HN Explorer

38 comments

[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 51.9 ms ] thread
vzaliva
common theme: tiled layout, terminals, minimum fancy decorations.
gentooflux
RMS could have taken a photo of his screen, or done something cheeky like dump his screen to a padded ASCII text file and submitted that. Stick in the mud.
prmoustache
The few photos he has on his own website have been taken by others. I doubt he even owns a camera.

I don't think the second answer even qualify as a screenshot nor why he should do that upon random request by strangers.

jasoneckert
I echo this. My desktop has stayed virtually unchanged for decades, and in retrospect, it explains why I use the Sway tiling window manager today.
SoftTalker
About 15 years ago I tried xmonad, a tiling window manager, and I was hooked. I moved to awesome a few years later and that has been my desktop ever since. I still pretty much use only emacs, terminals, and a web browser in my daily work, and that goes back even further than my use of tiling window managers.
drewg123
My desktop progression has been 1989: twm 1995: ctwm 2000: kde 2022: lxde

I moved from ctwm to kde because they accepted a patch that allowed me to maintain some modifier/mouse shortcuts I had configured in twm. Gnome rejected my patch

Moved to lxde because kde got too complex and hard to deal with

Still run tcsh with a .cshrc migrated from one i cloned from a friend at university

I’ve been on a bsd based workstation since the 80s with a few years on Mac and linux. Sunos->ultrix->osf/1 -> FreeBSD (on alpha) -> FreeBSD i386 -> macOS x -> Ubuntu-> FreeBSD/amd64

Retr0id
Linus Torvalds currently uses Fedora with GNOME, which was fun to learn because that's also been my personal choice for a while now.

(source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfv0V1SxbNA )

Insanity
LTT is my most watched channel according to YouTube rewind, but this one was one of my favourite of all time.. I was excited for this to drop as soon as Fake Linus started to hint at it.
apetresc
I completely misread '2015' as '2025' and thought these were from this November rather than November 10 years ago. I couldn't believe so many people were still using what appeared to be Aqua-era OS X.
ahoka
You might want to check the site again, as the Aqua screenshot is from 2002.
pelagicAustral
Old macOS has got so much soul. I missed all those years since I started working with it back when Sierra was around, clearly not the same.
Almondsetat
RMS to me is really a curious case. He doesn't know how to install GNU+Linux and relies on others to do it. He doesn't know how to take a screenshot, and I remember reading other snippets from him about not knowing how to perform other basic tasks.
HeadlessChild
An engineer at my work literally designed the processor architecture that lives in our products but he is more or less computer illiterate.
epolanski
I write software and use computers from ages, but put me in front of any app I haven't authored and I have no clue how to do things.

Often I find that apps have features only because I see others using the application.

Make me do anything on applications banking/government/delivery-related and I have to ask family members.

chickensong
Haha love that jerkcity is featured in Jordan's screenshot!
shevy-java
Interesting how Brian works. I guess it is the UNIX spirit he carries there. Or perhaps he is damn fast with the tabbed WM. Or is that OSX?

I use mostly IceWM these days. I can't use the leaner WMs such as ion or ratpoison and XFCE, mate-desktop, KDE and GNOME are too slow or too crap (KDE unfortunately also now; before that only GNOME was crap. KDE killing xorg-support also means it is one less thing I can use anyway.)

Mistletoe
I'd give anything to see their 2025 desktops.
accrual
This is really fascinating, I would love to see a 2025 version from those willing to respond.

All of the screenshots strike me as "get things done". Little flourish, just windows and text mode apps where needed to finish the day's task. To me, an ideal to aspire to.

tonyedgecombe
>All of the screenshots strike me as "get things done".

Well they are hardly going to send in screenshots showing them surfing porn sites or doomscrolling Facebook.

arendtio
To me, they all look like they just increased their monitor size ;-)

Or do you expect IRC users to switch to Discord?

qustrolabe
the last one with XMonad is the only one that looks even remotely good to me in compared to what we have today
mbrezu
Now I would really like to know what these guys think of Omarchy :-D
Simplita
This brought back memories. It’s wild how much tooling changed in a decade. The contrast really shows how much developer experience has improved.
chistev
It still looked ugly in 2015. I wonder what 2025 computers would look like because I think they look cool now.
zkmon
Shocking to see 2002 is considered as ancient. I still have a vivid memory of those days as if it was yesterday.
SoftTalker
It does seem like yesterday. Perception of time changes as one ages. We were settig up the Christmas decorations last weekend and I had an overwhelming feeling of "we just did this like a month ago" but it has already been another year.
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
bullen
This is my desktop 2025: http://ett.host.radiomesh.org/film/HL2%20on%203588%20uConsol... (controls are impossible at first on 3588 uConsole, this was me playing without the usual bindings just to prove the performance so don't judge the gameplay)

3588 (10W) plays HL2 at 300 FPS and streams it at 60 FPS to twitch.

Turns out 2025 was the year of the ARM linux desktop after all!

TWM + emacs + irssi + mpv(ytdl)

mindentropy
Can someone identify what font Bram Moolenaar was using in 2015 screen shot?