Indeed, the good old days when "optimizing for the user" got us... Windows 3.1 (release date April 6, 1992 , ref https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Microsoft_Windows_vers...) or the first version of Linux - which I did not have the honor to use but I can imagine how user friendly it was considering what I ended up using couple of years later (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Linux)

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linguae 16 hours ago | parent | next [-]

We can have stable user-friendly software. We had a nice sweet spot in the early 2000s with Windows XP and Mac OS X: stable operating systems built on workstation-quality kernels (NT and Mach/BSD, respectively), and a userland that respected the user by providing distraction-free experiences and not trying to upsell the user. Users of workstations already experienced this in the 1990s (NeXT, Sun, SGI, HP, and PCs running IBM OS/2 Windows NT), but it wasn’t until the 2000s when workstation-grade operating systems became readily available to home users, with both Windows XP and Mac OS X 10.0 being released in 2001.

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ndriscoll 11 hours ago | parent [-]

We do of course still have this in modern computing with Linux/KDE. Stable, snappy, and does exactly what you ask. The computer doesn't get in your way, nor does it try to get you to do something else. It just does what you tell it to do, immediately.

	▲	linguae 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yup, desktop Linux and other FOSS systems like ReactOS and Haiku are the last bastions of personal computing that haven’t been made into platforms that nag and upsell us.

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noir_lord 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

There are myriad ways to optimise for the user, user friendliness is only one of them.

As the old joke went "Unix is user friendly, it's particular about who its friends are".