Chicago95 – Windows 95 Theme for Linux

by acqbu • 3 years ago

358 216 3 years ago

mrabcx• 3 years ago

Some of these old style themes are interesting for nostalgic reasons but then after a while you do realize that there are reasons why the world has moved on.

mountaineagle• 3 years ago

Can you name a few of them?

Sakos• 3 years ago

I'm not sure I agree. I used the Chicago95 theme (with some added 98 icons) for a good 2 years. The only reason I stopped was because I left the job I was at and couldn't be bothered to replicate the experience on my private device and haven't really been using Linux as my main driver. My team found it hilarious and I thought the theme was quite usable. I find modern Windows windowing far more egregious and unusable. I can't even think of anything you might mean that would justify moving away from the 90s themes or UI concepts.

edit: I've recently been using Chromafiler (https://github.com/vanjac/chromafiler) and I'm realizing we've gone off in completely the wrong direction since the 90s.

Pannoniae• 3 years ago

I dunno but there's only a few things missing from those old-style UIs. (Notably, hiDPI support for example)

This is probably a niche opinion but I think we have been steadily devolving and going backwards in terms of user design. We waste so much space, require so many clicks for worse usability than we started with. With the death of skeumorphism and textual UIs we regularly have to guess or hover buttons to find out what they are. Even scrollbars are starting to be unusable - I can barely see some of them because they are small, low-contrast and auto-hiding.

drougge• 3 years ago

These modern useless scrollbars really anger me.

I can theme some things (unless some modern packaging tech makes the app ignore my theme), I can make the ones in Firefox usable but ugly (with widget.gtk.overlay-scrollbars.enabled and widget.non-native-theme.scrollbar.style), and so on. But I can see where we are heading. Scrollbars are one of many UI features that were too useful, so they must be destroyed.

I did not expect to feel so old at such a young age.

xp844• 3 years ago

100%. And all of this regression is either in the name of pure vapid trendiness, or an attempt to supposedly make things “easier for non-technical people” — and yet these people still have no idea how to use their devices any more expertly than they could Windows 95. The only difference is back then people knew what a file was and where it was located. Now there are a lot of people who don’t.

TL;DR millennial shakes fist at cloud

pluijzer• 3 years ago

Seriously wonder what you think the reasons the world moved on is? Everything was so clear, neat and discoverable back then. Now everything needs to be hidden behind labels that may of may not be a button. And that is on a good day because many times I need to learn a new language where a rocket means pipeline and to download an artifact from it you obviously need to press the pinkish two squares thingy. But that is actually still a good day because nobody knew that to do [useful feature] you need to click the triangle next to the lightning bolt so nobody used it. Next update it will be removed. This update will also make the now remaining three buttons two times bigger because our CAD software needs to be mobile first.

KnobbleMcKnees• 3 years ago

I kind of agree with this in that WIMP is a good philosophy for desktop UI design, and I feel that mobile has never really had the equivalent (hamburger menus falling out of fashion being the apotheosis of chasing rainbows IMHO)

But I feel we need only point to Microsoft Word as an example of how the statement.

Everything was so clear, neat, and discoverable back then

just isn't true. The only difference now is that we have dozens of pieces of software in our lives now instead of the half dozen we used in the 90s, and we don't have one company monopolistically decreeing what the status quo of UI design is.

Meaningful competition is also why I think there is no WIMP in mobile. And that's a double-edged sword.

WesolyKubeczek4• 3 years ago

I can name only one thing that has been massively popularised since then in "professional" tools and which I wouldn't mind the older software had: command palette.

Press some hot key, and then type the name of your command in a pop up window with full-text search, autocomplete and a hint what the hot key and toolbar icon for that particular command is. Probably single most useful thing that became mainstream roughly after the ubiquitous CLI-phobia mostly went away.

jtode3• 3 years ago

I wish I could have a very long discussion of this. It is my belief that people think they want new stuff because marketing has told them that. The corporate internet is like someone took that process and welded their finger to the fast forward button, endless iterations of pointless redesigns, galaxies of UXes that only a few people in Boise Iowa ever visited, it's nuts.

I want the internet back where everything looked like that phpbb stuff. You just got the information then. Now you have to solve the CCS/JS puzzle first.

nonethewiser• 3 years ago

Phpbb had a very windowsxp style. Im always trying to pinpoint what that is.

I think it includes smaller, denser text.

And something about the borders. Chunkier, more ornate, or griadients/light or something.

anthk4• 3 years ago

Yeah, to worse.

On Windows XP, beside the childish theme, the window buttons were very usable.

Ditto with XFCE with some xfwm4 with a round-surface squared buttons on yellow, green and red, you can find it under the last items of the list.

Let's talk about the icons and usability. On overy modern Gnome3/XP icon theme, the icons seem contrastless and very hard to see.

Meanwhile, the Tango icons are still standing a lot on the file manager's white background, with clear outlines.

xp844• 3 years ago

People hate on the default blue Luna theme, but there was a perfectly professional Silver version, and the later (black with orange accents) Zune Theme was one of the most attractive UIs I ever got to use.

CalRobert• 3 years ago

Moved on to dark patterns and dumbed down interfaces. Personally, I really miss mnemonics. Alt+underlined letter for_everything_. But having an underlined letter for everything died out and keyboard nav means a lot more memorization.

_dain_• 3 years ago

Office still has this.

accrual9• 3 years ago

I'm going to miss when the ability to double-click the top-left corner of a window will close it (and right-click brings up the window menu). This has been around since the Windows 3 days and still persists in 11, but it's going away in some places - e.g. you can't do this in most browsers, and the new file Explorer in 11 dropped it to support tabs.

antegamisou• 3 years ago

Personally Windows 8 UI and after is the reason I'm never going to touch this specific OS again. In fact, I find it an even bigger hindrance than the monstrosity Windows Updates is.

Paul-Craft• 3 years ago

I agree. I think Windows XP is where the windows UI peaked.

reacharavindh2• 3 years ago

Not that I want the UX To _look_ like Windows 95, but I sure do feel nostalgic how fast and responsive the desktop “felt” back in those days. These days, it is a rarity to see a native app that is as responsive. It feels like all native apps burn through CPU cycles in cosmetic things and animations that it feels sluggish in comparison.

moron4hire• 3 years ago

My Windows 11 laptop at home is quite snappy. My Windows 10 laptop at work with more RAM, a better SSD, and a newer, faster CPU, is not. It's because they virus scan and authorization check every single file access, every time. Even starting small programs like Notepad takes at least 2 seconds at work whereas it's instantaneous at home.

Same story at my previous job. Actually, my work laptop had been faster than my personal one for a while because I had gotten a special purchase due to the nature of my work and IT didn't know what to do with it (we contracted IT services out to a 3rd party. We were a small non-tech company). But then someone caught wind and I was made to figure out how to get IT's tracking software installed for them. And that's when I started working from home all the time (a situation I could manage as the non-tech company wanted me to own the code personally. Yes, a little weird, but it was all a tiny sure other for the company).

It's not the tech, it's the bureaucracy.

throwaway2990• 3 years ago

I got a dell XPS 15 for work, 2022 one. 32gb 12700h. It’s slow and loud. Especially compared to my personal laptop. Not enough to be annoying tho. But then IT decided they want some software installed to make sure they can monitor for bad processes. Wow it’s annoyingly slow now for development because every process is analysised.

accrual9• 3 years ago

It's because they virus scan and authorization check every single file access, every time.

Haha, I know this. I could be doing absolutely nothing and my 10th Gen work laptop CPU is chugging along at 40% utilization.

backendanon2• 3 years ago

Windows and Microsoft are the bureaucracy.

KirillPanov• 3 years ago

WHATWG has joined the chat

rpastuszak• 3 years ago

My experience was different as my first Windows PC was already quite old when I got it, so I was used to random delays in UI feedback. My current M1 feels like what you've just described.

I tried to run DSL (damn small linux) on my P60 around 2003-4 and felt what you've just described. The UI seemed to respond before the interaction!

Then, a few months ago I spent a an evening or two messing with Microsoft Bob (Win 3.11) then Win 95 trying to code a simple website compatible with the tech of the time, using the tools available at the time. Everything felt so snappy.

I don't mind animations applied thoughtfully (e.g. short UI transitions emphasising the state change), but what annoys me the most is animation jank, drops in frame rate, unpredictable delays. Older Windows versions weren't that great in that regard either (do you remember how much time it used to take for the "Open With" dialog, or event file context menu to show up on Win, when you right clicked on a file in Win9x-7?)

xp844• 3 years ago

I miss, when I had a jailbroken phone, briefly being able to set the animation time to zero. Everything is so much faster, even with hardware that can more than handle the GPU stuff. It’s now (on fast hardware) the actual animation frames themselves that are literally wasting my time.

I wish Apple would let me watch each of their oh-so-clever animations one time to give these “designers” their satisfaction, and just jump-cut to the final state from that point on.

justsomehnguy4• 3 years ago

for the "Open With" dialog, or event file context menu to show up on Win, when you right clicked on a file in Win9x-7?)

That's because you installed a ton of 3rd party shit which were registered as a handler for this/all filetypes so when the Explorer needed to show that menu it had to query every registered handler, extract an icon and if those .dlls weren't in the RAM, then you waited for the slow disk access.

soraminazuki• 3 years ago

That's not how I remember it. Windows 9x was slow and constantly crashing. Booting and launching programs took ages. To be fair, the performance problems had more to do with the available hardware back then, but still.

MrBuddyCasino• 3 years ago

IO was slow. Once stuff was in RAM, it was quite fast.

ekianjo• 3 years ago

Windows 9x was slow

because hard drives. Now we have SSDs and the desktop is slower than ever still.

wanderingstan2• 3 years ago

Hard to believe that a few system crashes per day was the norm. You just hoped you hadn’t lost too much, would re-boot and go get a drink while you waited.

Due to that “training” I still hit CTRL-S obsessively even when it hasn’t been needed for years.

raffraffraff2• 3 years ago

I had a carefully crafted 98SE CD that was created using a tool called (I think) 98lite. It let you remove components and set defaults. That was rock solid for me, and used so few resources. Boot times were very quick considering the hardware at the time. The all-important post-install defrag made a difference.

I didn't switch away from 98SE on my home computer until XP SP2 (which I immediately theme to look like 98 because I hated the primary colour nonsense).

Actually, every Windows installation from then until I switched to Linux was "shrunk" and tweaked (can't remember what tool I used, but it wasn't an official MS thing). Having a full licenced copy of InstallShield at work was extremely handy too - every app was repackaged into a fully automatic installer and bundled with the OS. It almost felt like a cloned PC. In fact when I got a job managing fleets of PCs, that XPCD Builder script was like a superpower.

dehrmann• 3 years ago

If you're bored, you should see how Windows 9x does on a Vortex86 CPU with an SD card.

seabass-labrax2• 3 years ago

My Intel Pentium 4 machine usually runs reliably and responsively, but you have to be careful: the default Windows picture viewer instantly freezes the PC if you click 'next image' before the current one has finished loading!

bitwize3• 3 years ago

Indeed. It took nearly a full decade for Windows to match the responsiveness of, say, an Amiga 2000.

qbasic_forever• 3 years ago

The terrible performance you remember is from slow hard drives and just a couple megabytes of RAM. Retro computing enthusiasts today have win 95 running on solid state flash disks and 32 megabytes of memory and it flies.

troupo• 3 years ago

Windows 2000 though... I think it was the pinnacle of Windows.

JohnBooty4• 3 years ago

   That's not how I remember it. Windows 9x was slow and 
   constantly crashing.

It was like... both.

If you had a did your own clean Windows installs, had an extra $100 of RAM, defragged the HDD regularly, and disabled crapware and unnecessary services etc. the UI felt real sharp and instant.

However this was not the typical experience. Typical experience for most people was that you clicked the Start menu and then listened to the HDD grind away.

reacharavindh2• 3 years ago

True that crashes were more frequent and annoying. However, that’s not what I was talking about. While it worked, the UX felt responsive. Moving the mouse around clicking things, opening files and folders, dragging stuff, scrolling, window switching, even the clicks felt responsive. These days the whole thing feels like “smooth” in a bad slow way. As if every action spends a good 20% of time first doing some animation and then doing what you really intended.

tracker13• 3 years ago

I think it largely came down to how much RAM you had in your system.. 4MB was mostly okay, and sluggish, 8-16 much more usable... 32+ was downright snappy.

I recall using an AMD 5x86@133 with 64mb ram with Win95 then NT4 and it was very usable at the time. It wasn't the best for gaming, my cpu/gpu weren't great, but for general work/productivity use it was pretty great for the time. I had received the wrong ram by mistake, and it worked... was supposed to be 16mb.

edit: I also recall paying extra to add in a cache module on that mb.

hknapp• 3 years ago

http://copy.sh/v86/?profile=windows95

treve2• 3 years ago

KDE Plasma in my opinion comes closest to this. It's stayed very snappy over the years and I'm mainly a laptop user.

backendanon2• 3 years ago

Agreed, I use KDE on both my desktop and personal laptop.

dmonitor• 3 years ago

turn off animations and it flies

Roark663• 3 years ago

One of the biggest things that contribute to the feeling of slowness today are all the animations /transitions etc. The very first thing I do when installing a new version of gnome is disable all of it. It suddenly feels 5x faster.

treve2• 3 years ago

KDE Plasma in my opinion comes closest to this. It's stayed very snappy over the years and I'm mainly a laptop user.

I'm on Gnome because I prefer the design, but if you want fast it might be worth a shot.

thrtythreeforty• 3 years ago

Initial releases of KDE 4 were absolute pigs. They spent several years trimming fat from those until it started to be useful for me around KDE 4.9 or so. Plasma 5 and onward have been excellent.

overgard2• 3 years ago

I think nostalgia might have rewritten your memory. Spinning rust disks meant apps would take 5-10 seconds to load, moving and resizing windows was laggy and left behind repaint artifacts, and anything network related took approximately forever

acdha• 3 years ago

Yes - what he described was the experience using BeOS, which had an amazing I/O scheduler, but switching back to Win95 was noticeably worse on latency. A big problem was I/O deadlines - I knew so many people who burned “coasters” because Win95 and classic MacOS couldn’t reliably feed data to a CD writer with a small buffer. Audio capture and data acquisition were similarly fragile if you needed latency guarantees lower than hundreds of milliseconds.

wildrhythms3• 3 years ago

There was a recent thread with twitter clips showing old Windows vs. new Windows and how old Windows opened its programs noticeably faster.

https://twitter.com/jmmv/status/1671670996921896960?s=20

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36503983

bitwize3• 3 years ago

Windows 9x feels snappy and responsive -- on a VM on modern hardware. On the hardware of the day... yeah, it chugged. You needed about 16 MiB of RAM and a graphics accelerator for acceptable performance in 1995, and that was quite a beefy system for that year.

tracker13• 3 years ago

I got the wrong ram (64mb instead of 16) and will say it ran like a dream on a 5x86-133 with a cache module. NT4 ran really well on there as well for the time. OS/2 didn't behave quite right, after NT4 I never really looked back. Kept a 9x partition for games only.

ceeam• 3 years ago

You know the old saying: "BSD is for people who like Unix, Linux is for people who hate Windows". I don't think it's hate. I think it's "for people who are tsundere about Windows".

anthk4• 3 years ago

You say that, but jwm was born on Irix I think and plenty of people used that instead of MWM/FVWM and similar. In the end, you just managed windows, so using XFM/XFE with JWM was more than enough.

Also, lots of *BSD people liked IceWM with Metal themes for similar reasons. The Windows UI was already peaking at usability, so they used that among virtual desktops and the power of Unix utilities on shells, tools and services.

accrual9• 3 years ago

I also like the old quote "BSD is what you get when a bunch of Unix hackers sit down to try to port a Unix system to the PC. Linux is what you get when a bunch of PC hackers sit down and try to write a Unix system for the PC."

jtode3• 3 years ago

Anyone know if there's an os/2 warp theme? I recall being quite pleased with it.

TacticalCoder• 3 years ago

Back then about just anything was better looking than Windows 95. OS/2 was slick. Mac computers had a very enjoyable UI. SGI machines had a very good looking UI.

But people mostly only knew Windows 95, so that's what they remember.

WesolyKubeczek4• 3 years ago

I would say that Win95 aesthetics was about someone with an actual good taste taking Motif and making it not suck. Remember how selecting menu items by hovering was BIG? Coming from Windows 3.1/3.11, the usability improvement of this alone was massive. Same with mouse wheel becoming ubiquitous, courtesy of Microsoft (they weren't the first, but it's thanks to them that everyone and their dog could actually make use of it).

Another thing about Win95 aesthetics (which peaked at the time of Windows 2000) was the extreme consistency which had been simply absent before that in the DOS/Win3/PC world. Maybe Apple could brag about it too, can't say about SGI (was it all like Motif in all applications, with colors/hotkeys set platform-wide, or was it the ugly Motif/Xaw/Athena mix seen elsewhere and each application having a mind of its own?). Man, you can't find it these days, especially since Electron.

I'm purposely omitting Qt/GTK, as they have always felt like also-ran toolkits, mimicking the conventions of the platforms they inhabited, and I can't for the life of me remember when it was that they actually set any trends instead of mimicking some hotness of the day introduced by the dominant platforms.

Clamchop• 3 years ago

I thought they were all similarly ugly. Thought so then and still do now. Drab grays and muted colors for miles. (Ignoring utility here.) Uglier stuff could be found off the beaten path, though.

Karellen• 3 years ago

Such a pity GTK3 and later aren't intended to be themeable, and the devs make no release-to-release compatibility guarantees for the theme engines.

If this only affected Gnome, I wouldn't mind so much. But so many regular non-Gnome apps I use are GTK-based, even if I pick a different DE (which I do), I can't personalise my own user experience in a way that's consistent. The UX I keep behind a password, so I doesn't matter if anyone else would get confused if they tried to use it, because they can't.

I can still try to pick QT-based desktop apps where possible. And for some fairly simple apps, there are both GTK and QT implementations (e.g. calculators), so that's feasible. But a lot of apps have one main implementation in their niche, and you either have no choice, or if you pick the one with fewer developers some features just aren't there.

I really feel like we've lost something significant from where things were 15-odd years ago.

nils-herzig• 3 years ago

I really like GTK4 / Adwaita and dislike the look and feel of QT, but I guess that's just personal preference.

You can change the colors of Adwaita using https://github.com/GradienceTeam/Gradience it even has a mode to extract colors from your background like current android versions

jeroenhd• 3 years ago

I love the Gnome design language but the way they made theming so difficult has put me off using GTK for anything. Sadly, I don't know any better alternatives for my language of choice (Rust).

I get that developers don't want their app to be stylized and broken by distro maintainers, but now none of them look native or good. It's like that time Android apps all started inventing their own bad UI themes, nothing feels native anymore and everything is a chore to use.

In theory, if every app kept their libadwaita versions and modifications up to date, you can still offer themes and everything works great. I practice, there's inconsistency everywhere and theming is impossible to apply to every application.

jwells892• 3 years ago

Sadly, I don't know any better alternatives for my language of choice (Rust).

This is the case for a lot of languages. I believe Qt being written in C++ hurts its adoption much more than some might think… plain C bindings are must for UI toolkits.

gattilorenz3• 3 years ago

Related: is there any "high resolution" version of setup.bmp (https://raw.githubusercontent.com/grassmunk/Chicago95/5670fd...) that does not kill the spirit of it? I tried upscaling it, but it's like upscaling pixel art...

I guess my best bet would be retaking the original pictures (the OG MS Natural Keyboard, CDs, etc.) and recreating it, but it sounds like plenty of work

post-it• 3 years ago

You could scale it without interpolation, giving you a crisper image at larger resolutions without blurring or smoothing.

gattilorenz3• 3 years ago

yes, technically that is possible, but it would give you an image with... big square blocks instead of tiny pixels.

I'm thinking of achieving something like https://github.com/nestoris/win98wallpapers, and maybe Midjourney's img2img (as the other commenter suggested) might be able to do something like that, I don't know.

pbhjpbhj2• 3 years ago

How about scaling with Midjourney's img2img (if it will do a wallpaper size image?).

creata• 3 years ago

You probably already thought of this, but this looks like a 1-bit dithered image (maybe Floyd-Steinberg?) so maybe you can blur it to get something like the original image, then scale it up, and apply the dither again.

wildrhythms3• 3 years ago

For dithered images I find waifu2x with the noise removal at 'None' to be pretty good at scaling these things up without destroying the dithered shapes.

Unrelated (Maybe related actually) this tool for applying old-school style dithering to an image with a bunch of settings and dithering algos: https://doodad.dev/dither-me-this/

gattilorenz3• 3 years ago

I actually tried waifu2x from mobile, and it looks good! Not sure if it will work as a desktop background, but thanks for the tip!

troad2• 3 years ago

I'm a big fan of this aesthetic. If you appreciate the usability of W95 without needing a pixel perfect copy, it's very easy to theme KDE to strike a really good balance.

As your global theme, use 'Reactionary'. Set your application style to 'MS Windows 9x'. For your icons, use 'Memphis98'. For cursors, 'Hackneyed (scaleable)'. Your Plasma style, colours, and window decorations should all follow your global theme (Reactionary). I keep the default Noto fonts because I find them quite easy on the eyes, but this is easy to change if you yearn for classic fonts.

My task bar (bottom bar) is set to use full names and not combine apps; I also use the application menu that looks like W95, and I've got it set to use a little W95 Start icon for that touch of nostalgia. Otherwise it's all very minimalist.

I've used this set-up for years and it works really well for me. I find it very conducive to being productive - it's stable, unchanging, and respectful of my attention and focus. I also don't need to hack away at anything or worry about updates - KDE officially supports theming and handles all of this really seamlessly.

anthk4• 3 years ago

You can use Chicago 95's icons perfectly under KDE.

ilyt2• 3 years ago

I don't like how it looks (prefer a bit flatter buttons, but that are still buttons), but windows didn't really get any more usable after that...

mcny2• 3 years ago

windows didn't really get any more usable after that...

The old UI is good but I am not a fan of the everything is folders and files idea of the start menu. Maybe I'm misremembering but iirc as a child I used to forget which sub menu inside the thing I needed was except for the ones I used frequently.

I like being able to just type obs and press enter in the new windows. I preferred the old theme better than windows XP Luna theme. I had a copy of tune up software and it said the old theme is somehow easier on my ram? iirc I only had 128MB on my pentium 4 computer.

_ea1k• 3 years ago

Search in the start menu and window management improved a lot since then. The newer screenshot tools are nice compared to 95 too.

They definitely got a lot of things right, though. The basic aesthetic was pretty good and very discoverable.

UncleSlacky• 3 years ago

You could also just use the "Redmond" theme with the Trinity DE:

https://baloo.neocities.org/TheGuide/TheGuide-Part1 (bottom of page)

tommica2• 3 years ago

This is a hail mary, but would there be something similar for getting the Win XP look? I'd love that

Aeolun2• 3 years ago

Absolutely. I’ve been doing this with the XP theme after this was posted on HN last time and I thought the same thing.

It exists, but need to check where.

Edit: No idea where I got it from. I know I installed the 98 theme first from this thing, and then downloaded a WinXP theme that I selected in all of the places it mattered.

troad2• 3 years ago

There is a KDE theme called 'Expose', by the same person who made Reactionary, which looks like it might be what you're after. (For icons, there's a set called just called 'Windows XP').

bacchusracine• 3 years ago

getting the Win XP look?

I used to follow the XPDE project avidly back in the day but it seems to have just withered on the vine and never went anywhere.

https://web.archive.org/web/20200502011912/http://xpde.holob...

qwerty4561273• 3 years ago

If you appreciate the usability of W95 without needing a pixel perfect copy

My experience suggests "not pixel perfect" usually means severely imperfect to the point of very ugly when Linux WMs try to imitate Windows 95. "Redmond" themes have been around for decades, always ugly as hell, only reminding of Windows 95 very loosely.

robertlagrant• 3 years ago

I don't think experience is relevant here, unless it's the same person doing that who made the previous ones. Maybe asking for a screenshot would help you discover if this one is good or not?

sombragris2• 3 years ago

I completely agree, but in my personal preference I would use the KDE1 window deco rather than the Windows 95/Redmond one. The Win95 style is good, but KDE1 is even better IMHO.

rtpg• 3 years ago

If someone is on KDE, I recommend the themes by phobian [0]. I had an issue where I needed to force my DPI to get things aligning nicely, but there's a lot of themes based off of various operating systems that are fun to mess with.

[0] https://store.kde.org/u/phob1an

WesolyKubeczek4• 3 years ago

I like his color schemes a lot. Especially the contrast.

jug3• 3 years ago

Would be cool to “do it right” and have a proper window manager for Linux like this rather than “just” a skin (I really don’t want to diminish the ton of work sunk into this). So you get the last details about windowing behavior and animations right, and achieving much more in terms of start menu, task bar behavior and so on.

To be less niche and reach even more nostalgic users it could be something like a RetroWM with modes for like Windows 95, XP, maybe even Mac OS 9.

If I only had unlimited time on my hands… :D

lmz• 3 years ago

There are already proper WMs with the Win95 look e.g. IceWM.

jwells892• 3 years ago

I’ve wanted to work on OS clone desktop environments (to cover all the little things a window manager alone can’t) for a while now because I think it’s worthwhile to preserve older environments and keep them available for usage even after their commercial creators have abandoned them.

Finding the time to do that is a challenge though, particularly with the higher activation energy of having to learn the ins and outs of X11, Wayland, and other bits and pieces involved in building a functional *nix desktop.

jug3• 3 years ago

Yeah, that’s exactly it! Unfortunately the different skill sets required here are so different. You part need deep understanding of the low level inner workings, and part need great attention to detail in user interface design. It would probably be easiest to pull of as a team effort.

petepete• 3 years ago

It's not Linux but Serenity OS checks all the other boxes.

https://www.serenityos.org/

jug3• 3 years ago

Yeah, I’m aware of Serenity and think it has a really cool combination of old school Windows and Mac OS!

prmoustache2• 3 years ago

Aren't you mixing up toolkits and window manager? Seems to me like we are pretty well sorted on linux with some amazing window managers that are superior to what Microsoft and Apple ever produced.

pbhjpbhj2• 3 years ago

Reflecting on the comments, I'm surprised - a little - that MS don't have backwards compatibility of GUI. Many older users like the interface not to change, or to change only superficially. It would, I think, be a usability improvement for many.

As a "family admin" I'd want to update for security reasons, or if the new version is better optimised or lacks some bugs, but for many elders (IME) any significant changes to UI are devastating to their comfort in using the OS.

MS just don't seem good at making windows (a DE), IMO.

LeoNatan25• 3 years ago

It's still possible to render similar kinds of controls in Windows. It's evident by old software that is still shipped in Windows.

But judging by the abysmal state of Microsoft modern UI toolkits, and Microsoft's complete inability to adhere to any consistency between the different frameworks that render toolkits, I just don't see any way Microsoft could offer cross-OS theme support that would work in any meaningful way. This was possible up to and including Windows 7, but then Microsoft just derped in their UI development, and it has been more and more embarrassing with every Windows release.

tyingq• 3 years ago

It's still there in some places...try <WindowsKey>+r then run odbcad32.exe

Click the "System DSN" tab, then "Add", Double-click the top entry ("Driver Da Microsoft..."), uncheck "Use Current Directory", then click the "Select Directory" button.

Also try the "help" button.

accrual9• 3 years ago

I love that some of these old UIs are still present in current Windows 11 22H2. I was surprised "control userpasswords2" still exists.

overgard2• 3 years ago

They did keep classic mode up till Windows 7. After that it must have just been too niche

cies• 3 years ago

for Linux

Linux is a kernel and does have a graphical interface. This theme is for XFCE, one of the many "desktop environments" that can run on the Linux kernel.

Other being: Gnome, Plasma (KDE), LXQt, and many more.

To make it more interesting, XFCE also runs on FreeBSD (another open source kernel/OS).

bigpeopleareold• 3 years ago

Linux is the kernel for the XFCE operating system called formally XFCE/Linux :)

I saw this and clicked into it and then saw I can't use it without using XFCE.(well, only for kicks)

stainablesteel• 3 years ago

this is the kind of stuff i use when we get a new IT person, i walk over and ask for help doing something mundane just to watch their reaction

accrual9• 3 years ago

I've never done hiring myself, but I'd joke with my manager that I should be allowed to watch potential new hires type for a bit before approving them for the role which involves a lot of typing/chatting, copy/paste, general UI work. So frustrating to see tech staff manually highlight words, right-click, copy, find some buried window, hunt and peck to type, etc.

charles_f• 3 years ago

This is so beautiful it brings tears to my eyes! Reproductions like this somehow always end up feeling just a bit off, like being so close but something is wrong. But this one seems spotless.

Pure UI that works from before the word "ux" was invented.

netbioserror• 3 years ago

Contrary to what many are saying, I want the LOOK but not the usability. We've made some good leaps since then and Cinnamon desktop represents just about the cutting edge in usability and familiarity. But that squared look with high-contrast and clearly-interactable elements was lost along the way. Now everything has to be flat, flat, flat with disappearing controls. Take me back.

TillE• 3 years ago

with high-contrast and clearly-interactable elements

Yeah, I miss that a lot. My favorite example is the iTunes sidebar icons going from clearly distinguishable different colors to flat uniform monochrome.

Why? Because someone decided it made the interface look "better" as an art object, rather than being a better user experience.

firen7772• 3 years ago

It doesn't even look "better". It's just more "modern", more "professional", more cooperate, or, my preferred description, more soulless.

wildrhythms3• 3 years ago

At the $bigcorp level, they ask survey panels "Which of these interfaces looks more modern to you?" that's largely the extent of the justification to completely change the entire UI that has been perfected and beloved by users over many years. The users begrudgingly learn the new UI, and a bunch of project managers get promoted and leave for the next company to do the same thing.

firen7772• 3 years ago

There's a study that shows flat UI designs cause uncertainty and can lower productivity: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/flat-ui-less-attention-caus...

My subjective experience agree with the study too. But since the entire industry (be it cooperate or non-profit org) collectively lost their mind and decided flat is the one true way and purged the entire internet of anything vaguely 3D, I can't really compare the experience again in a more objective manner.

I'd always go back to [Ross Scott's video of how a "non-expert" view modern GUI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AItTqnTsVjA) whenever I want some reminder on what good GUI should do. I don't agree with everything he say since a lot of it is subjective, but this video cursed me to pay far more attention on how shitty modern GUI is in my everyday interaction with the computer and phone.

(Ross's video essay style is more akin to how a cultist on the street preaches about the UFO or the end-of-the-world and doesn't even care if anyone listen. I personally love it but it may not be everyone's cup of tea)

spion• 3 years ago

Am I the only one that doesn't like the win95 look anymore but still appreciates designs that are similarly conservative about whitespace? Is there any design system out there that is like that?

Roark663• 3 years ago

Windows 95 "theme" was very nice for the CRT monitors and their resolutions of back in the day (1024x768 etc). Running it on a modern display?... I don't get it.

michaelcampbell• 3 years ago

Nostalgia, funzies.

notorandit• 3 years ago

It Is not a "theme for Linux". It is a theme for GTK-based DEs.

indigodaddy• 3 years ago

This might be fun for scambaiting?

sschueller• 3 years ago

Perfect for it. Lock it down a bit and start it in a VM...

CyberDildonics• 3 years ago

That's how it is done anyway

jszymborski• 3 years ago

I use this day to day and it's great. Bonus: people take a triple take when I screenshare in meetings.

cat_plus_plus• 3 years ago

If you like it, you should check out era X Windows managers with a multi button mouse. Same hierarchical start menu, but bring it up from any location on the desktop with right mouse click! Then most simple apps don't really need menu bars or windows controls, just maybe small resize handles at the corners, use right click to do the rest as well. Once you created a perfect arrangement for each virtual desktop, save it and have it perfectly recreated on startup. With not a pixel wasted and apps themselves not wasting much white space, it becomes possible to have all the tools you need for your workflow side by side rather than constantly hunting for the right overlapping window. Plus, workstations had keyboards with dedicated copy/cut/paste keys, rather than remembering to press Control-Shift-C in Terminal and Control-C elsewhere and half of the time killing your current command by mistake.

guestbest• 3 years ago

I think the late 1990’s and 2000’s X window managers was peak mouse/display productively

msie• 3 years ago

Seeing this brings me so much joy. If only they had it for Windows 11 as an add-on pack I would buy it!

Luctct• 3 years ago

This is really nice. I may try it soon.

I tested Windows 11 recently and I was really shocked. Apparently, it has two basic themes: my-eyeballs-hurt white and what-is-the-point-of-living black.

some-guy• 3 years ago

I used this theme for awhile but I kept running into visual bugs that caused certain applications to not render at all, and as a recent parent I just decided that tinkering with desktop / window manager constantly just wasn't worth it anymore.

What it did do however is remind me just how much space can actually fit on a 1920x1080 screen, and that was very special for the experience and applications that did work (which was most of them).

prmoustache2• 3 years ago

I like skeuomorphism but the windows look has always put me off.

I would say the pinnacle of the skeumorphism era in term of desktop aesthetics and behavior was QNX photon microgui:

Give me that with dpi scaling capabilities and modern font rendering and I will be happy:

http://nixon-development.com/guis/qnx/mediaplayer.png

http://nixon-development.com/guis/qnx/apps.png

With BeOS 5 in close second and MacOS 9 in third.

The windows 9x/2000/XP were all ugly in comparison.

qwerty4561273• 3 years ago

The best I've seen so far yet far from perfect when you try to actually do it. Just look how ugly do the window menus hot keys underlines look even on the screenshot. And that's not the only quirk even there, and there will be more on your actual machine.

There also is (or, perhaps, was? I haven't cheecked for a year) a problem with GTK3 apps which don't get skinned this way even if they use uncustomized window decorations.

In fact it fascinates me how hard it appears to restyle your widows to look like whatever you want.

MisterTea• 3 years ago

The last time this theme was posted here I had just replaced my Win 7 machine with a Linux machine running XFCE so I decided to install it for kicks. 5 months later and I am still using it. The "why" is simple: I've used Windows far longer than Unix/Linux, back to the early 90's with Win 3.1. Navigating the menus is almost second nature and familiar icons for notepad and others lead me right to the programs I need. Me and my brother did tons of gaming in Win 95/98 and setup our first LAN on 98 with a Netgear kit and our friends would come over for 1v1 DM - those were the days. Its a nice mix of nostalgia, familiarity and simplicity.

aimor• 3 years ago

It's comforting to see all the folders turned upright. Ever since Vista they've been sideways, spilling your documents all over the taskbar (this is why I moved my taskbar to the side).

sombragris2• 3 years ago

I take issue with the HN headline. This is a theme for Xfce, not Linux in itself. You can't theme GNOME, MATE, Plasma, Cinnamon, etc., with it.

refracture• 3 years ago

I used this as a slacker (Slackware user) for a year or so. I really enjoyed the aesthetic overall, and while I've been using Fedora KDE for a while now I have debated moving back to XFCE and would certainly reinstall this theme if I did.

I've got a screenshot somewhere of using this theme while playing the dos game Jetpak Christmas in dosbox with Xsnow running, it was fun.

Chicago95 – Windows 95 Theme for Linux

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