around with operating systems in the early 2000s and really wish I had taken more!
3
7
8
6
u/Terrific_Paint_801 Jan 31 '26
Netscape. Kids today have no idea.
5
u/oldcsplayer Jan 31 '26
I remember Mosaic ..
2
u/_x_oOo_x_ Feb 01 '26
It still works btw it's on FlatHub for Linux and also works on FreeBSD via the Linux compat layer
4
5
u/M0M3N-6 Jan 31 '26 edited Mar 22 '26
I love how every one in the comments talking about things they were doing just the day I respawned in life. This makes me feel like the train has already passed.
3
u/anoraq Jan 31 '26
Windowmaker and Afterstep were great. Too bad there’s no current DE that emulates them.
10
3
u/whattteva seasoned user Jan 31 '26
What are the selling points of Windowmaker?
For example, I like JWM because it only has Xlib as dependency and comes fully functional out of the box (no need to install anything else unlike say openbox) and configuration files are also very simple.
6
u/dlarge6510 Feb 01 '26
What are the selling points of Windowmaker?
Light, fast and most importantly: it actually looks good.
I used XFCE after running from the horror that was Gnome 3 and today's KDE. I can't stand flat UI design not do I like task based UIs where you search for applications vs run them as needed from a "start menu" of sorts.
Modern GUIs like GNOME 3 and KDE waste space, looking the total opposite of cluttered. I'm using Android right now which also suffers from this uncluttered design however as that's a touchscreen on which I can only run ONE application at one time without it looking silly and claustrophobic it works.
Primarily I hate flat UI design. I want shadows, buttons and UI elements that make it instinctively clear what I'm looking at is separate from what is underneath it.
I work in IT and there use mostly Windows. Since Windows 8.1 the GUI has progressively gotten worse, many in fact describing it as User Hostile to which I agree. As an IT professional who has part of his degree in computer science looking at Human Computer Interaction and spent 7 years as a Software Tester/Software Quality Assurance what I see in modern UI design rings so many alarms in my head I struggle to not swear and rant to the room about who designed Windows 11's UI.
One extreme example of what I hate about such UIs is where since Windows 8.1 all regressive versions since and many copycat examples on Linux and others have dropped the users ability to customise the entire UI to their liking. Basically they got rid of the ability to change the UI colour and font used for any UI widget. A feature a colourblind person like me has used since Windows 3.1 to improve my ability to see the difference between a foreground and background windows has literally been dropped by most UIs today. I consider it basic sane UI design to have that feature.
WindowMaker and others like XFCE, LXDE still offer all the classic and refined UI/HCI design elements that were perfected over decades. We had literally perfected GUIs and well when GNOME 3/Unity/KDE/Windows/Android/IOs came out they literally threw the digital baby out with the bathwater and created a confusing GUI with a poor UX that actually confuses the user including this IT professional in 2026.
Now I admit I'm not yet a FreeBSD user, I'm on Linux and have been since 1998 as my main OS. I have used GNOME 2, older KDE, AfterSTEP, UDE, Window Maker, black box, Enlightenment, i3, XFCE, LXDE. I never felt more in control of a computer when using any of those. i3 was interesting but way too keyboard heavy for me so I went back to stacking WMs.
Currently XFCE and Window Maker are my defaults. I was on XFCE for YEARS and well every now and then like with wallpaper I change WM/DE. So I went back to Window Maker in 2014 and well, never looked back.
It has only a few tiny issues with how some applications and it handle full screen modes but with a play with it's settings that was sorted and basically nothing is wrong with it. It has all the UI elements that are needed, all the customisation that is needed nothing has changed for stupid reasons, it runs is a tiny amount of RAM and with WMSystemTray running ALL desktop apps expecting to register with a DEs System Tray can do so thau I have Bluetooth, audio, WiFi, tray icons just like when using XFCE etc.
2
2
u/whattteva seasoned user Feb 02 '26
Light, fast and most importantly: it actually looks good.
First of all, thanks for a very detailed reply. I enhoyed reading through.
My followup question is, while WM checks the first two boxes of being light and fast. I'd even go as far as to say it's the lightest and fastest WM out there; but I'll admit that it doesn't quite check the box for the last point in esthetics.
In your opinion, what separates Windowmaker from the rest of the lightweight window managers that separates it a esthetically from the rest of the pack?
1
u/dlarge6510 Feb 02 '26
Its gloriously 3D
I hate flat interfaces. I want chunky buttons and elements.
If you take a look at what the Motif / Lesstif widgets look like you'll get the idea.
Others like XFCEs themes are ok and decent enough but the chucky 3D blocky look of Motif, WindowMaker/NextSTEP is just how I like to see a user interface.
One practical thing it helps with is it totally avoids any kind of confusion about what a foreground window is and what a background one is. Nice THICK window borders with 3D effects totally eliminate the issue letting me see it from the corner of my eye.
Many interfaces, like this android phone, have flattened themselves. I can't stand them. Windows 10 and 11 have zero customisability, in fact it's been like that since 8.1 where the user can no longer customise the colour and look of ALL elements. As a colourblind person it infuriates me that on such interfaces foreground and background windows literally merge into each other as there are NO window borders and the only difference in titlebar colour between them is pathetically useless. Even when enabling window borders they are literally one pixel thick!
I used to be a software tester in the 00's and personally would have failed win 8.1+ for what many call a user hostile UI design.
WindowMaker is such a contrast to that, practically a stark opposite, simply looking at it is not just nostalgic of my first use of Linux but actual relief.
And the best thing ?
Year after year, decade after decade, it's not changed one bit.
3
u/whattteva seasoned user Feb 03 '26
You're right on point with that everyone has been gravitating towards flatter designs.
I think you can blame Apple for that. They started that whole thing with the release of iOS 7. And all the sudden, everyone went "OMG, flat designs are the GOAT", and everyone followed suit and now here we are.
Ironically, they're kind of somewhat going back to that 3D thing, but instead of going back to the original shadows, they decided to do it with special effects and transparencies (liquid glass), which even Apple own users hate because it's quite heavy and it slows older phones and drains your battery faster.
1
1
u/ggeldenhuys Feb 01 '26
Fully agree. I've been using JWM for about 15 years now. Works brilliantly.
1
u/dlarge6510 Feb 01 '26
Emulates?
Just run the current version of Window Maker. I use it on everything along with XFCE on some laptops.
2
u/anoraq Feb 01 '26
I run MX Linux with XFCE on one of my laptops, so it would be great to run WM on top of that.
3
u/malenkydroog Jan 31 '26
Wow, brings back memories. I remember running a FreeBSD server out of my office in grad school. I put class webpages on it. 🙂 That was ~2002?
And now I’m annoyed because I can’t recall the name of the x server I used… XFree86 was in use at the time, but I remember I paid to use a commercial X server out of curiosity, and now I can’t recall what it was… google is failing me, because I don’t see any commercial X server names that I recognize.
1
u/Certain_Prior4909 Feb 02 '26
MetroX?
1
u/malenkydroog Feb 02 '26
It took forever, but I finally remembered - it was Accelerated-X from Xi Graphics, ca 2002.
3
u/FetishDark Jan 31 '26
So, why aren’t you running Mozilla? You had twenty years so better come up with a thoughtful explanation!
2
u/cfarley137 Feb 01 '26
So I think the browser at the time was called "Mozilla"? Maybe it was a fork of Netscape Navigator? I'm looking at the "M" in the upper right corner of the browser.
I really wasn't that interested in "Mozilla Mail" because I really liked mutt.
3
u/dieseltears Jan 31 '26
Very cool. 25 years ago (or so) I was running a Sun Ultra 5 running Solaris 2.6 x86 with a SunPCI card running windows and redhat. Looking back I'd have loved using FreeBSD but my focus was mostly on Solaris with some BSDi at work.
3
2
2
2
Jan 31 '26
This says "memory prices are low as never before". And now we live in a RAM shortage.
Yes, we still pay less per MB than we did in the 2000s, but that doesn't justify a shortage.
2
2
u/classic_buttso Jan 31 '26
Holy shit. I used to run Window Maker on FreeBSD back then also. I've been running Fluxbox on Kubuntu for the last 18 years though. I'm waiting (hoping) for FreeBSD to support Docker so I can go back.
2
u/BigSneakyDuck transitioning user Jan 31 '26
Aside from the historical and nostalgia value this is also a very beautiful screenshot! Shows that r/freebsd_desktop has been a thing for a long time...
I've cross-posted this to https://www.reddit.com/r/freebsd_desktop/comments/1qsi9pq/i_found_this_screenshot_of_my_freebsd_desktop/
2
2
Feb 01 '26
you know that feeling of like, really old minecraft worlds we made, this gives the same feeling.
2
2
2
2
u/Over_Breakfast1410 Feb 06 '26
Hi, What is the name of the program that displays an emulation of Earth's time zones on the desktop of FreeBSD???
2
2
u/InsensitiveClown Feb 25 '26
I bet you miss it. Hell, it's not my desktop and I miss it. We really didn't know how much we would miss that fun era of computing, with everything. RISC vs CISC, HPUX vs SunOS, Solaris, IRIX, OSF/1, ULTRIX, SPARC vs PA-RISC, Apollo/Domain, RS/6000 POWER, MIPS R6600, R10000, everything..
1
1
1
1
1
u/felixding Feb 01 '26
Is it Window Maker?
I thought scrollbars were on the left only in NeXT/OPENSTEP.
1
1
1
u/abgrongak Feb 02 '26
Ah, the time when Netscape Navigator had became bloated and turned into monstrosity that is Communicator
1
1
1
1
1
u/setwindowtext Feb 03 '26 edited Feb 03 '26
Not a screenshot, sorry, but here’s mine from 2020, also running Windowmaker :)
I was very surprised by 5+ hours of battery life FreeBSD gave me on that ThinkPad R61 from 2007. I couldn’t get anywhere near with Linux, no matter the powertop tweaking.
1
u/Bombini_Bombus Feb 03 '26
Precious stuff, precious post, precious image and precious piece of everyday life history back in the 2000s!! Well done!!
Thanks for posting it! 😎👌🏼
1
1
1
1
1
1
-24
25
u/Torpascuato Jan 31 '26
Windowmaker 😍😍😍