Screenshots from developers: 2002 vs. 2015 (2015)

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.

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.

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.

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)

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 )

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.

One thing I'm reflecting on here is just how boring these screen grabs are.

Even if I consider how my PC looked in 2002, the 2015 screenshots are far and away uglier than my desktop experience.

Yet... I produce... very little. At least when compared to these absolute titans, who have contributed much more to my computing experience than most - certainly more than myself, I find it somewhat unsettling.

This is how my laptop looked in 2015 (it's a screenshot from 2017, but the configs were the same): https://sh.drk.sc/~dijit/2017-11-19-003840_4480x1440_scrot.p...

Shocking to see 2002 is considered as ancient. I still have a vivid memory of those days as if it was yesterday.

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.

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.

common theme: tiled layout, terminals, minimum fancy decorations.

Dennis Ritchie running Rob Pike's acme editor on Windows back in July 2002.

https://anders.unix.se/images/dmr_screenshot.gif

https://anders.unix.se/2015/10/28/screenshots-from-developer...

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

Hey this one over here [1] has a virtual desktop minimap on the top right. That person mentions fvwm which has this [2] website with screenshots, but I don't see the minimap there. Could someone help me find a reference to it?

Update: Also on the bottom left here [3]

[1] https://anders.unix.se/images/desktop_warren_toomey.gif

[2] https://www.fvwm.org/

[3] https://anders.unix.se/images/desktop_jordan_hubbard.jpg

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10722536

This brought back memories. It’s wild how much tooling changed in a decade. The contrast really shows how much developer experience has improved.

Haha love that jerkcity is featured in Jordan's screenshot!

I'd give anything to see their 2025 desktops.

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.)

the last one with XMonad is the only one that looks even remotely good to me in compared to what we have today

Now I would really like to know what these guys think of Omarchy :-D

Now do 2025…

The old Mozilla icon on a screenshot (2002) caught my attention.

I searched for it and confirmed it was inspired by communist aesthetic https://www-archive.mozilla.org/party/2002/

[flagged]

It still looked ugly in 2015. I wonder what 2025 computers would look like because I think they look cool now.