7 ms·

FVWM-95 (2001)

125 points by mghackerlady 11mo ago

erickhill 11mo ago
"Page last updated: Nov 26, 2001." That page even looks a tad dated for 2001!
- kristopolous 11mo ago
  Well it doesn't disclose when it was first updated.
jonhohle 11mo ago
Beautiful. I miss the late 90s aesthetic of these window managers. KDE 2 was particularly nice. Motif was ugly, but I look at it fondly now. This looks a little too Windows 95, but the dock is a nice reminder that it’s X Windows.
irdc 11mo ago
I ran this at one time but it was a bit unstable. I remember corresponding with one of the authors who remarked that it was also attempting to emulate the stability of Windows 95. This was ... oh gawd ... back in 1997 or 1998 I think.
itomato 11mo ago
“ The main distribution site has moved from mitac11.uia.ac.be to sourceforge.” The last time I revisited one of these old X projects, I wound up wasting time with libraries that have been deprecated for a decade or more.
- mrspuratic 11mo ago
  xmkmf. I feel your pain.
ajross 11mo ago
This was a kludgey hack that never managed to land upstream, yet utterly dominated (for a brief moment) the headspace of the early linux desktop. It's funny how quickly things were moving at the time. In the mid 90's, GUI design elements were still in their infancy. Even basic stuff like "what do windows do?" was in flux. Traditional X window managers hadn't settled on anything like a regular usage model: twm was still in regular use, fvwm mostly cloned its UI, Sun was still defaulting to OpenWindows which was pretty and clever but sort of an evolutionary dead end, and other commercial unixes were running Motif which was a lot like a monochrome Windows 3.1 that used too many pixels. Macs were still stuck in the only-one-foreground-app-is-enough model with System 7 and had nothing to offer. Then Windows 95 landed like a bomb: there was a CLOSE button in the corner of the window finally! And there was a start menu and a little status bar! And that's what we all decided we wanted, really badly. So it got cloned and picked up pervasively. Basically everyone not already part of one of the X11 camps was running this. But the window was small. KDE kicked off mere months later, Gnome followed quickly after that, and we all forgot about fvwm95. But we for sure all remember it.
- trinix912 11mo ago
  It was actually NeXTSTEP that introduced the familiar "Windows 9x" 3D control appearance and close buttons on the top right. The first versions were released around '88.
  - bandrami 11mo ago
    I love that interface. If I ever get a lodpi monitor again I'm going straight back to Windowmaker.
  - ptx 11mo ago
    And the Windows 1.0 UI [1] looks really similar to Mac OS (especially dialogs and buttons), so apparently Microsoft pilfered their UI design from Steve Jobs's companies not only once but twice. [1] https://www.pcjs.org/software/pcx86/sys/windows/1.00/ https://www.pcjs.org/software/pcx86/sys/windows/1.00/
- cosmic_cheese 11mo ago
  > Then Windows 95 landed like a bomb: there was a CLOSE button in the corner of the window finally! And there was a start menu and a little status bar! And that's what we all decided we wanted, really badly. So it got cloned and picked up pervasively. Basically everyone not already part of one of the X11 camps was running this. Huh? Perhaps I'm misunderstanding, but Mac windows had close buttons even as far back as System 1.x in 1984. Multitasking didn't land until System 5 with the optional MultiFinder in 1987 (made standard in System 7), but window close buttons were absolutely not a Win95 innovation.
  - ajross 11mo ago
    Mac UI as generally understood didn't involve moving windows around yet, not really[1]. "Window management" at the time was limited to the paradigm you'd see on the mac plus screen where you'd have one app window and some dialog boxes. Yes, you had a button to close it, but the paradigm didn't match the needs of the big workstation screens on which X11 evolved. [1] These were the dark days of the mac. It was falling behind rapidly and the failure was accelerating. Jobs would walk back in the door within months of this moment too! Again, Windows 95 isn't felt to be notable in this community of true believers, but it was absolutely a bomb in the market as a whole. It changed everything, instantly.
incanus77 11mo ago
There's a nice theme for XFCE, Chicago95, that looks a lot like this as well and is quite good! https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95 https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95
- CGMthrowaway 11mo ago
  Oh man the teal text background brings back so many memories
- MisterTea 11mo ago
  I use this on my desktop. Started out as a curiosity but stayed once I realized it brought back more familiar icons such as the notepad and terminal icons. Clean start menu design too.
- bayindirh 11mo ago
  That blue Microsoft Keyboard background... Oh man...
- 0xfeba 11mo ago
  I use this on my work machine, with Cortile for tiling.
  - incanus77 11mo ago
    Nice, Cortile is slick. Love that it's so modular.
- jsrcout 11mo ago
  Wow, tried this in a VM and absolutely love it. Besides the nostalgia factor, there's just a concreteness and visibility to the UI elements that feels like it's been lacking in Linux desktop environments for a long time. Thinking about putting it on my home PC for a while. Might even throw caution to the wind and install it at work :-)
hackthemack 11mo ago
That type of webpage style was quite common in the late 90s. Compare it to https://www.circlemud.org/ https://www.circlemud.org/ I think the html editors of the time defaulted to some of style we now find quaint/quirky.
- irdc 11mo ago
  Anything more complicated than this was just too difficult with the early HTML standards (there was no CSS).
- thesuitonym 11mo ago
  It was just the style at the time. There weren't a lot of HTML editors, even in 2001, and those that existed typically defaulted to an entirely blank page. People mostly wrote web pages in something like an emacs, vim, or notepad. Dreamweaver and Frontpage existed back then, but DW was only really popular with professionals, and nobody ever really used FP. This style was a popular choice because it was easy to write, and could be displayed by just about any web browser. Compatibility and low resource usage was important back then.
  - phpnode 11mo ago
    Dreamweaver was extremely popular with amateurs too - they just didn't pay for it
    - thesuitonym 11mo ago
      lol maybe it just wasn't popular in my neck of the woods. I never knew anyone who even bothered with it. Now Flash, on the other hand...
BeetleB 11mo ago
I have fond memories of FVWM. I don't know where this was (Slashdot?), but back in the mid 2000's, someone posted a "Why are people not using FVWM? It's one of the most flexible window managers?", and linked to various people's FVWM setup. This led to a lot of folks (including me) switching to FVWM. I used it until switching to AwesomeWM around 2011. You can see some (fairly old!) screenshots here: https://fvwm-themes.sourceforge.net/screenshots/ https://fvwm-themes.sourceforge.net/screenshots/ Glad to see it's still around. Edit: Here's the thread (Gentoo Forums): https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=80517 https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=80517 The thread ran a total of 121 pages over 7 years.
- stevekemp 11mo ago
  I used it until I switched to GNOME2 at some point, and I also have fond memories. Just seeing the title of this post recalled the desktops I had had over the years. My linux days started around 95/96, and I was always using low-resource environments due to necessity. Other than FVWM95 the other system I recall using for a long long time was IceWM which was something I switched to around 1999/2000.
- flopsamjetsam 11mo ago
  I switched over to using it because (I think) it was much lighter on memory than the window manager I was using. I remember it being very responsive, and looking quite nice for the time.
- ErroneousBosh 11mo ago
  I used it on an IBM Workpad Z50 (WinCE device, really quite cute) booted into NetBSD. It had a fairly slow MIPS processor and 16MB of RAM but with a 1GB IBM Microdrive (spinning rust in a CF card format) and a wifi card (Orinoco Gold, recovered from a scrap supermarket barcode scanner gun) it made an awesome portable setup. I believe taviso still posts on here. Pretty sure we chatted on IRC at some point. Anyway, it was taviso who had the coolest configs and that's where I got all my inspiration from, using it. You know what? I might just fire it up on something, I'm sure I've got a netbook around here somewhere.
fragmede 11mo ago
Does anyone remember MPX? It was a set of patches on top of X11 that let two people use one computer at the same time. Two mouse pointers for two mice, and two keyboards for input. It was super fun in a dorm environment (I was at Random hall at the time) to browse the Internet with friends. I wonder what it works take to revive it for Wayland.
- gldrk 11mo ago
  It's part of XInput 2.0 and works as well as it ever did with upstream X.org. The more popular approach to multiseating these days involves logind, udev and two video cards (or drm-lease-manager). Then the two display servers are completely independent from each other, which may or may not be what you want.
  - fragmede 11mo ago
    It seems Wayland actually natively supports this via wl_seat, so multiple people can be at one computer! I can't wait to test this out!
guestbest 11mo ago
This was a good one, but icewm was one better. FVWM2 went on to FVWM3, and FVWM95 was encouraged by power users and developers to stop being used in favor of FVWM3 https://ice-wm.org/ https://ice-wm.org/
- LargoLasskhyfv 11mo ago
  Depends on if you like to make heavy use of virtual desktops. That's not really IceWMs department. FVWM is still king there. Otherwise, yes, (recent) IceWM is good. But so is (recent) Plasma/KDE, if you can spare the RAM.
BastienSANTE 11mo ago
Insane homepage pull vro It's incredible how much charm there was in these interfaces, specifically in the bitmap fonts. Were GUI applications more or less graphically diverse than now ?
- Nullmoment 11mo ago
  Bit of a mix, but less diverse depending on the platform. Apples Skeuomorphic Era, was likely the height of "anything goes" in the mainstream.
- jandrese 11mo ago
  The fact that almost anybody could make a Window Manager on X lead to a tremendous amount of experimentation and variety. Almost all of them were half baked and faded to obscurity, but it was a lot of fun to try them out. Also, if your bar is "better than TWM" then it's a pretty easy target to hit. These days the level of effort to even get to the baseline is way higher, one dude in a weekend can't try out some crazy idea.
  - anthk 11mo ago
    A big list, in Spanish: http://galeriawm.hol.es http://galeriawm.hol.es You don't need to know Spanish, the screenshots speak from thelselves.
anthk 11mo ago
Xaw95 https://sourceforge.net/projects/sf-xpaint/files/sf-xpaint/xaw95-1.1.4/xaw95-1.1.4.tar.bz2 https://sourceforge.net/projects/sf-xpaint/files/sf-xpaint/x... You don't need to install it globally, an LD_PRELOAD env var pointing to ./libXaw95.so.8.0 will do the trick. Usage: xmkmf -a make Test: export LD_PRELOAD=./libXaw95.so.8.0 xcalc
- michaelcampbell 11mo ago
  For anyone following this thread, that link goes to a download itself rather than a page where you choose whether or not to download.
deafpolygon 11mo ago
I love lightweight desktops, like this one. I just wish we could have a lightweight browser. Seems like you spin up a chrome browser and all that saving goes out the window
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
- bandrami 11mo ago
  There are plenty of very light browsers you just have to give up on having a JS engine (which honestly can be a kind of nice way to surf, but probably not a good idea for work)
- rgreekguy 11mo ago
  In my last job we had some memory issues with the build, many times I ended up running out of memory, trying to build the huge Java monolith that was the stupid "product" we made. Automagically, the issues were resolved to a decent extent when switching from GNOME to XFCE, in Ubuntu 24.04. There is still some use for lightweight even in today. You make better use of your memory/resources in some application, than in something so fundamental.
LocalH 11mo ago
It's pretty visually accurate, fonts notwithstanding. It even reproduces the slight gap between maximize and close that existed all the way back to the earliest Win95 builds with the "new" window style
tracker1 11mo ago
This and some of the other links on this topic are absolutely painful and a strain to read... DarkReader is borked and turning it off on the pages isn't much better.
pjmlp 11mo ago
The original fvwm was my first window manager in Linux back in 1995, I was not a fan of the evolution into fvwm-95, though. By then I was already into other window managers.
- sombragris 11mo ago
  IIRC fvwm95 was not meant as a next-gen fvwm, but as a customization of the existing fvwm desktop.
  - pjmlp 11mo ago
    Nevertheless, I never got the point to use another platform to look just like Windows 95, Mac, Amiga or whatever. While you may get the Look, you will never get the Feel.
    - sombragris 11mo ago
      > While you may get the Look, you will never get the Feel. Perhaps for many of us this is exactly as intended. The look of W95 or something else, the feel (and power) of Unix.
- Agingcoder 11mo ago
  I liked window maker and enlightenment, both of a which appeared a bit later.
  - pjmlp 11mo ago
    I only used Enlightenment for a while, now AfterStep/Windowmaker were my favourite window managers.
dvh 11mo ago
I'm on JWM since Ubuntu switched away from gnome 2x in 2012 (13 years) and my desktop is unchanged every since. I don't update OS to relearn basic controls every 2 years, I update OS to get latest versions of apps.
- bayindirh 11mo ago
  I'm using KDE since 3.x days, and still use the same setup, same controls and same workflows in KDE 6.x. It's just more modern and hardware accelerated. KDE is a powerhouse. I probably replace 10-15 applications just by using what's built-in to that.
iku 11mo ago
I have used a version of this called Qvwm, and even had branched it off at some point to fix some bugs... https://ahinea.com/en/tech/qvwm/ https://ahinea.com/en/tech/qvwm/ (I don't think github existed at the time or maybe I didn't know about it.) P.S. Oh, there is the official Qvwm page: https://sourceforge.net/projects/qvwm/files/qvwm/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/qvwm/files/qvwm/
- asveikau 11mo ago
  About 5 years ago I got qvwm working on a modern system and put it on github: https://github.com/asveikau/qvwm https://github.com/asveikau/qvwm I don't recall what was broken, but it was a few random things. I also added xrender image scaling on the window decorations, because they were hardcoded to a size that was tiny on modern DPI.
d1l 11mo ago
I still use it (shout out taviso iykyk). https://github.com/zy/zy-fvwm/blob/master/fvwmrc/taviso.fvwm2rc https://github.com/zy/zy-fvwm/blob/master/fvwmrc/taviso.fvwm... Someone made a full cde style desktop with fvwm: https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE It’s too bad tech seems so much to take away this kind of configurability in the name of “we know better”. There’s so much to be said for software that can last so long, as opposed to the constant treadmill of forced updates. Fuck gnome eternally for destroying gtk and fuck Wayland.
sombragris 11mo ago
fvwm is still one of the default graphical environments in Slackware (even in -current), and fvwm95 came packaged for some time, too. Now fvwm95 is no longer part of the basic Slackware distribution but there's a SlackBuild for it: https://slackbuilds.org/repository/15.0/desktop/fvwm95/ https://slackbuilds.org/repository/15.0/desktop/fvwm95/ I like the Win95 aesthetic, but I like a close relative, KDE1, better; and I have configured my Plasma 6 setup along these lines. Screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/Q9Gfs08 https://imgur.com/a/Q9Gfs08 Back into FVWM, Slackware also has a SlackBuild for the next-gen fvwm3. FVWM configurability could be amazing, although it can be a challenge.
- LargoLasskhyfv 11mo ago
  To each his own. I had a phase of emulating the classic W2K look, but like W95/98/ME all of this it feels too dark, dirty greyish for me now. Still in times of late KDE3 I then switched to https://store.kde.org/p/1100735/ https://store.kde.org/p/1100735/ but with different more colorful (soft pastel) icons which I can't remember the name of anymore, later then to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluecurve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluecurve , but not like the ugly default depicted there. It could be customized to a mix of that Reinhardt style and Microsofts 'dot.net' style, still using the forgotten soft pastel icons. Which would then be applied to apps for other toolkits as well. Very consistent. I like consistency. Meanwhile, Plasmas Breeze (light) does all of that for me, again. One could maybe depart from the breeze window decorations, and exchange them for 'Klassy', they can 'fit', there is much to change, chose from. I'm trying them out at the moment. The thing with Breeze is, many other apps have presets for that also, like LibreOffice, which leads to even more visual consistency :-) My desktop is blank, a mix between soft pastel yellow and 'manila' paper. No icons, widgets, clocks, weather. I don't care about CPU or Network speed there. I wouldn't see them anyway, since I tend to have windows maximized. If something would be wrong Kget or Ktorrent would make themselves known, which they won't ;-> CPU speeds suffice, even if mostly clocked down to 800Mhz :-) My 'taskbar' is at the top, only 24px high. I switch between 3 by 3 virtual desktops by either using that too small (for that arrangement, it should grow a little when hovering the pointer over it) widget in the taskbar, or by jamming the mousepointer into one of the four corners, which makes that 'expose'-like thing appear.
Narishma 11mo ago
Related: https://xclass.sourceforge.net/index.html https://xclass.sourceforge.net/index.html A C++ GUI toolkit with the Windows 95 look and feel.
alan-crowe 11mo ago
I'm still using fvwm2 $ pkg info fvwm fvwm-2.6.9_4 Name : fvwm Version : 2.6.9_4 Installed on : Mon Dec 8 02:01:51 2025 GMT Origin : x11-wm/fvwm2 Architecture : FreeBSD:15:amd64 Very happy with it :-)
- jmclnx 11mo ago
  Same here, still using fvwm2, and have tested fvwm3. I use it on large screens. fvwm is the main reason I dread wayland taking over. But at least the *BSDs will be on X for a while longer.
  - signa11 11mo ago
    one of us, one of us ! there are literally hundreds out there ! i for one have migrated to fvwm3 (https://github.com/fvwmorg/fvwm3 https://github.com/fvwmorg/fvwm3) almost everywhere i can. i don't think i am ever switching to anything else. reason: nothing better exists :o) not for the lack of trying mind you ! heck, even at work, where i log into a aws machine, i have it running with x-forwarding over an ssh session (using x2go) from within my mac. it looks something like this: https://ibb.co/DHYbM45J https://ibb.co/DHYbM45J unfortunately, i just realized, that on github, my config is not up to date, will update in a couple of days. i would be remiss to not mention my huge thanks (fwiw) to mr. thomas-adam the current maintainer + project-lead of fvwm3. thank you ! ps-01: for folks getting into it, this: https://www.zensites.net/fvwm/guide/index.html https://www.zensites.net/fvwm/guide/index.html is not-too-shabby a launch point. ps-02: deep wiki has fvwm3 indexed here: https://deepwiki.com/fvwmorg/fvwm3 https://deepwiki.com/fvwmorg/fvwm3
- 0ld 11mo ago
  2.6.9 is around 6yo now. I had been procrastinating for too long too, with my almost 30yo fvwm2rc, but finally migrated to x11/fvwm3 last month. Wasn’t too complicated in the end
ptx 11mo ago
This was the default window manager on Red Hat Linux (not RHEL) 5.0, if I recall correctly.
sevensor 11mo ago
I remember this being installed on the unix workstations in the undergraduate engineering computer labs. The default option was CDE, but CDE was slow. You could pick fvwm2 or fvwm95. I liked fvwm2 better and theme it however you liked. I remember people running xsnow this time of year.
gatane 11mo ago
I've realized I am more fond of WinXP rather than Win95.
xenospn 11mo ago
I really really miss the internet of the 90s/early 00s. So much wonder that is missing today.
fvwmuser 11mo ago
fvwm95 was a fork of fvwm2 and has remained in that state, and never updated. It was created at a time when the theming in fvwm was not as flexible, but it's completely possible to emulate all of fvwm95 in fvwm3, and behind the scenes, the application support in fvwm3 greatly outweighs the version of fvwm2 which fvwm95 wad forked from. In other words, it remains a curio in fvwm's history, and that's where it should remain.
aap_ 11mo ago
I find it strange that nobody has ever recreated the classic windows desktop faithfully, except for reactos i suppose. But on Linux i think there are quite a few people around who would happily use it. All sorts of themes for other interfaces aren't quite the same thing

FVWM-95 (2001)

125 points by mghackerlady 11mo ago

erickhill 11mo ago

"Page last updated: Nov 26, 2001." That page even looks a tad dated for 2001!

kristopolous 11mo ago
Well it doesn't disclose when it was first updated.

jonhohle 11mo ago

Beautiful. I miss the late 90s aesthetic of these window managers. KDE 2 was particularly nice. Motif was ugly, but I look at it fondly now. This looks a little too Windows 95, but the dock is a nice reminder that it’s X Windows.

irdc 11mo ago

I ran this at one time but it was a bit unstable. I remember corresponding with one of the authors who remarked that it was also attempting to emulate the stability of Windows 95. This was ... oh gawd ... back in 1997 or 1998 I think.

itomato 11mo ago

“ The main distribution site has moved from mitac11.uia.ac.be to sourceforge.” The last time I revisited one of these old X projects, I wound up wasting time with libraries that have been deprecated for a decade or more.

mrspuratic 11mo ago
xmkmf. I feel your pain.

ajross 11mo ago

This was a kludgey hack that never managed to land upstream, yet utterly dominated (for a brief moment) the headspace of the early linux desktop. It's funny how quickly things were moving at the time. In the mid 90's, GUI design elements were still in their infancy. Even basic stuff like "what do windows do?" was in flux. Traditional X window managers hadn't settled on anything like a regular usage model: twm was still in regular use, fvwm mostly cloned its UI, Sun was still defaulting to OpenWindows which was pretty and clever but sort of an evolutionary dead end, and other commercial unixes were running Motif which was a lot like a monochrome Windows 3.1 that used too many pixels. Macs were still stuck in the only-one-foreground-app-is-enough model with System 7 and had nothing to offer. Then Windows 95 landed like a bomb: there was a CLOSE button in the corner of the window finally! And there was a start menu and a little status bar! And that's what we all decided we wanted, really badly. So it got cloned and picked up pervasively. Basically everyone not already part of one of the X11 camps was running this. But the window was small. KDE kicked off mere months later, Gnome followed quickly after that, and we all forgot about fvwm95. But we for sure all remember it.

trinix912 11mo ago
It was actually NeXTSTEP that introduced the familiar "Windows 9x" 3D control appearance and close buttons on the top right. The first versions were released around '88.
- bandrami 11mo ago
  I love that interface. If I ever get a lodpi monitor again I'm going straight back to Windowmaker.
- ptx 11mo ago
  And the Windows 1.0 UI [1] looks really similar to Mac OS (especially dialogs and buttons), so apparently Microsoft pilfered their UI design from Steve Jobs's companies not only once but twice. [1] https://www.pcjs.org/software/pcx86/sys/windows/1.00/ https://www.pcjs.org/software/pcx86/sys/windows/1.00/
cosmic_cheese 11mo ago
> Then Windows 95 landed like a bomb: there was a CLOSE button in the corner of the window finally! And there was a start menu and a little status bar! And that's what we all decided we wanted, really badly. So it got cloned and picked up pervasively. Basically everyone not already part of one of the X11 camps was running this. Huh? Perhaps I'm misunderstanding, but Mac windows had close buttons even as far back as System 1.x in 1984. Multitasking didn't land until System 5 with the optional MultiFinder in 1987 (made standard in System 7), but window close buttons were absolutely not a Win95 innovation.
- ajross 11mo ago
  Mac UI as generally understood didn't involve moving windows around yet, not really[1]. "Window management" at the time was limited to the paradigm you'd see on the mac plus screen where you'd have one app window and some dialog boxes. Yes, you had a button to close it, but the paradigm didn't match the needs of the big workstation screens on which X11 evolved. [1] These were the dark days of the mac. It was falling behind rapidly and the failure was accelerating. Jobs would walk back in the door within months of this moment too! Again, Windows 95 isn't felt to be notable in this community of true believers, but it was absolutely a bomb in the market as a whole. It changed everything, instantly.

incanus77 11mo ago

There's a nice theme for XFCE, Chicago95, that looks a lot like this as well and is quite good! https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95 https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95

CGMthrowaway 11mo ago
Oh man the teal text background brings back so many memories
MisterTea 11mo ago
I use this on my desktop. Started out as a curiosity but stayed once I realized it brought back more familiar icons such as the notepad and terminal icons. Clean start menu design too.
bayindirh 11mo ago
That blue Microsoft Keyboard background... Oh man...
0xfeba 11mo ago
I use this on my work machine, with Cortile for tiling.
- incanus77 11mo ago
  Nice, Cortile is slick. Love that it's so modular.
jsrcout 11mo ago
Wow, tried this in a VM and absolutely love it. Besides the nostalgia factor, there's just a concreteness and visibility to the UI elements that feels like it's been lacking in Linux desktop environments for a long time. Thinking about putting it on my home PC for a while. Might even throw caution to the wind and install it at work :-)

hackthemack 11mo ago

That type of webpage style was quite common in the late 90s. Compare it to https://www.circlemud.org/ https://www.circlemud.org/ I think the html editors of the time defaulted to some of style we now find quaint/quirky.

irdc 11mo ago
Anything more complicated than this was just too difficult with the early HTML standards (there was no CSS).
thesuitonym 11mo ago
It was just the style at the time. There weren't a lot of HTML editors, even in 2001, and those that existed typically defaulted to an entirely blank page. People mostly wrote web pages in something like an emacs, vim, or notepad. Dreamweaver and Frontpage existed back then, but DW was only really popular with professionals, and nobody ever really used FP. This style was a popular choice because it was easy to write, and could be displayed by just about any web browser. Compatibility and low resource usage was important back then.
- phpnode 11mo ago
  Dreamweaver was extremely popular with amateurs too - they just didn't pay for it
  - thesuitonym 11mo ago
    lol maybe it just wasn't popular in my neck of the woods. I never knew anyone who even bothered with it. Now Flash, on the other hand...

BeetleB 11mo ago

I have fond memories of FVWM. I don't know where this was (Slashdot?), but back in the mid 2000's, someone posted a "Why are people not using FVWM? It's one of the most flexible window managers?", and linked to various people's FVWM setup. This led to a lot of folks (including me) switching to FVWM. I used it until switching to AwesomeWM around 2011. You can see some (fairly old!) screenshots here: https://fvwm-themes.sourceforge.net/screenshots/ https://fvwm-themes.sourceforge.net/screenshots/ Glad to see it's still around. Edit: Here's the thread (Gentoo Forums): https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=80517 https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=80517 The thread ran a total of 121 pages over 7 years.

stevekemp 11mo ago
I used it until I switched to GNOME2 at some point, and I also have fond memories. Just seeing the title of this post recalled the desktops I had had over the years. My linux days started around 95/96, and I was always using low-resource environments due to necessity. Other than FVWM95 the other system I recall using for a long long time was IceWM which was something I switched to around 1999/2000.
flopsamjetsam 11mo ago
I switched over to using it because (I think) it was much lighter on memory than the window manager I was using. I remember it being very responsive, and looking quite nice for the time.
ErroneousBosh 11mo ago
I used it on an IBM Workpad Z50 (WinCE device, really quite cute) booted into NetBSD. It had a fairly slow MIPS processor and 16MB of RAM but with a 1GB IBM Microdrive (spinning rust in a CF card format) and a wifi card (Orinoco Gold, recovered from a scrap supermarket barcode scanner gun) it made an awesome portable setup. I believe taviso still posts on here. Pretty sure we chatted on IRC at some point. Anyway, it was taviso who had the coolest configs and that's where I got all my inspiration from, using it. You know what? I might just fire it up on something, I'm sure I've got a netbook around here somewhere.

fragmede 11mo ago

Does anyone remember MPX? It was a set of patches on top of X11 that let two people use one computer at the same time. Two mouse pointers for two mice, and two keyboards for input. It was super fun in a dorm environment (I was at Random hall at the time) to browse the Internet with friends. I wonder what it works take to revive it for Wayland.

gldrk 11mo ago
It's part of XInput 2.0 and works as well as it ever did with upstream X.org. The more popular approach to multiseating these days involves logind, udev and two video cards (or drm-lease-manager). Then the two display servers are completely independent from each other, which may or may not be what you want.
- fragmede 11mo ago
  It seems Wayland actually natively supports this via wl_seat, so multiple people can be at one computer! I can't wait to test this out!

guestbest 11mo ago

This was a good one, but icewm was one better. FVWM2 went on to FVWM3, and FVWM95 was encouraged by power users and developers to stop being used in favor of FVWM3 https://ice-wm.org/ https://ice-wm.org/

LargoLasskhyfv 11mo ago
Depends on if you like to make heavy use of virtual desktops. That's not really IceWMs department. FVWM is still king there. Otherwise, yes, (recent) IceWM is good. But so is (recent) Plasma/KDE, if you can spare the RAM.

BastienSANTE 11mo ago

Insane homepage pull vro It's incredible how much charm there was in these interfaces, specifically in the bitmap fonts. Were GUI applications more or less graphically diverse than now ?

Nullmoment 11mo ago
Bit of a mix, but less diverse depending on the platform. Apples Skeuomorphic Era, was likely the height of "anything goes" in the mainstream.
jandrese 11mo ago
The fact that almost anybody could make a Window Manager on X lead to a tremendous amount of experimentation and variety. Almost all of them were half baked and faded to obscurity, but it was a lot of fun to try them out. Also, if your bar is "better than TWM" then it's a pretty easy target to hit. These days the level of effort to even get to the baseline is way higher, one dude in a weekend can't try out some crazy idea.
- anthk 11mo ago
  A big list, in Spanish: http://galeriawm.hol.es http://galeriawm.hol.es You don't need to know Spanish, the screenshots speak from thelselves.

anthk 11mo ago

Xaw95 https://sourceforge.net/projects/sf-xpaint/files/sf-xpaint/xaw95-1.1.4/xaw95-1.1.4.tar.bz2 https://sourceforge.net/projects/sf-xpaint/files/sf-xpaint/x... You don't need to install it globally, an LD_PRELOAD env var pointing to ./libXaw95.so.8.0 will do the trick. Usage: xmkmf -a make Test: export LD_PRELOAD=./libXaw95.so.8.0 xcalc

michaelcampbell 11mo ago
For anyone following this thread, that link goes to a download itself rather than a page where you choose whether or not to download.

deafpolygon 11mo ago

I love lightweight desktops, like this one. I just wish we could have a lightweight browser. Seems like you spin up a chrome browser and all that saving goes out the window

deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
bandrami 11mo ago
There are plenty of very light browsers you just have to give up on having a JS engine (which honestly can be a kind of nice way to surf, but probably not a good idea for work)
rgreekguy 11mo ago
In my last job we had some memory issues with the build, many times I ended up running out of memory, trying to build the huge Java monolith that was the stupid "product" we made. Automagically, the issues were resolved to a decent extent when switching from GNOME to XFCE, in Ubuntu 24.04. There is still some use for lightweight even in today. You make better use of your memory/resources in some application, than in something so fundamental.

LocalH 11mo ago

It's pretty visually accurate, fonts notwithstanding. It even reproduces the slight gap between maximize and close that existed all the way back to the earliest Win95 builds with the "new" window style

tracker1 11mo ago

This and some of the other links on this topic are absolutely painful and a strain to read... DarkReader is borked and turning it off on the pages isn't much better.

pjmlp 11mo ago

The original fvwm was my first window manager in Linux back in 1995, I was not a fan of the evolution into fvwm-95, though. By then I was already into other window managers.

sombragris 11mo ago
IIRC fvwm95 was not meant as a next-gen fvwm, but as a customization of the existing fvwm desktop.
- pjmlp 11mo ago
  Nevertheless, I never got the point to use another platform to look just like Windows 95, Mac, Amiga or whatever. While you may get the Look, you will never get the Feel.
  - sombragris 11mo ago
    > While you may get the Look, you will never get the Feel. Perhaps for many of us this is exactly as intended. The look of W95 or something else, the feel (and power) of Unix.
Agingcoder 11mo ago
I liked window maker and enlightenment, both of a which appeared a bit later.
- pjmlp 11mo ago
  I only used Enlightenment for a while, now AfterStep/Windowmaker were my favourite window managers.

dvh 11mo ago

I'm on JWM since Ubuntu switched away from gnome 2x in 2012 (13 years) and my desktop is unchanged every since. I don't update OS to relearn basic controls every 2 years, I update OS to get latest versions of apps.

bayindirh 11mo ago
I'm using KDE since 3.x days, and still use the same setup, same controls and same workflows in KDE 6.x. It's just more modern and hardware accelerated. KDE is a powerhouse. I probably replace 10-15 applications just by using what's built-in to that.

iku 11mo ago

I have used a version of this called Qvwm, and even had branched it off at some point to fix some bugs... https://ahinea.com/en/tech/qvwm/ https://ahinea.com/en/tech/qvwm/ (I don't think github existed at the time or maybe I didn't know about it.) P.S. Oh, there is the official Qvwm page: https://sourceforge.net/projects/qvwm/files/qvwm/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/qvwm/files/qvwm/

asveikau 11mo ago
About 5 years ago I got qvwm working on a modern system and put it on github: https://github.com/asveikau/qvwm https://github.com/asveikau/qvwm I don't recall what was broken, but it was a few random things. I also added xrender image scaling on the window decorations, because they were hardcoded to a size that was tiny on modern DPI.

d1l 11mo ago

I still use it (shout out taviso iykyk). https://github.com/zy/zy-fvwm/blob/master/fvwmrc/taviso.fvwm2rc https://github.com/zy/zy-fvwm/blob/master/fvwmrc/taviso.fvwm... Someone made a full cde style desktop with fvwm: https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE It’s too bad tech seems so much to take away this kind of configurability in the name of “we know better”. There’s so much to be said for software that can last so long, as opposed to the constant treadmill of forced updates. Fuck gnome eternally for destroying gtk and fuck Wayland.

sombragris 11mo ago

fvwm is still one of the default graphical environments in Slackware (even in -current), and fvwm95 came packaged for some time, too. Now fvwm95 is no longer part of the basic Slackware distribution but there's a SlackBuild for it: https://slackbuilds.org/repository/15.0/desktop/fvwm95/ https://slackbuilds.org/repository/15.0/desktop/fvwm95/ I like the Win95 aesthetic, but I like a close relative, KDE1, better; and I have configured my Plasma 6 setup along these lines. Screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/Q9Gfs08 https://imgur.com/a/Q9Gfs08 Back into FVWM, Slackware also has a SlackBuild for the next-gen fvwm3. FVWM configurability could be amazing, although it can be a challenge.

LargoLasskhyfv 11mo ago
To each his own. I had a phase of emulating the classic W2K look, but like W95/98/ME all of this it feels too dark, dirty greyish for me now. Still in times of late KDE3 I then switched to https://store.kde.org/p/1100735/ https://store.kde.org/p/1100735/ but with different more colorful (soft pastel) icons which I can't remember the name of anymore, later then to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluecurve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluecurve , but not like the ugly default depicted there. It could be customized to a mix of that Reinhardt style and Microsofts 'dot.net' style, still using the forgotten soft pastel icons. Which would then be applied to apps for other toolkits as well. Very consistent. I like consistency. Meanwhile, Plasmas Breeze (light) does all of that for me, again. One could maybe depart from the breeze window decorations, and exchange them for 'Klassy', they can 'fit', there is much to change, chose from. I'm trying them out at the moment. The thing with Breeze is, many other apps have presets for that also, like LibreOffice, which leads to even more visual consistency :-) My desktop is blank, a mix between soft pastel yellow and 'manila' paper. No icons, widgets, clocks, weather. I don't care about CPU or Network speed there. I wouldn't see them anyway, since I tend to have windows maximized. If something would be wrong Kget or Ktorrent would make themselves known, which they won't ;-> CPU speeds suffice, even if mostly clocked down to 800Mhz :-) My 'taskbar' is at the top, only 24px high. I switch between 3 by 3 virtual desktops by either using that too small (for that arrangement, it should grow a little when hovering the pointer over it) widget in the taskbar, or by jamming the mousepointer into one of the four corners, which makes that 'expose'-like thing appear.

Narishma 11mo ago

Related: https://xclass.sourceforge.net/index.html https://xclass.sourceforge.net/index.html A C++ GUI toolkit with the Windows 95 look and feel.

alan-crowe 11mo ago

I'm still using fvwm2 $ pkg info fvwm fvwm-2.6.9_4 Name : fvwm Version : 2.6.9_4 Installed on : Mon Dec 8 02:01:51 2025 GMT Origin : x11-wm/fvwm2 Architecture : FreeBSD:15:amd64 Very happy with it :-)

jmclnx 11mo ago
Same here, still using fvwm2, and have tested fvwm3. I use it on large screens. fvwm is the main reason I dread wayland taking over. But at least the *BSDs will be on X for a while longer.
- signa11 11mo ago
  one of us, one of us ! there are literally hundreds out there ! i for one have migrated to fvwm3 (https://github.com/fvwmorg/fvwm3 https://github.com/fvwmorg/fvwm3) almost everywhere i can. i don't think i am ever switching to anything else. reason: nothing better exists :o) not for the lack of trying mind you ! heck, even at work, where i log into a aws machine, i have it running with x-forwarding over an ssh session (using x2go) from within my mac. it looks something like this: https://ibb.co/DHYbM45J https://ibb.co/DHYbM45J unfortunately, i just realized, that on github, my config is not up to date, will update in a couple of days. i would be remiss to not mention my huge thanks (fwiw) to mr. thomas-adam the current maintainer + project-lead of fvwm3. thank you ! ps-01: for folks getting into it, this: https://www.zensites.net/fvwm/guide/index.html https://www.zensites.net/fvwm/guide/index.html is not-too-shabby a launch point. ps-02: deep wiki has fvwm3 indexed here: https://deepwiki.com/fvwmorg/fvwm3 https://deepwiki.com/fvwmorg/fvwm3
0ld 11mo ago
2.6.9 is around 6yo now. I had been procrastinating for too long too, with my almost 30yo fvwm2rc, but finally migrated to x11/fvwm3 last month. Wasn’t too complicated in the end

ptx 11mo ago

This was the default window manager on Red Hat Linux (not RHEL) 5.0, if I recall correctly.

sevensor 11mo ago

I remember this being installed on the unix workstations in the undergraduate engineering computer labs. The default option was CDE, but CDE was slow. You could pick fvwm2 or fvwm95. I liked fvwm2 better and theme it however you liked. I remember people running xsnow this time of year.

gatane 11mo ago

I've realized I am more fond of WinXP rather than Win95.

xenospn 11mo ago

I really really miss the internet of the 90s/early 00s. So much wonder that is missing today.

fvwmuser 11mo ago

fvwm95 was a fork of fvwm2 and has remained in that state, and never updated. It was created at a time when the theming in fvwm was not as flexible, but it's completely possible to emulate all of fvwm95 in fvwm3, and behind the scenes, the application support in fvwm3 greatly outweighs the version of fvwm2 which fvwm95 wad forked from. In other words, it remains a curio in fvwm's history, and that's where it should remain.

aap_ 11mo ago

I find it strange that nobody has ever recreated the classic windows desktop faithfully, except for reactos i suppose. But on Linux i think there are quite a few people around who would happily use it. All sorts of themes for other interfaces aren't quite the same thing