Originally published at: Windows XP Delta Edition revives the world's second-most beautiful OS ever | Boing Boing
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OK, I’ll bite @beschizza : which one is the most beautiful OS?
(Surely 3.1?)
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There are enough (dangerously unpatched) XP systems still chugging along in the back offices of small and medium sized businesses in 2022 running essential software that a little beauty would be appreciated.
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Dust off that PB and replace every electrolytic capacitor in the motherboard and power supply, you meant to say. Remember the stolen mis-copied electrolyte formula?
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No. And now I’m intrigued.
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I’d be happy to drop a Linux distro on my old netbook, but it’s the machine that has the bolusware needed to use my scanner.
That said, I doubt I’ll fiddle with the stable configuration just for the pretties.
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I’m intrigued. What does “techiraeth” mean?
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There’s definitely a many-way tie for the bottom. Windows 11 is unsurprisingly way down there, as it’s an unholy combination of an ugly-ass color scheme, difficult to use UI elements, and inconvenient navigation.
Also down there are the Jekyll & Hyde Windows 8-10. The Metro interface has always been crap, being designed for touch instead of usefulness. Microsoft, you’re never going to create an “iPad killer”. Stop polluting your base UI with that idea. Even Apple has a different UI between MacOS and iOS, and they know a helluva lot more about usability than you.
Sadly, none of the Linuces are what I’d consider particularly “beautiful” (although I give Gnome the nod over KDE any day of the week.) And while many of the 16-bit era GUIs have a nostalgic appeal, it’s not due to inherent beauty.
Windows XP and Windows 7 were the least offensive UIs that Microsoft ever released. Despite XP’s Fisher-Price color scheme, they were the far and away the most usable of all their OSes. Shame the inner workings of them were so bug-ridden.
So that leaves MacOS. The MacOS GUI has never appealed to me, but I know I’m in the minority. I assume that’s your top pick.
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Around the turn of the century, an industrial spy working at a Japanese company allegedly stole a copy of a formula for making the electrolyte used in electrolytic capacitors, but mis-copied the formula. The bad formula worked for its intended purpose, but caused the capacitors to corrode internally. (A capacitor should last 30+ years, not 13 months.) The stolen formula supposedly made its way into Taiwanese manufacturing plants starting in about 2001.
A year or so later customers started noticing a rash of PCs failing due to defective capacitors. The capacitor cans would swell up, the tops would split open, and the systems would fail. It impacted motherboards from all the major manufacturers including IBM, Dell, Apple, Intel, etc. from about 2002-2007. This was referred to as the Great Capacitor Plague.
As far as anyone knows, the story about the industrial spy was printed by one newspaper, but was never corroborated or proven.
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OS/2? (Ducks and runs for cover. Ok - it was not ‘beautiful’ but it did work.)
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This guy gets it:
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I was thinking of including OS/2 on my list, but it was never mainstream popular enough. For its time, it was the best OS out there, both in form and function; way nicer interface than Windows NT 3.5, and Warp was way nicer than Win95.
I used OS/2 for quite a few years on my work desktop until we switched vendors, and Longhorn became our next desktop platform. It was not a step up.
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It had a wonderfully sinister name that would make a great band name:
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@jaded & @ficuswhisperer - thanks!
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portmanteau of technology and hiraeth
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To this day my 2007 Samsung TV suffers from it. I’ve got a replacement kit for the power supply capacitors, but I’ve been too lazy to tear the TV apart again.
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That’s an interesting and tragic story.
And here I thought OS/2 was too obscure…
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wait. what about nextstep?
maybe. its gui feels pretty unobtrusive to me which i like. the finder and mac os’s lack of standard #!$& key shortcuts though are unacceptably terrible. being able to search menus almost makes up for it some days. almost.
i long for the days when the start menu wasn’t trying to sell you a new car, or whatever bing thinks you want. 
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I wouldn’t characterize it as ‘beautiful’ in the visual sense; but I find OpenBSD’s intense avoidance of automagic to be refreshing on an aesthetic level. It means having to specifically do a lot of things for yourself, because nothing is going to do them for you(unless you put doing them in the crontab yourself); but when so much of high profile contemporary operating systems involves interacting with tottering heaps of complexity that mostly automagically work, except when the automagic fails in ways that are profoundly cryptic, both because automagic is really complex to implement and because it’s supposed to be handled automagically, not supposed to be user-serviceable, it can be a real relief to enter an environment where things only move if you tell them to; and there isn’t a roiling mass of uncertainty at the edges of your vision at all times.
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