That's a matter of taste, but for many it was the Windows they used first and/or spend the most time on and there's a lot of love for that reason alone. I never used XP all that much, but I always changed the theme to the Windows 2000 look. I really didn't like the default, it looked unprofessional and clunky in my eyes. Upon release XP was also pretty universally mocked as a Fisher Price-like UI.
To me Windows 95/NT 4 is still the gold standard in Windows UI. It's certainly not the prettiest, that would be Windows 2000, but it was easy to use, easy to navigate and efficient with space.
Of course that's a matter of taste but Luna interface/theme made whole XP being more appealing to ordinary people - especially with these task-oriented elements. On the other hand, "classic" widgets had that strong bare-bone technical and functional look that made whole system scarier to some degree.
I had tons of "Visual Styles" back then and in the last XP days I opted for grayish Royal or Royale. It's such shame that MS has abandoned Watercolor theme - that was a middle ground: interface was updated and yet, still similar to classic design. And it was even in some elements flat before that style become a dominant. Luckily we're slowly moving away from that and I won't be missing it.
win2k was peak for me. lean, functional, just a pinch of glitter here and there (short fade-ins). it was on par with the amazing stability brought by nt5 kernel.
i kinda miss xp at a cultural level since it was a bit the end of that computing culture cycle (after that apple started to dominate and ubuiquitous computing influenced desktop ui)
When did Apple dominate? I'm not trying to hate on Apple here, but there's this weird belief that Apple have had a lead in personal computer OS market share at some point in the last few decades, and it isn't really true since about 1984.
You can argue that they should dominate, but that doesn't seem to have happened.
I remember Apple products being the realm of graphics designers, videographers, and other art professionals back in the XP days. I thought they went mainstream later, as Windows Vista coincided with the iPhone release.
The first Windows I used was 98, and I sure didn't miss the blocky grey menus nor the pixelated icons. Maybe it was Fisher Price-ish but the new rounded buttons and borders were way more appealing to me.
Took me years to like Windows XP. Hated the new start menu. I always kept installing Windows 2000 (or ME, probably because it could use Windows 98 drivers but look like Windows 2000).
I eventually got used to it and ended up liking it.
I always ran it with the 2000 style theme. That said XP offered me nothing over 2000 so 2000 is what I ran on my main machine since it used less ram but did all the same things, often a bit faster.
For awhile I ran XP 64-bit though, that did do one thing 2000 couldn't do.
It was at this moment I realized that people are talking about liking the non-classic-look XP. I always immediately put things in classic look, no grouped windows, etc.
The "Windows Classic" look on XP is exceptionally ugly, because those 3D-rendered icons just do not belong on a Windows 2000-style grey background for menus or buttons. (I have recently had to test both these OSes in VMs…)
That is true, it looked completely off, as if no one really bothered to tests it and make it look nice. It got rid of the horrible window decoration of the default theme, but the start menu looked terrible.
>During the Luna studies, that people’s reaction to Luna was often, “Wow this would be a great UI for X,” where X was “my dad” or “my employees” or “my daughter”. People didn’t look at it as the UI for themselves; rather, they thought it was a great UI for somebody else.
(Luna is the name of the default look of Windows XP)
That’s Vista. And there’s no contest whatsoever. They’ve never been able to again achieve the perfect balance of elegance and functionality that Vista’s UI had.
> And a big fuck you to DeAlignAI, Z.ai, and everyone else who's been participating in this race to the bottom.
I'm so glad frontier level AI isn't in the hands of just the Altmans and that other cult leader who are currently live testing their products in actual conflicts in the middle east and Ukraine.
I have very little pity for any of these customers, excluding maybe small businesses that simply don't know any better and lack the expertise but at every company and client I've been at there were at least 1-2 people trying to convince higher ups to not needlessly build core infrastructure on proprietary components and yet most were and are still being ignored.
Sure, if you have legacy Windows-only software that is proven to not work in other environments, you're out of luck and your hands may be tied but all the VMWare shops I've liberated from this slow, ugly and terrible to automate mess had to pay dearly for that.
How many more rug pulls do these people need? Oh right, they're probably in the middle of some Azure migration anyways.
It can take a lot of time to migrate. People who've known about Broadcom's behaviour for some time may still be working towards solving it.
Or, they may have been naive. Small companies especially tend to have people with a more, I don't know, 'social' set of business expectations? 'I wouldn't do it to others so surely they wouldn't do it to me / they'll reverse course when they see how bad it looks' sort of expectations. I don't think we should feel "very little pity" for people like that (sympathy is human): but I'd instead say, I think they may be taken advantage of, but I feel admiration because an expectation of good conduct is something everyone should have and retain, even if it is breached.
> 3D printed guns are a thing as well and yet they don't show up in most annual violent crime reports.
For now in most parts of the world it's easier to acquire a gun either legally or on the "grey market" and be assured that it will work for the intended purpose than to 3D print a gun, find a shooting range to test out the gun and iterate until it works fine enough.
Most adults in Switzerland have guns at home from military duty and none of this is happening. If this claim had any truth to it you'd see significant gun involvement in neighbour disputes and that simply doesn't happen.
Depressed people usually don't have the energy to get out of bed so they're even less likely to think of hunting down instructions on how to build pipe bombs.
Mass media really has people being scared all the time.
> If this claim had any truth to it you'd see significant gun involvement in neighbour disputes
That’s not what I’m saying, I’m saying there’s more likely to be gun involvement in disputes when people have easy access to guns than when they don’t.
For example, when the number of men with service arms fell by 20% the number of men killing themselves dropped by 8%
Indeed. I lived 5 years in Switzerland in the 1980’s including in a rented house where the owner left his military-issued rifle at home for us to play with. It was a beautiful weapon, & as Americans we didn’t understand why more disagreements between neighbors weren’t settled using it. But we assumed the Swiss were more homogeneous & polite so that as everyone had a rifle no-one used it. And this was during the Cold War when it was thought that Ronald Reagan would save Europe from any Soviet attack. Though he couldn’t save Switzerland from the effects of Chernobyl which we experienced while living there.
As if there wasn't a massive amount of nuance between "you may keep your dotfiles private but don't upload your photo library". If their rules read this arbitrary, I wouldn't trust them to host any of my stuff, especially considering that you always have to hope they don't change their rules any further.
Assume you did some local LLM stuff in June that worked with a 200MB set of various jpegs and you wanted to keep it private: Is this still legit in September 2026? I wouldn't rely on it.
> , I wouldn't trust them to host any of my stuff, especially considering that you always have to hope they don't change their rules any further.
Yeah, I think this is a win-win for both parties.
You strike me as someone who would "ride along the lines of the terms of service" basically, and you'll see anything not explicitly forbidden as being allowed essentially.
While Codeberg is a project driven by humans, with human reactions to what's happening. If you're not comfortable with rules not being 100% defined, and requiring a humans value judgement to be had to figure out if the rule is broken or not, I don't think Codeberg is for you.
The rest of us, who are OK with humans making decisions rather than just going by what's written in rules, are fine with this, because we know our private repositories won't be deleted. And if they are, you'll be able to speak with a human to explain, and if your intention is fine and good, they'll be OK with it. But if you try to argue about some "That wasn't explicitly stated", then yeah, they'll probably get tired of you quickly.
Think your participating in your local user group vs some corporate/government forum, the rules will be enforced differently.
Do X in whatever way you want, if you do so knowing it's against the terms of service, you're "riding along the line of the terms of service" for sure if you try to explain away how it is/isn't explicitly forbidden.
No, it was just against every value Codeberg ever stood for, and against the value humanity should stand for. There was no ambiguity ever about this. There is no moral ambiguity that if people develop military FLOSS on codeberg they will be banned, even though it's not in the ToS right now, because that's the right thing to do and the community will reach a consensus that we want to support human communities, not military organisations who destroy them.
The rules say nothing about military AI and currently include selfhosted LLMs as well:
> You must not share projects that mostly consist of code written by "generative AI"-tools (including services such as Claude, OpenAI Codex). Such projects having an unclear copyright status (see requirements § 2 (1) 1 and § 2 (1) 3) and furthermore have little safeguards to ensure that they do not include harmful code (c.f. § 2 (1) 5).
At least stick with the truth before launching with "the right the to do" (which is also a pretty bad rule because it's completely ambiguous.)
I'm fine with ambiguous rules. A non-profit is not a legislative body, though to be fair even actual laws are usually ambiguous and contradictory and that's why we have lawyers and judges and such.
Ambiguous rules with clear objectives is what gives a non-profit the power to be flexible in the way to accomplish common goals. It's based on human trust and is fine by me and others. If you ever were part of a non-profit, you know human trust is an essential component.
Ok, point being? Codeberg is a non-profit community that evolves and figures out where to move, all the time, this is the point of the association itself. Members discuss what to do, then a decision is made, then new rules eventually apply, this is how the project moves forward.
You said people were “riding the line”. They weren’t. Codeberg made up a rule that excluded eligibility for projects they were already hosting. Projects that were not illegal, indecent or dangerous. I can’t think of another time something like that has happened. They can do it, sure, but many had hoped they could be an independent host for all FOSS as GitHub deteriorates. They have disappointed those hopes, and we will have to look to others - like Codefloe - to carry that hope forward.
> Codeberg made up a rule that excluded eligibility for projects they were already hosting
What does "made up" mean? It was a decision by the actual members of the platform, you know, the actual people using it! Nothing "made up" about it.
I think it's pretty clear you don't have an idea of what Codeberg is trying to be, nor do you have any interest in understanding, you just want to push this "Codefloe" platform for some reason. Codeberg make very public what the platform is for and yes, that'll change in the future too, as the world changes.
I'm sorry that phrase offends you so much that you have to resort to personal attacks. Why don't you respond to the actual substance?
The reason I'm supporting Codefloe is written in the comment you are responding to. Codeberg is not interested in hosting all FOSS, and Codefloe is. That is the reason. Its very simple.
It is pretty clear you are not making any effort at all to understand the problem people have with Codeberg's rug pull.
Not one programmer i know does this. Well no actually, one does because his boss makes him but it's so shitty he basically AI-washes his own job. How come on HN every week i come across someone who believes programming is dead and everyone has been brainwashed by Silicon Valley execs into destroying the planet with LLMs?
Honestly it is astonishing to me that there are still people who believe things like this. AI is just a tool. Software development still requires human minds.
There are people who don't understand that and crank out slop. Fuck those people. That isn't what I do.
There are people who don't understand that and won't host my FOSS. Well, I've found someone who will.
„ and if your intention is fine and good, they'll be OK with it“
That doesn’t work because „fine and good“ doesn’t mean the same thing to Codeberg voters/admins and to a large part of the hacke news population. Notably, Codeberg is morally opposed to AI.
> That doesn’t work because „fine and good“ doesn’t mean the same thing to Codeberg voters/admins and to a large part of the hacke news population.
Why on earth would Codeberg give even the slighest fucks about what the "hacker news population" finds "fine and good"? Makes absolutely zero sense.
Codeberg made those things against the Terms of Service because paying members who use the platform voted for exactly that. This is how Codeberg works, the members of the platform decides how it works.
You changed the topic. The topic is not what Codeberg should care about. The topic was trust in the humans behind Codeberg to not delete private repositories on a whim. Codeberg community is free to care about whatever it sees fit. That doesn't protect them from criticism.
Do I trust humans behind Codeberg to behave sensibly? No.
Would more precise terms of service that explain what Codeberg community thinks is ok help with such trust? Yes.
Should the humans behind Codeberg care what I think? Maybe? Presumably they do care about reaching _some_ users, otherwise why have the service public at all?
What a weird take coming from a pro-Codeberg perspective considering that many their users I are proudly #actuallyautistic people who would prefer strict rules to follow in order to feel secure.
> The rest of us, who are OK with humans making decisions rather than just going by what's written in rules [...]
Better speak for yourself and not infer from your own views to others. With bad intention this could be interpreted as if I was incapable of dealing with human decisions when all I stated is that I mistrust people who rugpull me.
Eh, it's a lot less restrictive than Bluesky with its block lists maintained by weirdos. What are some things you aren't allowed to say on Twitter?
I see people talk all the time about how great Bluesky is, yet I never see any great posts there. The discussion is almost always just in relation to Twitter.
Reminds me a bit of when people were pushing for Lemmy.
Twitter actually ban and "shadowban" accounts completely at random for every weird reasons. The difference between it and the rest is that it turns blind eyes on most blatant of ban evasions, so much so that its own support sometimes recommending it to users when they were banned. This had been the case since it legitimately was Twitter and there were no injected African spams.
> Twitter actually ban and "shadowban" accounts completely at random for every weird reasons.
Yeah, this kind of thing is on reddit and Facebook too. Very frustrating to be on the receiving end.
> The difference between it and the rest is that it turns blind eyes on most blatant of ban evasions, so much so that its own support sometimes recommending it to users when they were banned
Can't say cisgender, can't repeat ADS-B data, can't interview people Elon Musk doesn't like, even off platform. Didn't they ban the devs of Nitter, too?
This is a pretty silly point to be arguing about, but I can pretty confidently say you're dead wrong on that.
As far as running flight trackers for celebrities, assuming that's what you mean by "ADS-B data", I think you'll need to use Bluesky for that I'm afraid.
I understand you can still tailor a good experience, but if you create a fresh X account the density of Elon Musk posts is genuinely absurd. There's no way he isn't putting his thumb on the algorithm to boost his reach.
Also the density of pure hate & ragebait by mask-off fascist accounts! It shocks me how much of that I saw unprompted right away after making a new account recently.
I made a new reddit account for a side project a few months ago and I couldn't believe how terrible reddit is when you don't have 10 years of subreddit curation. The default experience is to be dumped into what basically amounts to "Facebook boomer slop" mixed with a ton of hustle / small business / get rich quick content.
It's an unpleasant experience. My main Reddit account doesn't "solve reddit" by any means - I often find myself thinking "man this site sucks, I should stop coming here," but the difference between that curated account and a fresh one is night and day.
Their "open source algorithm" (Which is actually a random code dump that does not constitute the algorithm) contains enough evidence that Elon posts are massively boosted, though no smoking gun. It also classifies politics as democrat or republican and then acts to maintain echo chambers.
I mean I went from fresh account to unprompted groypers posting hitler hype edits and white nationalists posting happy merchant memes about the great replacement.
This is uniquely an X thing. It wasn't like this when I used twitter, and it isn't like that on any other socials I know.
The Dutch PM for some reason uses X (or his PR agents do). There is always a lot of impotent homophobic rage coming from the retweets. It is all very sad.
The US first amendment has nothing to do with what a private company chooses to host on their platform. That content is there because the users and owners of the platform want it to be there.
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