CDE has some pleasing color options to choose from. The blockiness of the UI is really brutalist but maybe it is a matter of what one is used to. When watching

CDE has some pleasing color options to choose from. The blockiness of the UI is really brutalist but maybe it is a matter of what one is used to. When watching Hollywood movies in the 90's it looked modern, almost sci-fi. Maybe the windows aesthetic was influenced by hardware limitations of the time: smaller screens, lower resolutions and somewhat blurry CRTs. Windows on a modern larger, higher DPI e very sharp LCD will look small and hard to differentiate smaller details; CDE on a large high DPI screen makes it very easy to differ smaller details and the borders "better communicate" limits. I like KDE 1.0 appearance. It's got a good balance of influences from CDE, OS/2 and Windows.