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Comment by ducktective | Hacker News Reader

I think you might enjoy Xfce from the GNU/Linux world.

A KDE desktop has about the same resource consumption as XFCE but with lots more features/maintainers. And there exists a KDE win95ish theme:

https://www.opendesktop.org/p/1253201

With the Redmond or Chicago95 theme for GTK, those apps also look in place in case you need them.

For truly a low resource usage desktop I look at LXQt. Same base lib as KDE, namely Qt, which is apparently a lot lighter on the resources than GTK. Not sure if it is ready yet these days.

I agree 100%, but you can go further. Like, all the way: https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95

Just looking at it I'm struck by how difficult it is to get the small details right. I don't even know exactly what's wrong but the spacing at the top and bottom of the title bar text is visibly wrong, and the menu bar is too high?

I don't say it to be needlessly negative, it just amazes me how difficult this stuff can be. And I don't think I could actually use this, it would drive me insane for reasons I can't really justify.

For trying to reverse engineer a look, what has been done with this theme is amazing! I use it in a VM and on a laptop. Between higher resolution/PPI screens than CRTs that displayed this old Windows look, and familiarity with XFCE, the spacing doesn't look weird to me.

For me, fonts are more important (and easier!) to get right than being pixel perfect, so I grabbed the real fonts from a Vista install DVD, and used those.

Part of it appears to be that the font descender may have been used for alignment/padding, rather than the baseline. Agree though, when something is so burned into your psyche, tiny differences create a really aggravating uncanny valley effect.

There's also FVWM95.

Can confirm, I loved windows 2000 UI and I'm now using XFCE. XFCE is of course better, just sad there is not more maintainers for it.

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