Chicago95 – Windows 95 Theme for Linux

I&#x27;m a big fan of this aesthetic. If you appreciate the usability of W95 without needing a pixel perfect copy, it&#x27;s very easy to theme KDE to strike a really good balance.<p>As your global theme, use &#x27;Reactionary&#x27;. Set your application style to &#x27;MS Windows 9x&#x27;. For your icons, use &#x27;Memphis98&#x27;. For cursors, &#x27;Hackneyed (scaleable)&#x27;. 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.<p>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&#x27;ve got it set to use a little W95 Start icon for that touch of nostalgia. Otherwise it&#x27;s all very minimalist.<p>I&#x27;ve used this set-up for years and it works really well for me. I find it very conducive to being productive - it&#x27;s stable, unchanging, and respectful of my attention and focus. I also don&#x27;t need to hack away at anything or worry about updates - KDE officially supports theming and handles all of this really seamlessly.

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.

Such a pity GTK3 and later aren&#x27;t intended to be themeable, and the devs make no release-to-release compatibility guarantees for the theme engines.<p>If this only affected Gnome, I wouldn&#x27;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&#x27;t personalise my own user experience in a way that&#x27;s consistent. The UX I keep behind a password, so I doesn&#x27;t matter if anyone else would get confused if they tried to use it, because they can&#x27;t.<p>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&#x27;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&#x27;t there.<p>I really feel like we&#x27;ve lost something significant from where things were 15-odd years ago.

Contrary to what many are saying, I want the LOOK but not the usability. We&#x27;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.

Reflecting on the comments, I&#x27;m surprised - a little - that MS don&#x27;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.<p>As a &quot;family admin&quot; I&#x27;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.<p>MS just don&#x27;t seem good at making windows (a DE), IMO.

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.<p>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.<p>If I only had unlimited time on my hands… :D

Am I the only one that doesn&#x27;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?

It Is not a &quot;theme for Linux&quot;. It is a theme for GTK-based DEs.

Related: is there any &quot;high resolution&quot; version of setup.bmp (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;raw.githubusercontent.com&#x2F;grassmunk&#x2F;Chicago95&#x2F;5670fde8ce33b33d37622b888278aa9cdbe5eea2&#x2F;Extras&#x2F;Backgrounds&#x2F;Wallpaper&#x2F;Setup.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;raw.githubusercontent.com&#x2F;grassmunk&#x2F;Chicago95&#x2F;5670fd...</a>) that does not kill the spirit of it? I tried upscaling it, but it&#x27;s like upscaling pixel art...<p>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

You know the old saying: &quot;BSD is for people who like Unix, Linux is for people who hate Windows&quot;. I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s hate. I think it&#x27;s &quot;for people who are tsundere about Windows&quot;.

&gt; for Linux<p>Linux is a kernel and does have a graphical interface. This theme is for XFCE, one of the many &quot;desktop environments&quot; that can run on the Linux kernel.<p>Other being: Gnome, Plasma (KDE), LXQt, and many more.<p>To make it more interesting, XFCE also runs on FreeBSD (another open source kernel&#x2F;OS).

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.<p>Pure UI that works from before the word &quot;ux&quot; was invented.

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&#x27;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&#x2F;cut&#x2F;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.

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 &quot;why&quot; is simple: I&#x27;ve used Windows far longer than Unix&#x2F;Linux, back to the early 90&#x27;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&#x2F;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.

I use this day to day and it&#x27;s great. Bonus: people take a triple take when I screenshare in meetings.

This is really nice. I may try it soon.<p>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.

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 &#x2F; window manager constantly just wasn&#x27;t worth it anymore.<p>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).

Anyone know if there&#x27;s an os&#x2F;2 warp theme? I recall being quite pleased with it.

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&#x27;s a lot of themes based off of various operating systems that are fun to mess with.<p>[0]:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;store.kde.org&#x2F;u&#x2F;phob1an" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;store.kde.org&#x2F;u&#x2F;phob1an</a>

The best I&#x27;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&#x27;s not the only quirk even there, and there will be more on your actual machine.<p>There also is (or, perhaps, was? I haven&#x27;t cheecked for a year) a problem with GTK3 apps which don&#x27;t get skinned this way even if they use uncustomized window decorations.<p>In fact it fascinates me how hard it appears to restyle your widows to look like whatever you want.

I used this as a slacker (Slackware user) for a year or so. I really enjoyed the aesthetic overall, and while I&#x27;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.<p>I&#x27;ve got a screenshot somewhere of using this theme while playing the dos game Jetpak Christmas in dosbox with Xsnow running, it was fun.

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

It&#x27;s comforting to see all the folders turned upright. Ever since Vista they&#x27;ve been sideways, spilling your documents all over the taskbar (this is why I moved my taskbar to the side).

I like skeuomorphism but the windows look has always put me off.<p>I would say the pinnacle of the skeumorphism era in term of desktop aesthetics and behavior was QNX photon microgui:<p>Give me that with dpi scaling capabilities and modern font rendering and I will be happy:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;nixon-development.com&#x2F;guis&#x2F;qnx&#x2F;mediaplayer.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;nixon-development.com&#x2F;guis&#x2F;qnx&#x2F;mediaplayer.png</a><p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;nixon-development.com&#x2F;guis&#x2F;qnx&#x2F;apps.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;nixon-development.com&#x2F;guis&#x2F;qnx&#x2F;apps.png</a><p>With BeOS 5 in close second and MacOS 9 in third.<p>The windows 9x&#x2F;2000&#x2F;XP were all ugly in comparison.

Windows 95 &quot;theme&quot; 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&#x27;t get it.

I take issue with the HN headline. This is a theme for Xfce, not Linux in itself. You can&#x27;t theme GNOME, MATE, Plasma, Cinnamon, etc., with it.

Seeing this brings me so much joy. If only they had it for Windows 11 as an add-on pack I would buy it!

This might be fun for scambaiting?

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.