Blue95 is a modern and lightweight desktop experience that is reminiscent of a bygone era of computing. Based on Fedora Atomic Xfce with the Chicago95 theme.
↫ Blue95 GitHub page
Exactly as it says on the tin. This is by far the easiest way to get the excellent Chigaco95 theme for Xfce set up and working in a polished way, and it also contains a few different application choices from the regular Fedora Xfce desktop to improve the illusion even further.
This is just so brilliant! I would love to see the start of a new trend where all OS’s can can get skinned. I personally HATE Windows 11. I would love to skin it as Windows 7. Or switch to Linux if it looked like Windows 7.
I also miss theming and, for that matter, configurability. Custom fonts and color schemes are nice, especially when you’ve got a weird display configuration or specific color-balance preferences. KDE does a nice job there.
I also see why developers think of theming as a heavy lift. Now instead of just supporting a toolkit you gotta support e.g. sandboxed application formats like Flatpak, and do what the GNOME developers were complaining about a couple years ago (which is sort out theme-related bugs). Bet Apple and Microsoft lock down e.g. UI font choices for something like that reason.
At the same time, I can see a place for a project like this: it’s a nifty way to run Windows 3xx/95/98/2000-era software through WINE and DOSBox. Beats a VM especially when your software needs mutually-incompatible configurations to run properly or the OS itself has issues you can address through a compatibility layer.
If you don’t mind KDE there is quite impressive Windows7 theme: https://gitgud.io/wackyideas/aerothemeplasma/-/tree/master/
The Chicago95 theme isn’t new, I’ve been using the mouse cursors in KDE for years. I really want a theme that creates the look of Windows 2000. Reactionary (https://www.pling.com/p/2138468) comes very close