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Chicago95 – Windows 95 Theme for Linux

358 points by acqbu 3y ago

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
prmoustache 3y 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/mediaplayer.png http://nixon-development.com/guis/qnx/apps.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.
qwerty456127 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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).
sombragris 3y 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 3y 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.
mrabcx 3y 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 3y ago
  Can you name a few of them?
- Sakos 3y 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 https://github.com/vanjac/chromafiler) and I'm realizing we've gone off in completely the wrong direction since the 90s.
- Pannoniae 3y 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 3y 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.
ceeam 3y 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".
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- anthk 3y 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.
- accrual 3y 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."
reacharavindh 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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.
    - tracker1 3y ago
      I find that doing almost everything under WSL is a much better experience, if you can spare enough ram to the environment. Mostly because the monitoring software doesn't run inside the WSL/Ubuntu env.
jtode 3y ago
Anyone know if there's an os/2 warp theme? I recall being quite pleased with it.
- TacticalCoder 3y 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.
  - WesolyKubeczek 3y 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.
    - jtode 3y ago
      Thing about GTK and QT though, is they are extremely relevant in 2023. I use QT at work and as a nerd that reads spaces like this I hear those acronyms basically every day - conversely, other than these, we have all been saying names of things that essentially don't exist anymore. Not here to fight, but I dunno, slow and steady wins the race I guess? Also, don't be owned by capital lol.
Karellen 3y 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 3y 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 https://github.com/GradienceTeam/Gradience it even has a mode to extract colors from your background like current android versions
- jeroenhd 3y 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.
  - jwells89 3y 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.
gattilorenz 3y ago
Related: is there any "high resolution" version of setup.bmp (https://raw.githubusercontent.com/grassmunk/Chicago95/5670fde8ce33b33d37622b888278aa9cdbe5eea2/Extras/Backgrounds/Wallpaper/Setup.png 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
- pbhjpbhj 3y ago
  How about scaling with Midjourney's img2img (if it will do a wallpaper size image?).
- creata 3y 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.
- wildrhythms 3y 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/ https://doodad.dev/dither-me-this/
  - gattilorenz 3y 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!
- post-it 3y ago
  You could scale it without interpolation, giving you a crisper image at larger resolutions without blurring or smoothing.
troad 3y 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.
- tommica 3y ago
  This is a hail mary, but would there be something similar for getting the Win XP look? I'd love that
  - Aeolun 3y 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.
  - troad 3y 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').
    - tommica 3y ago
      Neat, thanks!
rtpg 3y 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 https://store.kde.org/u/phob1an
- WesolyKubeczek 3y ago
  I like his color schemes a lot. Especially the contrast.
jug 3y 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
- prmoustache 3y 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.
- lmz 3y ago
  There are already proper WMs with the Win95 look e.g. IceWM.
- jwells89 3y 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.
  - jug 3y 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 3y ago
  It's not Linux but Serenity OS checks all the other boxes. https://www.serenityos.org/ https://www.serenityos.org/
pbhjpbhj 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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.
  - accrual 3y ago
    I love that some of these old UIs are still present in current Windows 11 22H2. I was surprised "control userpasswords2" still exists.
    - Dalewyn 3y ago
      With certain programs (in this case Paint Shop Pro 5), you can get Windows 11 to render Windows Aero.[1] [1]: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/747297210613498216/1091911648647860305/image.png https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/747297210613498216/10...
cies 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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
- accrual 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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.
  - wildrhythms 3y 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.
  - firen777 3y ago
    It doesn't even look "better". It's just more "modern", more "professional", more cooperate, or, my preferred description, more soulless.
- firen777 3y 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-cause-uncertainty/ 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 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)
deleted 3y ago
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spion 3y 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?
Roark66 3y 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 3y ago
  Nostalgia, funzies.
notorandit 3y ago
It Is not a "theme for Linux". It is a theme for GTK-based DEs.
indigodaddy 3y ago
This might be fun for scambaiting?
- sschueller 3y ago
  Perfect for it. Lock it down a bit and start it in a VM...
  - CyberDildonics 3y ago
    That's how it is done anyway
jszymborski 3y 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 3y 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 3y ago
  I think the late 1990’s and 2000’s X window managers was peak mouse/display productively
msie 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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).

358 points by acqbu 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

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

qwerty456127 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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).

sombragris 3y 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 3y 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.

mrabcx 3y 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 3y ago
Can you name a few of them?
Sakos 3y 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 https://github.com/vanjac/chromafiler) and I'm realizing we've gone off in completely the wrong direction since the 90s.
Pannoniae 3y 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 3y 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.

ceeam 3y 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".

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
anthk 3y 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.
accrual 3y 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."

reacharavindh 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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.
  - tracker1 3y ago
    I find that doing almost everything under WSL is a much better experience, if you can spare enough ram to the environment. Mostly because the monitoring software doesn't run inside the WSL/Ubuntu env.

jtode 3y ago

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

TacticalCoder 3y 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.
- WesolyKubeczek 3y 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.
  - jtode 3y ago
    Thing about GTK and QT though, is they are extremely relevant in 2023. I use QT at work and as a nerd that reads spaces like this I hear those acronyms basically every day - conversely, other than these, we have all been saying names of things that essentially don't exist anymore. Not here to fight, but I dunno, slow and steady wins the race I guess? Also, don't be owned by capital lol.

Karellen 3y 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 3y 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 https://github.com/GradienceTeam/Gradience it even has a mode to extract colors from your background like current android versions
jeroenhd 3y 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.
- jwells89 3y 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.

gattilorenz 3y ago

Related: is there any "high resolution" version of setup.bmp (https://raw.githubusercontent.com/grassmunk/Chicago95/5670fde8ce33b33d37622b888278aa9cdbe5eea2/Extras/Backgrounds/Wallpaper/Setup.png 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

pbhjpbhj 3y ago
How about scaling with Midjourney's img2img (if it will do a wallpaper size image?).
creata 3y 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.
wildrhythms 3y 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/ https://doodad.dev/dither-me-this/
- gattilorenz 3y 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!
post-it 3y ago
You could scale it without interpolation, giving you a crisper image at larger resolutions without blurring or smoothing.

troad 3y 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.

tommica 3y ago
This is a hail mary, but would there be something similar for getting the Win XP look? I'd love that
- Aeolun 3y 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.
- troad 3y 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').
  - tommica 3y ago
    Neat, thanks!

rtpg 3y 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 https://store.kde.org/u/phob1an

WesolyKubeczek 3y ago
I like his color schemes a lot. Especially the contrast.

jug 3y 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

prmoustache 3y 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.
lmz 3y ago
There are already proper WMs with the Win95 look e.g. IceWM.
jwells89 3y 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.
- jug 3y 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 3y ago
It's not Linux but Serenity OS checks all the other boxes. https://www.serenityos.org/ https://www.serenityos.org/

pbhjpbhj 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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.
- accrual 3y ago
  I love that some of these old UIs are still present in current Windows 11 22H2. I was surprised "control userpasswords2" still exists.
  - Dalewyn 3y ago
    With certain programs (in this case Paint Shop Pro 5), you can get Windows 11 to render Windows Aero.[1] [1]: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/747297210613498216/1091911648647860305/image.png https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/747297210613498216/10...

cies 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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

accrual 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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.
- wildrhythms 3y 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.
- firen777 3y ago
  It doesn't even look "better". It's just more "modern", more "professional", more cooperate, or, my preferred description, more soulless.
firen777 3y 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-cause-uncertainty/ 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 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)

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spion 3y 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?

Roark66 3y 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 3y ago
Nostalgia, funzies.

notorandit 3y ago

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

indigodaddy 3y ago

This might be fun for scambaiting?

sschueller 3y ago
Perfect for it. Lock it down a bit and start it in a VM...
- CyberDildonics 3y ago
  That's how it is done anyway

jszymborski 3y 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 3y 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 3y ago
I think the late 1990’s and 2000’s X window managers was peak mouse/display productively

msie 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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).