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Comment by klaussilveira | Hacker News Reader

Not related, but related: I could definitely use a consistent, coherent, pixel-perfect Windows 95 theme package for Linux. QT, GTK, DE does not really matter, as long as they blend in properly. Something like the adapta-project.

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I also wouldn't mind (and would certainly donate to) a "consistent, coherent, pixel-perfect" (and also kept up-to-date to be easily installable on recent distros, covering Qt, GTK and GTK3) themes imitating the actual SerenityOS, as well as Windows 98 (not a radical Windows 95 fan), Windows XP, Windows Vista (it was shitty but pretty), MacOS 9.2, QNX6 Photon, Haiku and Swing[1]. Perhaps even Windows 3.11 (OMG I loved its Control Panel icons). And I've once seen a picture some other exotic retro UI which I found beautiful but I could never find it again and don't know which platform it was (I thought it was some modern Amiga but apparently it wasn't, some sort of Unix perhaps, but no Unix screenshots I found actually looked like that).

Needless to say the themes would have to be extended to accommodate the features of the relevant toolkits like GTK3 complex window titles and KDE's optional always-on-top and always-on-bottom buttons (I actually want every stacking window manager to have these two, I use both of them a lot).

And I would also want these for Windows 10 (and 11 obviously), not just Linux. Themes for some actual apps (e.g. Firefox) also needed.

I wonder if there already is enough of aging millennials appreciating retro GUIs to form a market.

[1] https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E37069_01/html/E37073/figures/ide...

My favourite ever OS theme was Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger", that period of Aqua was just so cheerful and friendly compared to everything before or since. I'd love to be able to skin modern macOS back to Tiger's theme but the best I can do is giving Firefox a brushed metal theme!

It might be worth watching how the development of helloSystem plays out, and maybe contributing.

https://hellosystem.github.io/docs/

I've never heard of this, cheers for the heads up! I'll definitely have a look into it.

I'm entirely in support of this entire thread. It would really murder the soul of change for change's sake Linux UI people if users were allowed to stay on Windows XP UI forever, but with modern features and bugfixes.

> It would really murder the soul of change for change's sake Linux UI people if users were allowed to stay on Windows XP UI forever, but with modern features and bugfixes.

If you're used to the other side of the fence, CDE [0][1] is 28 years old and perfectly usable on modern systems, not as a theme or recreation, but simply as the same software that once dominated the Unix desktop scene. Sometimes I enjoy running it when I get fed up with the "modern" world and just want to work on a system that's nigh-indistinguishable from decades ago.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Desktop_Environment

[1] https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/

B00merang themes has all of those and Win 3.11 themes too.

Not for icons but Chicago 95 makes a good approximation.

Interesting. I'll take a look. Thank you very much.

I recently came across XP4Q ( https://xpq4.sourceforge.io ) when I was looking for a long-term stable desktop with traditional look.

Tried it out on an old MacBook and the look was great, but then I got bogged down in the standard get-trackpad-and-wifi-working.

Not sure how far the "pixel perfectionism" goes, but the few hours I used it (before breaking X11) it felt good.

Check Chicago95

The problem with Chicago 95 is that it is not consistent. Check the padding/margin on these buttons:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/grassmunk/Chicago95/master...

Now compare to these:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/grassmunk/Chicago95/master...

Or here:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/grassmunk/Chicago95/master...

Everything is off. Compare to the real thing:

https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=http%3A%2F%2F4...

https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2F...

Or compare to SerenityOS. That's good UI work.

Those Chicago95 screenshots might be a bit out of date. Some of the systems I use have the latest Chicago95 on them, and it either doesn't bother me, or I'm so focused on doing things in applications (or on anything but the UI theme) that it doesn't bother me.

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