Hi I’m looking for a retro style desktop environment (or maybe just some skin or something) for my Debian workstation. Preferably something that looks like Mac OS 9.
Q for all those with suggestions: do any of these attempt to replicate the Spatial Finder? No other system I’ve seen (contemporary to OS 9 or since then) seems to have got this element correct (or even attempted to do so).
It’s such a key part of the OS 9 (and earlier) experience. Double click a folder and it opens where you expect it to, in the shape you left it, with the icons laid out as you left them. It’s a method of working that gives you great familiarity and confidence.
If anyone’s worked in a kitchen or workshop for a long time and developed a deep memory for the layout and the location of every tool, material, and control, then they’ll know what I’m talking about. You can move around and work incredibly efficiently, relying greatly on muscle memory.
Since the demise of OS 9, the only way to retain this level of operation has been to rely heavily on the keyboard. Since almost everything on the screen is transient and unreliably positioned (non-spatial), only the keyboard is persistent enough to allow us to work at the speed of thought and rely on muscle memory. It’s been so long now that I think people forget (or never knew) that the contents of the screen could also be persistent and spatial this way.
That sounds really nice. What if you changed systems? Would the spatialness also change over to the other system? Was there like a hidden file in the folder or somewhere else that defined where everything was?
All the spatial persistence stuff was handled by the desktop database which was an invisible file that got stored on the disk. Hard drives and floppies each had their own so that if you shared a floppy with a friend the spatial properties of the floppy would travel with it. This also worked if you moved a hard drive from one system to another for the same reason.
It also worked over AppleShare network file sharing. Where it didn’t work was if you had 2 different computers since there was no way to sync information between them. You essentially treated each computer as its own thing which is really more in keeping with the spirit of spatial design. After all, it would be really weird if 2 different drawers in different rooms in your house somehow always had identical contents which stayed in sync.
The tricky point to your needs is getting the app’s menu bar in the top bar. The rest are easy to do with almost all desktop environments. But getting the menu bar on the top bar, I think currently only KDE supports it (with a plugin), and MATE (with another plugin).
However, if you want the general feel of how MacOS 9/X feels, then Gnome with extensions would be your best bet. The rest feel more like simpler Windows, but in a mac skin. Gnome+extensions feel more accurately like a Mac, in terms of overall usability (even if the looks aren’t 100% there). So it depends what you’re after more: the feeling of using a mac, or the exact looks of it.
