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Lately I've been strongly considering helping migrate my parents to Linux. Their needs are primarily web-based with some basic productivity tools mixed in, and Windows has just been getting more and more hostile. On top of this, they're at an age where they're now more susceptible than ever to various scams/attacks, and shutting down an entire category of problems by removing Windows from the picture is increasingly attractive.

I had forgotten that Chicago95 exists, but this might be exactly the right thing. They'd immediately find it familiar, and while the theme isn't the whole story, this would go a long way in easing the transition I think.

I miss this era of computing.

This looks nice and easy to use.

My hypothesis is today's "modern" OS user interfaces are objectively worse from a usability perspective, obfuscating key functionality behind layers of confusing menus.

It reminds me of these "OS popularity since the 70s" time lapse views:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=cTKhqtll5cQ

The dominance of Windows is crazy, even today, Mac desktops and laptops are comparatively niche

I like themes like this. The only thing that hampers the authenticity for me, and this isn't the fault of the author really, is the super high resolution fonts compared to what was available back then. There's just something charming about low resolution fonts that are readable enough on screen, probably nostalgia.

I think any type of pixel font authentic to a couple decades ago won't look good on a 4K monitor, unfortunately. It got to the point where I ordered a 1024x768 monitor just to play old games with a period system.

Three modern desktop environments that I use:

- Windows 10/11. Especially in 11, it's easiest just to type the start of an app's name into the search box. As opposed to the two clicks it takes to get to the "traditional" menu where you still have to scroll to find it.

- Gnome (only on fresh Linux installs, usually replaced with Mate pretty soon). Has a smartphone-style app grid, but here, too, its quickest just to type the start of the app's name.

- Mate: Modern, but still has the Windows 95 paradigm (easy enough to collapse the two toolbars into just one bottom one). Still my favourite desktop environment.

Not all fancy graphic stuff is good. And don't even get me started on how hard it is to drag an app window to another screen these days - on Windows. You really have to find the 2% or so of the top bar that's still draggable and not cluttered up by other stuff.

This looks neat. I remember the various fvwm95 and icewm themes doing a similar number in the late 90s and early 2000s.

It would be fun to pair this with Gambas[0], a free VB6 clone that works with GTK.

[0] https://gambaswiki.org/website/en/main.html

This still remains the absolute pinnacle of cohesive desktop environment design in my books.

Is it really necessary to spin up an entirely new distro for an XFCE+GTK theme?

A better modern middle ground imo is the KD3 continuation project https://www.trinitydesktop.org/

It's not complete until you have a comet cursor and several IE toolbars that were somehow installed.

I love the niche of enthusiasm that exists for the Windows 95 UI. It's not an original point that aside from nostalgia it's a really clear and usable design; but that leads me to wonder, are there any modern UIs/themes/etc that are inspired by (rather than necessarily directly mimicking) Windows 95?

Would be interesting to see what a modern version of Windows 95 would look like, or what general design lessons can be learned from it's niceties.

Does this project offer anything besides Chicago95's UI pre-installed?

`/var/home/afidel/`

There are some pretty good desktop environments for Linux which emulate the Windows desktop, so that old Windows users would feel at home immediately.

But I've never seen them emulate the filesystem, which is what took most old Windows users the biggest effort to understand. And the Linux filesystem raises it to a new level of complexity, which makes every old Windows users want to go back to Windows immediately.

With "old" users I don't mean experienced users.

Is there some kind of overlay which does all this `C:\User\afidel\Desktop` mapping for those users?

My childhood home's computer said 38911 BYTES FREE.

anyone remember XPDE? I'm not sure it was ever finished / packaged in any major repo but came across someone doing a walkthrough of it the other week and it looked pretty complete.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFKx8nCl1Vw

It is hard for me to distinguish between the functional simplicity of desktop computing in that era, with the overall excitement that the explosion of connectivity brought to the world. The internet was a lot of fun and had so many surprising corners. Practically all of it was personal, niche, or experimental content for awhile.

I wonder if Windows 9X was really all that exceptional, or if it was just what people remember driving with as they navigated the new world.

The best modern equivalent to that desktop paradigm I've found is LXQt, although when I use it I find I kind of miss some of the accouterments of the modern desktops.

This looks great with some apps that have matching themes, but I wonder if it quickly falls apart once you rely on apps with very non-consistent UIs (audio/video software, Discord, Spotify, Slack, and basically all other Electron-based apps). Although I guess there might be some matching CSS injection hacks available for the Electron ones?

I've done something like this with the windows 2000 look from time to time, but something I found frustrating with theming xfwm4 window decorations is the non existent ability to create a horizontal gradient across the top of the window like in Windows 2000.

I believe this is the reason you cannot find a proper windows 2000 theme for xfce.

That's just the chicago theme I'va had for years now on my XFCE, I think it's a bit lame to steal that theme (not from Microsoft but the maker of that xfce theme), put it in a repository, give it a different name, and pose it as your own work?

The repo literally adds nothing, just a name change.

seen the win32 aesthetic used for higher-order reasons: separating "work mode" from playtime. An extra user to do so on the same machine helps.

Connect the dots reading https://www.marginalia.nu/log/99_context/ and seeing the ui change in old vs new screencasts https://www.youtube.com/@ViktorLofgren/videos

While neat, I would love to see a desktop that has similar design to either Windows XP/2000, classic Mac OS, or mac OS x cheetah.

Turns out they do have Windows XP: https://github.com/winblues/bluexp

What are the benefits/drawbacks of using this vs. actually running Windows 95 or XP?

I'm assuming the PC will be mostly used for "educational software" (games), which you would want to run on XP. What benefit is there to running Fedora?

This is awesome. IMHO the Windows 2000 UI was the pinnacle of UX, it's still unmatched to this day. I'd love to see the SerenityOS UI ported on Linux+Wayland someday.

How cute… imagine my childhood home would have a computer with a graphical desktop…

I feel so old now…

Neat! It's probably just nostalgia, but I still don't think any modern desktop has been as good as Windows 2000 was. Perfect blend of minimal without hiding things (well, excluding the Office 2000 menu hiding disaster which we will conveniently ignore)

My childhood home would need DOS. Maybe deskview for multitasking. :)

This looks neat, but the problem with all these nostalgia fueled projects is that if you use it seriously you’re basically LARPing being in a kinder past. Eventually it just gives an empty feeling, and you long for days when interfaces didn’t just look like this for fun, it’s because that’s what they simply were, and this was the state of the art. But you can never go back to those days.

A Windows 3.x UI theme would get the childhood nostalgia going much stronger for me than a 95/NT4/98/2000/Me theme does.

Occasionally I boot up Windows 3.1 in a VM and play a game of Solitaire, for old time’s sake - I can run Windows 95 in a VM too, but it just doesn’t have the same pull.

I remember a couple kids with Windows 95 PCs at home. They seemed like such richie rich's. We'd all play Wolfenstein when we'd sleep over at their houses. My childhood computer was a WebTV, hacked to get dialup internet for free, on a 100 lb CRT TV from Goodwill. I finally scraped up the money for an actual PC some time in highschool.

Based on the description I was hoping it would include some classic DOS and Windows games to play via wine :)

Usually the observation that “a widely used thing is objectively bad” is strong market signal for entrepreneurial opportunity in a big tam.

I for one would welcome a set of deeply integrated ui improvements in a Mac that included a better file manager, better window management, better desktop search, a contact manager just that worked, a messaging client that just worked, audio and camera controls that just worked, a calculator that didn’t suck, etc.

I’d pay at least $100 a year for that tool set.

That Git GUI got my attention. Does anyone have an idea what it might be? The titlebar says aurora but when I searched for it all I got was an commercial product with AI nonsense stuck into it.

Nice. I use KDE + Kvantum + Expose theme and various Windows XP themes myself for Windows XP Experience.

well this is simply adorable, down to the neocities hosted website

this already is my stack, tho I need to get over to the immutable variety. i'm on fedora 41 i3-spin, using chicago95. been using it for years, with the plymouth bit that gives you a proper win95 startup background during boot

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Plymouth

This really resonates with me.

Every time I try desktop linux it feels like it's 30 years behind in usability.

I can testify that Xfce+Chicago95 is great as a daily driver, and one of the most consistent GUIs across different distros (some differences in defaults still exist)

I love that it's not trying to be a 1:1 clone of Windows 95, but more of a vibe-match

What about the old school Packard Bell OS. With Kidspace and other "areas"

My childhood computer was a Mac. Anyone have a theme that emulates System 6.08?

If we could get tabworks I would love that

This looks wonderful to use. Is there video playback?

I’ve been thinking lots about the YouTube algorithm, how it’s based on engagement, not educational value, and how it’s such a huge missed opportunity for our kids.

So I’ve been building my own YouTube exploration app, for my own kids.

Email me if you’re interested in testing.

jim.jones1@gmail.com

Sweet! I have a very similar desktop that I’ve shoehorned support for i3 into as well. Will do likewise with this.

How messed up is the current state of play than half the population yearns for the late 90s?

Why are recreations of old UIs always differently wrong? Is pixel-perfection too much to ask for?

Sounds good

I'm trying to forget that horror show and you want to put it under a spotlight! If I never see a bsod or windows registry again it'll be too soon.

It needs the BSOD screensaver from XScreensaver, for sure. And, maybe, DOSBox-X or DOSEmu2.

Also:

- Pan

- Sylpheed

- Audacious with the WinAMP theme

- Hexchat kinda has a MIRC vibe

- Parole looks like WMP from < v9 releases

- You can't simulate a dialer, but with trickle you can mimic a 56k/ISDN connection pretty well

- SyncTERM for BBS's

- ScummVM, with just a bilinear filter, because I played tons of adventures

- There's an SDL2 reimplementation of Space Cadet Pinball at github.

- Trigger Rally would look like a great shareware game

- Pidgin, hands down. Either you were an AOL user in America, or a MSN user in Europe. It has emoticons, not emojis. Add that annoying notification theme with a sound and that would be the very late 90's/early 00's (my early teen years)

if you're interested in golden era UI computing, check out Trinity Desktop which is a fork of KDE3.5