Only a few weeks ago we talked about Blue95, a Fedora-based distribution focused on bringing the Windows 95 look to the Linux world by integrating a set of existing Windows 95 Xfce themes. Since Fedora 42 has just been released, the Blue95 project also pushed out a new release, called Blue95 Topanga. It brings with it all the improvements from Fedora 42, but also goes a step further be integrating new applications to further add to the Windows 95 vibe.
First, there’s Winblues Paint, a faithful recreation of Windows 95’s Paint, using jspaint.app. Second, they’ve recreated the classic Plus! experience with Chicago95 Plus!, a tool that allows you to take any existing Windows 95/98/ME/XP theme and apply it as-is on Xfce. Topanga also further improves the theming experience with custom Windows 95 icons for LibreOffice as well as custom themes for Audacious and Flatpost, a desktop-agnostic Flatpak client.
I adore that this project aims to be more than just a vessel for the existing Chicago95 theme, and in fact goes so far as to create its own applications. I hope this continues from here on out and doesn’t fizzle out.
Nice, but if you install Linux only to make it look like Windows (whatever the version) instead of as cool as possible, you’re clearly doing it wrong.
Who is that distro for? Those people who miss Win95? They can either run Win95 in a VM or on retro hardware and probably get a better compatibility with Win95 apps too.
This sounds like one of those distros that will be of interest to 10 people tops and of those 10 people, 5 will just theme their existing distros to look like Win95 anyway.
I think you answered your own question:
> Who is that distro for?
For people who think Windows 95’s look was “as cool as possible”. Sure, I wouldn’t want to daily drive this. However, the screenshots immediately take me back to a simpler time when I did use Windows 95 and Office 97 every day.
I appreciate the effort they’ve put into curating an experience that looks like 30 years ago while having all of the advanced underpinnings of a current Linux distro.
Newer looking isn’t always better. And neither is older too. Just let folks enjoy things.
One of the great things about Linux is being able to customize it to look and work however you want. That’s why there are so many distros, there is something out there for everyone and if there isn’t you can make it. Perhaps I want a modern, stable OS and I don’t care about “making it look as cool as possible”. I happen to like the Windows classic UI, that doesn’t mean I’m doing anything wrong.
I think most people missed the point: If you want to make your distro to look like Windows 95, you already can do it on any distro. There’s literally no need for a distro that JUST look like Windows 95 and doesn’t do anything special outside of that.
I guess people like me…. I think these “retro” interfaces are incredibly productive.
Windows 2000 (for me) was a GUI high water mark for windows. And I still want a modern CDE (i know xfce is the successor, but doesn’t have that UI predictability CDE once had).
I’m mid contracts, but might try it as a daily driver on my next small scale one.
There is an actual open source CDE: https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
What’s going on with linux fonts nowadays? Even in Windows95 times windows fonts looked great, but in Linux all fonts seem to be misaligned as well as everything looks “fat” and contains tons of unnecessary spacing?
Have you tried using different fonts? It seems the problem isn’t font rendering in itself but the fact that many “modern” fonts like Noto and Roboto are simply fugly and you’re better off with Linux Libertine or similar families (basically most open fonts released after ~2015 belongs in the /dev/null). I’ve replaced the fonts that are used by my distro with some better choices (Liberation Sans for sans-serif, Liberation Serif for serif, Classic Console Neue for fixed width) and it looks so much better, lmao.
The most interesting thing to me is that Blue95 is not a distribution in the traditional sense but actually a “bootable container”:
https://github.com/bootc-dev/bootc