I love the idea, and I love strong visions, but why not something closer to Motif/CDE? In my mind at least, when I think of 90s workstations, I don't think of Windows 95.
More current-day developers are nostalgic for Windows 95/NT than for Motif because of sheer exposure. It's the same for me: Windows NT UIs have a vibe of "good old days" for me, whereas Motif UIs feel like ancient history that is unrelated to me personally.
I've never used a pre-OSX Mac but still find the screenshots lovely. I've even styled my Linux window decorations after MacOS 9.2. I find it an optimal middle between heavily retro and modernly sleek themes.
To be pedantic: just the window manager of NeXTStep, not the actual "desktop". (Not that real NeXTStep had a separate "window manager" as such.)
The whole UI was a lot more complex, and IMHO, probably the best-looking GUI ever designed. There's an effort to bring it back to life via GNUStep, and as a desktop environment, NEXTSpace:
Two pieces of software developed by two different groups of people. I don't believe there's any sharing of code between these projects.
WindowMaker tried to recreate the NeXTSTEP UI and succeeded admirably.
AfterStep might've started out trying to recreate the NeXTSTEP UI, but it went all kinds of crazy with colors and gradients. Since then its connection to NeXTSTEP has almost entirely been in name only.
It depends. NT users with Linux (specially Slackware) with FVWM and a bunch of Lesttif/GTK1 tools for sure they are nostalgic on Motif and even Athena. At least a bit.
Motif would probably be a little too much. I always perceived Motif as the ugliest GUI toolkit I've ever seen. Now as I age I started to appreciate retro GUIs and began seeing some charm in Motif but it certainly requires some intentional "will to love". Or maybe it is just an acquired taste like
surströmming or something like that.
And someone related to the SCO Group can probably patent-troll you if you use it. There are no giants like RedHat and Novel to protect SerenityOS in such an event the way they protect Linux.
So has Linux, yet SCO didn't hesitate to spend enormous amount of lawyer-hours attacking it.
AFAIK even simple scroll bars and double clicks are patented, the patent holders (Microsoft and Apple, IIRC) just have generously allowed the GNU/Linux community to use them.
I don't know if you mentioned scrollbars as a rhetorical argument, or literally. But if the latter, then ... (queue rant) ...
What? Even scrollbars? Shows just how broken, regressive and anti-innovation the US Patent system is.
Its part of software legend how Jobs et al learned of these concepts through early exposure to Smalltalk. There are numerous videos of Jobs himself talking about it (with requisite amounts of awe). I'm sure most people here already know the history.
Theres even the interesting tale of how Jobs critiqued the scrolling (he prefered something smoother than line-by-line scrolling), and Dan Ingalls live coded a solution in a few minutes.
