GUI nostalgia draws me back to ...

And other similar game menus :)

And of course the text "Get Psyched!" while the level was loading and the floppy went "tchuck tchuck tchuck".

Coming from tvtwm and fvwm, Window Maker [windowmaker.org] was extremely beautiful and powerful. Although Gnome 2.x replaced it on all my workstations, I still fondly remember my Window Maker days.

It was nearly perfect, my favourite feature was the abillity to grab the border of a full-screen window and _slightly_ resize it. I simply do not understand why all other WMs i've seen treat a full-screen window differently compared to non-full screen windows _happening_ to cover the entire screen. Oh, and the on-top and on-all-desktops buttons! No idea if KDE4 has these features as well since it's too much of a hog for my "relic" 5 year old hardware.

Anyone who went to school in the UK in the 1980s grew up on it.

On my Atari ST, GEM was amazing. Maybe not the fanciest system in the world, but I always thought it was pretty sweet for the time.

Surprised no one has mentioned the Warp yet...

This is getting a bit ridiculous. Some people are starting to use any excuse to bash Unity/Gnome3 whatever.

They give us plenty of options for bashing. No reason to find "any excuse".

Well yes, but the purpose of a GUI is to give you multiple command line interfaces. I think GUIs do other things, but I have yet to find them essential.

Well yes, but the purpose of a GUI is to give you multiple command line interfaces.

What does tmux have to do with GUIs? :)

See, that's the problem with LCARS - it's not cheap (Paramount ownership issues, license would have to be paid before it could be distributed), it's not readily available (nobody's paid for the license, so they always get shut down via DMCA), and it's not actually comfortable (which is why UI experts regard it as a poor UI). The largest problem is the massive waste of available space for those giant thick menu bars to the sides that don't go away. The main advantage of LCARS is it's distance-visibility, meaning that you can see it over the shoulder of someone in the background on a TV screen, and see that they're doing something.

      Sadly, what makes a good "TV show computer interface" and what makes a good real computer interface are totally separate qualifications. The best example of this that I can think of would be the movie "Hackers" - seriously, nobody who is doing any kind of systems work or programming has a screen that looks like that, but if they'd used what those screens would really look like, nobody would have found it interesting to watch.

The 9000 series is the most reliable computer ever made. No 9000 computer has ever made a mistake or distorted information. They are all, by any practical definition of the words, foolproof and incapable of error.