Linux themes and icon sets, inspired by other operating systems, have been around for as long as Linux has had a GUI. Some times those themes get pretty close to looking like the original. But…
What if — what if — you could make your Linux desktop look almost exactly like Windows 95?
It’s damn headerbars in GNOME (and now also Xfce) that mess this utopia up. They looks preposterously bad using these classic operating systems skins.
Been using Chicago95 non-ironically as my laptop DE for about a year now and I love it. XFCE brings a bunch of usability elements that Windows 95 never had, but gives a very familiar feel.
Too bad the MS fonts are broken in newer versions of GTK (Debian 11+):
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/pango/-/issues/463
Are there any good replacements?
I feel like you buried the lead Thom, haha.
The screen shots are pretty darn close to the real deal!
Wow. This is amazing. Thank you for posting this, Thom!
(I often find myself customizing XFCE to look like an odd mix of BeOS and Solaris’ CDE in idle moments as I wait for servers to reboot but this is a true labour of love.)
Amazing, this is just crazy!!
😀
Luckily, the good devs of xfce are working on fixing those headerbars for their applications. From the discussions it looks like they even may go for them being opt-in.
Source: https://gitlab.xfce.org/xfce/libxfce4ui/-/merge_requests/47
In the meantime there is a setting in the settings editor to disable them for xfce applicatoins.
Question… Why?
You are right : why a new look for every OS iteration ?
Yes, That and us Win95 users are a dying breed…literally. We hated 95 when we had it. IMO, it would be far more intriguing if CDE was ramped up with modern features. Aren’t they doing that already? CDENG or something? CDE is in reality is in the same boat sadly. Too many Gnome 3ers out there trying to turn your desktop into a tablet like M$.
You should separate the UI from the kernel. To me Windows’ classic theme (95/98/Me/2000) and even Luna (XP) are by far the best UI theme for their clarity ; what is editable, what is clickable, what is draggable. Now we have an ocean of white (or grey in dark mode). And even the scroll bars disappears after a short while.
I loved Windows 2000 because it kept the pretty clear and readable UI with an updated kernel. XP allowed the classic theme, even Windows 7 did. But no more starting from Windows 8.
Honestly it’s a generational issue.
To the people who grew up with that type of interface it’s the “right way” to represent things graphically. Because most people had not had any interaction with virtual interfaces (what a GUI is), so they relate to physical/mechanical elements that represented what they had been used to interact with.
But give it a kid, and they don’t see it as being that intuitive at all. For them modern interfaces seem far more intuitive and representative of objects they can relate to and interact with.
I can understand that, but a Metro/Material like UI with a gazillion sub hamburger menu is not necessarily more ergonomic than the good old menu + icon tool bar + status bar UI where you see all your possibilities in one glance.
Imagine if Blender was reduced to a Paint 3D like UI.
Nah, joking.
But imagine anyway.
Incidentally you using Blender, which has had traditionally a horrible UI, reinforces the point regarding what we find “intuitive” being very contextual in generational and cultural terms.
A younger person may find the Paint 3D UI infinitely more intuitive, ergonomic and productivity than Blender’s (specially the previous iterations).
Modern UIs are driven by what most of their users demand. And most of the users are now a generation which has grown with computing as it being a given in all parts of their experience: home, school, work, etc.
So these interfaces tend to be far more data-centered and less concerned with providing a nexus with mechanical real objects whose function we were trying to virtualize via computing.
That’s why newer iterations of iOS and Android, for example, make their phone Apps look less and less than a traditional land-line discrete phone, and more like a phone directory.
It creates interesting situations in which if you show any kid an Windows 95 PC they find it incredibly counter intuitive and wonder how people got anything done with them. While old folk go mad trying to get anything done with Metro UI.
javiercero1,
“phone Apps”.? Wow that is old school 🙂 I know many people who have all but dropped “phone apps” and have opted for other platforms instead.
It’s normal for people have different preferences, but the criticism isn’t all about visual preferences. Some criticism is more objective like declining information density in websites and apps over the years. Unless we make the argument that modern generations have less capacity to process detailed information, then we should recognize that the UI flavor du jour can negatively effect functional aspects.
@Alfman
UIs have become more and more accessible, UI stands for User Interface… so the more Users an UI supports the more successful it is in it’s goal.
I keep reminding people in this site that geeks stopped being the primary market of computing somewhere before the turn of the century.
When I was a kid I remember there was a whole cottage industry dedicated to train people how to use windows and specific Apps. So those UIs were far from intuitive.
javiercero1,
Companies including Microsoft and Apple deserve credit for putting in a lot of research and development for UI standards in the 90s. They even used use focus groups to make sure it was usable, but it seems they started taking it all for granted. Once and a while somebody comes in and throws it all away because they want to push artistic vision (for better or worse). I personally find some of the new UIs harder to use and less accessible especially when they start hiding things, removing context clues, and making hit boxes for windows and scrollbars smaller, etc. There were lots of complaints for metro at the time over changes that were clearly done to advance a new theme even at the expense of accessibility. Fortunately microsoft got the hint and went back to fix many of the confusing elements and behaviors that their designers didn’t really get right. I still think the ways they’ve become fast and loose with their prior UI guidelines is a mixed bag.
Of course stylistically some people might like it, and more power to them. My personal priorities may be different though since I consider my computer a work tool rather than an art piece. There are others though who actually like things that look new and different. “New and improved” changes are a powerful marketing tool whether it’s operating systems or shampoo, haha. There’s an obvious problem though because after a few years you have to start over again to sell new changes.
Did anyone catch how the web browser theme works? The blog post shows Pale Moon looking like classic Netscape, but there’s no mention of how on the GitHub site.
It’s just the Moonscape theme + icons: https://addons-legacy.palemoon.org/addon/moonscape/
Thanks. I’ve also discovered that SeaMonkey is an option if you want this kind of theming.
Oh, my!
Directly from the time my father would call me by phone asking for directions and my answer could be as simple as “Push the button with label (something), and everything will be fine”. From an era when buttons were easily identifiable!
Good memories with him, my father, and despite Windows 95 having lots of problems with drivers for printers, scanners and whatnot. Well, at least printers and other peripherals didn’t beg to call mothership by then.
Miss my father. A lot.
We already had FVWM95 back in the day:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FVWM95
Coupled with XMMS to replace WinAMP, and we had a real nice looking Win 95 desktop replacement. And that was actually when Windows 95 was still a thing (or rather 98 to be exact).
But there are reasons to why this visual experience is no longer working in the modern age. Now instead of a neat start menu with 5-10 folders, we would have hundreds of applications. Instead of hand curated menus, we have desktop search functionality. Instead of placing full window names on the taskbar, we use large descriptive icons. And instead of wide window borders, we use a minimal, less obtrusive design.
Anyway, it is a good demo of what Linux can do, and congrats to the team.
We also have screens with vastly higher resolutions (in some cases 4K and Retina screens) and decent fonts. Putting Win95’s bitmapped fonts on a Retina screen would mean you couldn’t read the text, but even without that, it’s a dated look.
Yep. There is that too. Even with modern desktop environments, I remember having real difficulty on 4K screens. I had to use 2x scaling in Linux until finally some fractional scaling was implemented (and that is still buggy).
It’s possible to make KDE look more or less like classic Windows (95 to Win7), with the launcher menu, app switcher, system tray and clock in all the same places. It won’t look exactly the same, but then, Windows 95 was built for the mid-1990s with 800×600 CRT displays before anti-aliased fonts were a thing. Why would you want to copy that look today, any more than 90s Mac or X11? In the 90s you had FVWM95 as already mentioned, but most users wanted flexible desktop environments.
Maybe because “that look” is actually pretty easy to use… compared to the flatness of every “modern” OS.
IMO KDE 2-3 was peak Linux UI design era… everything after that is fluff.
Mostly it’s a goof. It’s kinda neat to have a Windows 95-looking DE where I use games and software from that era (granted, through DOSBox or WINE), but without having to deal with all the really bad parts of W95 that attend running it either in a VM or — God help us — on actual hardware. That way, you get visual consistency while also avoiding the parts of W95/98/XP that you really don’t want.
There’s also a very specific use case, which is for Chromebooks. The best linux distro for these is GalliumOS, which is XFCE-based and therefore (a) amenable to theming this way and (b) powerful enough to run most 25-year-old software through compatibility layers. So if you’re like me and dropped $200 on a Toshiba Chromebook back in 2014, you can still get perfectly good (albeit niche) service out of it nearly ten years later.
Or you could try the TwisterOS which has 11 different user interface themes.
https://twisteros.com/index.html#item-1