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Comment by willvarfar | Hacker News Reader

Ah back in the early 2000s life was exciting on the Linux desktop with weird and unconventional artistic window decorators that would make plants twine around your borders or have short beOS-style tabs or put the close buttons bottom right and so on! Customizing the desktop was a major time-sink for the students at my collage. :D

In fact, by comparison with how I recall Linux desktops in 2000, these KDE 2 screenshots seem to be ushering in a new era of boring conforming window decorators :(

Where have all the crazy interesting rebelling different decorators gone? I did a quick flick through gnome-look.org and found nothing very different.. :(

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Not just Linux, I had a really nice freebsd + KDE desktop setup from 2001-2004... Took hours to get xfree86 working right.

Not just *NIX! When I was forced to use Windows at some employer I had a blast tweaking 'litestep'.

Gnome and KDE have both embraced flat designs but the Enlightenment community seems to still do some rather "original" decorations [1]. They do look rather retro these days though.

https://exchange.enlightenment.org/themeGroup/show/24

Is enlightenment still active and still the most hackable?

I cannot comment on hackability since I've only used it for a few months several years ago but it looks to be under active development [1].

https://git.enlightenment.org/core/enlightenment.git

It's under active development, yes. It has seen a major rewrite of a lot of foundation libraries after 0.16.

The artwork is not of the same quality, I guess, probably because a lot of artists have moved on, but it's a very solid environment, and the libraries that have been developed as part of the project are great. They're used in Tizen: https://www.tizen.org/events/presentations/tizen-native-disp... ; Carsten Haitzler (rasterman) has been working at Samsung for a few years now.

(Or at least he had been working for a few years when I read the presentation; I think he still does, but I'm not sure)

For a guy that has in the past railed against the Red Hat/Gnome people, Rasterman seems to have become very corporate in recent years...

Note that KDE still ships at least 4 desktop themes on any reasonable distro, including "MS Windows 9x" that still has a similar look to these screenshots.

You can still use the KDE 3 and 4 themes (Plastik and Oxygen) throughout Plasma 5.

They're not exactly bug-free though. For example, when I enabled the Oxygen theme and adjusted the taskbar height to roughly where I had it in KDE 4, all the text became about three pixels high for no reason. I think there were other problems too.

LXDE has some really "interesting" window borders. Beauty is definitely in the eye of the beholder.

> students at my collage

In the arts program, I hope.

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