Make Linux look like Windows 95 | Hacker News Reader

Make Linux look like Windows 95

lunduke.substack.com

473 pointsiio7202 comments

This with WINE is what I think is the perfect combination of GUI and CLI... but as a long-time Windows user, several things stood out and made it look slightly off:

    the menu bar and padding around the icon labels is too tall
    the window borders are slightly too wide (compared to the default)
    scrollbar buttons shouldn't disable at end of travel
    sort direction indicator in header control (which first appeared in Win2k) should be a grey triangle, not a black arrow
    "KiB" and "GiB"
    font has some weird keming in some places

Nonetheless, this is a lot closer lookalike than some of the others I've seen, such as this one:

https://kmandla.wordpress.com/projects/lookalike-windows-xp-...

This comment makes me so happy. If I read it anywhere else I'd invoke Poe's Law and guess it was a joke. But it being HN I know it's for real, and I love it. Excellence in all we do

I like the meta-joke of complaining about the kerning and calling it "keming"

Thank you for pointing out the joke! My eyes went right past the first time. That is the best keming joke ever!

The font in the terminal called my attention. IIRC, the default one was the 8x8 CGA font with the option for it to be “Lucida Console”. Also, the icon for the terminal was the MSDOS 3D logo.

All in all, amazing work.

Is "keming" a graphical pun on "kerning"?

I thought so when I saw it, as well. It's pretty funny - bad kerning == keming [0]. It's a keeper, I'd say.

[0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/keming

I didn't notice that at first glance. It's beautiful.

Not to mention the fonts.

That's no MS Sans Serif...

To be fair, its also no moon.

It's the fonts in general, for me; though I also noticed that the menus and icons labels had too much padding.

That and Inconsolation was my preferred blog for years.

This looks so nice. Nostalgia indeed, but I miss consistent UIs across apps.

SerenityOS must be mentioned in this context too: Win95-like UI on a Unix-like OS. Check it out if you haven’t yet!

Edited to add the link I missed: https://serenityos.org/

Wow... just, wow! It's really not just GUI, but an OS!

You should come here more often :) there are lots of wonderful discussions, in recent past even, on SerenityOS.

I really want to rebuild this in a for an existing OS. It’s not the same but it has the perfect feel.

I’ve used this before and it’s quite good; it not only captures the “old Windows” look well, but I find it to be quite functional too.

I was frustrated trying to get my Linux box to look “pretty”, since I find that most GTK and DE themes lack attention to detail that is glaringly obvious to a trained eye. My solution was to take the “scorched Earth” approach: make my UI look as primitive as possible rather than aiming for perfection.

Did you try the arc-dark theme? It's quite popular among archlinux users, and I think it looks pretty polished. [1]

I'm no design expert, so I got nothing to say in terms of UI/UX. But it's the theme I've grown most comfortable with to use over the years. I agree with your sentiment that most themes lack attention to detail, where everything looks just more cluttered than anything else (especially when taking a look at icons, fonts etc).

[1] https://github.com/horst3180/arc-theme

It seems to have the same icky "material" design look forward which makes me puke in my mouth.

I have been wanting to rant on this, so I will do it here.

To anyone working in design, the "material" design is not it.

Look at this: https://twitter.com/vectaio/status/1018697206776225794?s=21

And compare it to this: http://www.visguy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/aws-shapes-...

What is the purpose of an icon and which of the above serves the purpose better?

The purpose of icons is not to look all same, like the material design aims to do. It is to quickly visually distinguish between different things. Material design is terrible for it. I hope more sensible designers fix this and get us out of the "material" nonsense Google has pushed into the world.

I find it funny that you use AWS as the better example, because I find native cloud product ranges notoriously hard to understand. Everybody tries to find some weird name for things we had for a while. EC2, S3, Route 53... Why not simply call it Virtual Machines, File Storage and DNS. It would make it so much easier to start. Even the somewhat better icons don't help, if you have to learn what the fancy names stands for first.

I have faced the opposite problem. When talking to people, even when we were using GCS or Azure, I find myself refering to those services using AWS terms (when applicable). And that is not because I have used AWS the most but because their names are much easier to refer to then saying Cloud Storage (Google Cloud) or Storage Account Blob Container (Azure)... and most people I talk to are familiar with AWS terms.

That's for the same reason I want to refer to my cousin by his first name, and not "My fathers second brothers oldest son", unless I am introducing him to people who don't know him and need to know that detail about him.

Once you know S3, you know what S3 is... and when you don't you can look it up until you do. After that, that makes communication much easier.

Of course, you need to keep in mind who you are talking to and refer to those services by what it means to your audience... or introduce those terms if you have to, to your audience. But for most people, this is rather rare, so why optimise for this rare communication?

Most of the time, we are talking to people who know the names and it becomes so much eaiser to communicate. We skip the description of description of what we are talking about every time we mention it. Having short names optimises the names for the conversations that happen the most, which is the great design.

The AWS icons are better, but still pretty bad, using only 1 colour.

i don't care for the aesthetic of the aws icons you posted, but i agree they serve their purpose much better than the gcloud icons you posted.

Oh I'm not very pleased with the AWS icons much either but they have one property of the real materials: depth.

The most frustrating thing about "material" icons is its name; real materials have depth and colors... and so should functional icons; material icons are monocolor and flat.

My favorite GTK theme so far is Orchis.

> make my UI look as primitive as possible rather than aiming for perfection.

Yeah i like i3 too :)

I can't express how excited I am for consistent and metaphorical UI to be rediscovered by the 'designers' of today.

Wait, you simply let users know what's a button by the visual decorations and differentiated edges?

And you let them know the status of toggle buttons without forcing them to toggle multiple times and guess based on which colors what might mean what?

Blasphemy!

Next you'll be letting web pages readers know what is and is not a link by using a consistent underline scheme. Which would be a completely unacceptable level of interpretability.

Remember when buttons, when pressed, looked pressed? I remember!

Wow I've somehow completely missed the gradual disappearance of this. So many buttons now only have the hover effect.

The UX & UI design department of Pepperidge farm members, too.

There were still some differences back then too.

I remember in the late 1990s you could usually tell if a desktop app was written in VB6 or Delphi based on certain hints. For example Delphi apps usually had those cool looking OK / Cancel buttons with an icon.

But yeah, nowadays it feels way more different because developers have a blank canvas with Electron vs using a standard set of controls from a popular UI toolkit.

It’s not about “today”, it’s about Linux vs Win/Mac. The former is a lot less consistent than the latter and this was just as true in 1995 as it is today.

At least with respect to Linux and Windows, both suffer from similar problems with consistency. Both have suffered from a great deal of churn over the years. Both have a variety of toolkits that vary in both appearance and functionality. If you compare current software on both platforms, it is difficult to claim that one is much better than the other. (Though I will agree that Linux was incredibly inconsistent in 1995.)

I have used themes like this on Linux and also some to make it look like MacOS. What I really want on Linux are tools that are written to be exactly like Windows, no more no less. Why? Well in addition to the numerous OS related problems I seem to encounter every time I go back and do a clean install of a distro like Ubuntu I am also annoyed by how poorly designed many of the basic tools like the calculator is. The Windows calculator is so simple that it makes it super easy to hop in, do a quick calculation via the numpad and jump out. Just copy it exactly. To this day there is still no default Paint program as good as MSPaint. MSPaint is great for pasting screenshots, quickly cropping/cutting and then saving. On linux you gotta install some other junk like Gimp/Krita/whatever else the typical forum dwellers recommend this month. Just please give me MSPaint on Linux. Nothing more, Nothing Less.

From a typical "forum dweller" this seems like an argument to familiarity not quality.

Lets give an example what does Krita call itself? It says

> Krita is a professional FREE and open source painting program. It is made by artists that want to see affordable art tools for everyone.

    concept art
    texture and matte painters
    illustrations and comics

Doesn't sound like what one would use to crop and share screenshots.

Gimp looks more favorable. It is comparatively slow to start 3.7 seconds here. Lets look how challenging it is to make that work. Well there is a crop tool on the main tool box. Mousing over it helpfully notes you can press Shift+c if you want to do it slightly easier. If you don't like the split between export and save and just want it to save and shut up I recommend an addon called save-export-clean and a handy binding in my case just alt+x.

If you find yourself creating a series of screenshots for example for an article or howto or some such instead of taking a screenshot, then opening it in gimp you can from gimp take a screenshot of a window, part of a window, or the entire screen and immediately edit it in gimp. Seems this is pretty suitable.

Maybe you don't actually need any of the things gimp does? Well Kolourpaint is basically a better mspaint and opens in 400ms. It has an obvious selection tool. Select what you like and hit control+t to crop to selection. Control+s to save and your done.

Maybe there is a way to do this with less steps yet? Enter flameshot. Click an icon or hit printscreen and click and drag what you would like to screenshot to the correct size. While you are at it You can do light annotations and optionally open it in an actual editor. You can even with a button share it to imgur if you just want a quick way to show someone something. Want the old behavior of just hitting printscreen saving the screen contents to clipboard no problem bind flameshot full -c

Want the full windows experience bind flameshot full -c to print and open up kolourpaint and hit control+v

Have you tried the gnome app "drawing" or the kde apt "kolourpaint" ?

Kolour Paint is really good - basically a much improved version of MS Paint in terms of interface and simplicity. I run a GNOME system but I still use the Klour Paint flatpak since it's so good.

FYI, there's a port of the Windows calculator to Linux (and a bunch of other platforms): https://github.com/unoplatform/calculator

Darn, its the new calculator. I actually delete this on a fresh Windows 10 install and if you search, there is an installer floating around that re-adds the Windows 7 calculator. It takes much longer for this new calculator to boot up and you can feel the bloat when using it.

Perhaps you should just use Windows.

> Windows calculator is so simple that it makes it super easy to hop in, do a quick calculation via the numpad and jump out.

What's wrong with calculator in Linux? FWIW, I just fire up a Python interpreter and do calculations there.

Speaking of which, I feel Mac's Spotlight is a superior solution to ocassional calculation needs.

A UNIX environment is something that I cannot live without. Furthermore Windows is also slowly throwing out their rock solid tools and replacing them with garbage. For the time being I am on a life raft using MacOS which gives me a reasonably designed GUI environment/tools + a solid UNIX foundation. But MacOS is also slowing sinking. It would be nice to have a well designed Linux environment with good simple tooling. That way you have everything: UNIX + freedom + good tools. I've tried writing my old simple tools but I seem to struggle using GTK. Its a long term goal to port all these old Windows tools to Linux(the dream is to have a FOSS Linux environment running on Apple M1 platform) but for the time being MacOS is still good enough.

Not Plasma? https://i0.wp.com/9to5linux.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/k...

The idea of using Windows 95 instead of Plasma is just absurd to me.

Windows 95 Explorer vs Dolphin? What?

How about WINE?

xpaint is the MS-Paint lookalike, much lighter than Gimp or Krita.

I really like the Chicago95 theme here, it's great with XFCE/xubuntu on low spec devices.

I also like installing the Window Maker and OpenBox WMs with a bunch of retro unix backgrounds--they kind of have the feel of CDE and old Solaris systems. I haven't used it but apparently someone is working on a more modern retro feel CDE-inspired thing here: https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE

Depending on my mood I can log in to a retro Windows or Unix experience. I haven't looked deeply into it but I think saw a Mac System 7 inspired WM theme out there too. IMHO retro modern computing environments are quirky fun that should be a bigger thing. :)

It's not canon to Windows 95, but XScreenSaver pairs nicely to go with the overall late 90s retro feel too: https://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/ These screensavers are exactly the kind of thing workstations of the era would have been blasting in computer labs nearly 24/7.

Just a tip, JWZ doesn't like direct links from here to his site. Copy and paste the link into a new tab for it to work. I don't even remember why, but it's been tradition for years now.

I actually didn't like (and still don't) Windows in any form, but the one thing I did/do like is the Windows 95/98/2000 UI. I came from an Amiga background, and even though I think of Amiga with fond memories, I thought the UI was a bit too spartan and clumsy (MUI was a step in the right direction though).

Nowadays I use Memphis-98 [0] as GUI theme (not desktop and window decorations). It's is kinda like Chicago95, but feels a bit more modern, not just a straight copy of Windows. There are some layout bugs, and some apps looks overall bad, like Firefox, Thunderbird and BDeaver. I had to manually turn off theming of DBeaver because it's basically useless with the Memphis theme.

For Qt I use the built in Windows look.

[0] https://gitlab.com/hadrosoft/memphis-98

> Make Linux look exactly like Windows 95... I mean *exactly*.

Good try, but if you're going to emphasize the exactness, I'm going to nitpick.

In the top picture ( https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_p... ), the menu bar has too much vertical padding and lacks mnemonic (underlined) letters. The amount of padding on the desktop icon text also looks off. A good example is https://socket3.files.wordpress.com/2016/10/w95ptoys-1.png .

In the second picture ( https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_p... ), Calculator just looks completely off. The Taskbar has too much space between the icon and window title. The tray icons should go in the same box as the clock, not outside. Good examples: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/27/fc/05/27fc05d3f826760c7fd0... ; https://www.cultofmac.com/ezoimgfmt/cdn.cultofmac.com/wp-con...

And this isn't even going as far as to nitpick the exact font-rendering algorithm down to the pixel.

I've been using Chicago95 in a VM and on my laptop for a few years. I was so dedicated to the look that I picked through a Windows install DVD to grab its fonts and use those (Microsoft Sans Serif particularly). I throw in a high resolution Bliss wallpaper, too, even though it totally didn't come with 95, and I don't have much fondness for XP.

I thought I was reading my own comment at first. This is my main dev environment.

I'll be the first to say the unpopular take on HN: I don't think Windows 95 looks that good (compared to today).

I personally find more modern (like MacOS 10) styles to look the best, and flat designs to be just as usable as more skeumorphic ones.

It seems to me that preference for UI styles is completely personal, probably being influenced by what OS we initially used. As someone (potentially a lot) younger than many of those on HN, I like newer designs, and vice versa holds as well.

> It seems to me that preference for UI styles is completely personal, probably being influenced by what OS we initially used.

My first GUI "OS" was Win3.1 and while i do have some bits of nostalgia for it, i do not think it is a particularly good UI. It is a bit better than Win95 in one element where they tried to introduce a consistency where every element that represented a command was supposed to have a 3D/bevel look while every element that was an input entry was supposed to have a 2D/flat look, but ultimately they didn't succeed completely (e.g. menus are flat even though they invoke commands) - and was ultimately abandoned once the "3d controls" were introduced (and later became the default style in Win95).

However i do think that Win95 is among the best styles not because it has the most pleasing looks, but because it is the most visually neutral while at the same time being among the most functional. During the 90s there were even games that used regular desktop controls and it felt fine because Win95's style didn't really clash with them (well, unless the user customized it, but that was up to the user's choice).

I was always annoyed by the apparent lack of consistency between flat and beveled elements in Win3.1, and liked 95 better for its relative homogeneity across the UI. Now I get why they did 3.1 that way! Thanks for explaining this.

My brain believes two things simultaneously:

* that Windows 95 was the first GUI I used for any extended period of time and that I will naturally think it's the best one for this reason, for the same reason people tend to think things they liked when they were teenagers peaked when they were teenagers; and

* that Windows 95 really did rule - to repurpose Hoare, "not only an improvement on its predecessors but also on nearly all its successors"

...and those two could fight each other all day.

Taking off the rose-tinted glasses, I might miss the UI, but I definitely don't miss how unstable it was. 25 years on I can still rattle off a Windows 95 product key off the top of my head as a consequence of reinstalling it so often.

> but I definitely don't miss how unstable it was

We had NT4 with that same look and it was much better.

2000 was pretty much Windows 95 alike with the classic theme and the window colors to an ungradiented one, buch much more stable and compatible.

As a Mac user, Windows 2000 was the first good non-Apple OS to use as a daily driver. I then ran a PC and a Mac side by side for several years, until OS X finally got into the groove.

> I don't think Windows 95 looks that good (compared to today).

Not doubt about it, the Windows 95 UI was never pretty, but I also don't believe that's why people like it... well, hate it less perhaps.

As someone how got started with Windows 95, looking back at my options over the past 25 years, functionally Windows 95 was less terrible than some of the current options. Sure, macOS is pretty (and I do prefer that UI), but the Windows 95 UI was simpler, it had to be.

Part of the issue, as I see it, is that we added more and more stuff to desktops as years has past us by, but how many of those features do I really use? There's absolutely nothing that I do my laptop today, that I couldn't do using a Windows 95 UI. On top of being much simpler, the Windows 95 UI is also consistent, much more so than any current alternatives.

Finally, Windows 95 has useful hints all over, allowing you to actually learn how to effectively use the UI. Microsoft had to add these hints, because when it was release no one knew who to use their new interface. It's very clear that talented UX people where involved, most likely the last project ever to care about good UX, everything is downhill from 95.

Bundle all that together, simplicity, ease of use and consistency, that's why people still care about the Windows 95 UI. It's not pretty, it was never pretty, but it is incredibly well designed, it has just taken some of us 20 year to come to that realization.

Yup, I think we fall in a similar age group, and lack the nostalgia that most HN readers have.

At the same time, flat design is objectively worse. Barely any indication as to whether something is a button or a text box or a label. Personally, I really like the path taken by WinUI3, since it addresses the UX concerns with a fresh paint of UI

> Yup, I think we fall in a similar age group, and lack the nostalgia that most HN readers have.

> At the same time, flat design is objectively worse.

Gonna jump in this boat as well, though I do actively search out older UI's and OS's to use.

>"I personally find more modern (like MacOS 10) styles to look the best, and flat designs to be just as usable as more skeumorphic ones."

I am not familiar with MacOS styles. But from what I see on other platforms my problem with "modern flat" is not that it is in any way inferior by design. Problem is that the designers make for example clickable elements not any visually different than unclickable, make scroll bars that are impossible to locate, put light gray text on white background and lots of other demented things.

Even worse, they’re now intentionally using it for dark patterns, making buttons grey and disabled looking when they’re active, using links instead of buttons, making things clickable that shouldn’t be (and bringing up surprising behavior). Note that there’s no visual language, all bets are off.

> I don't think Windows 95 looks that good (compared to today).

Me neither. I dislike anything that reminds me of old Windows. Some people are the opposite — when they move to other platforms, they seek out things that look like old Windows so that it becomes supposedly easier to use (?).

I like MacOS. I liked the old Unity. I like Gnome 3 except for the fact that it's consumes a lot of resources. I shy away from KDE even though I hear it's now more efficient because it reminds me of Vista from certain angles.

And even though XFCE can be a little bit like old Windows, I like it because it's very efficient, and therefore I give it a pass :) . The no-bullshit DE.

I've been on Gnome 3 for years now. However, I might switch to XFCE eventually because I tend to do memory intensive things.

> I like MacOS. I liked the old Unity. I like Gnome 3 except for the fact that it's consumes a lot of resources. I shy away from KDE even though I hear it's now more efficient because it reminds me of Vista from certain angles.

Same. Definitely don't like gnome/gnome-shell 3+ dropping the global menu, featuring a useless file picker, and overall just wasting a lot of space on my favourite notebook sizes of 13.3" and 14", though preferring dark themes I could see that gnome maybe wanted to get rid of those cheesy non-scaling, always-black-on-white icon menus as leftovers from the 90s. Regarding KDE (Plasma) though, I've learned you can customize the hell out of it to get back most of gnome 2 + Unity [1], so that's something I'm going to try next when I get around to it.

[1]: https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/plasma-look-like-unity.h...

What do you think of the shiny, glassy look of Vista and/or early MacOS 10? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Vista and https://www.techradar.com/reviews/phones/mobile-phones/iphon...

Looked "space age", and less like the drab office building which Win 9x/MacOS 9 looked like. Is there any nostalgia for that?

Yes, there is. Well, Windows 7's version of Aero anyways. It's my favorite UI in terms of graphics.

To be slightly obtuse: MacOS 10 is a really broad category, encompassing the last 20+ years of desktop Mac UI and including probably the peak of skeumorphic design. Personally I think Mac OS X hit its prime around 10.5-10.6 Leopard and Snow Leopard. But I know that's not everyone's cup of tea. :)

When I was using Windows 95 (and 98) the first thing I would do was change the colors to try to make my windows and buttons look less like a bunch of sidewalk blocks. When XP came out I was excited for the colorful, plasticky theme, but it hasn't aged well. Even Vista/7's glassy Aero has grown old, but for me Aero is still the best standard Windows theme (honorable mention to Royale and Watercolor). I think you're probably 100% right about the personal preference being the key here.

The default Windows 95 didn't look that great, but almost everyone agrees that 98 or 2000 are much better (at least they have gradients). But I'm not 100% old school, and I think that Windows 7 Aero looked good, too. I'm sad that someone decided that glassy transparent windows were an abomination and broke them all :(

To me the biggest improvement that 2000 makes to the 9x look are the move to a lighter base gray, as well as changing the default desktop color from that funky teal to a much nicer blue. As minor as those two things may seem they made the OS feel more pleasant.

But that may just be the classic Mac OS fanboy in me speaking. Mac OS never used particularly dark grays, so the almost-perfectly-middle-gray seen in 95/98 felt almost depressing in comparison.

95 copied more the NeXT than the Mac look. The grey is much closer, as are the button corners, an explicit rejection of the Windows 3 rounded corners. The NeXT greys made sense for the original cube, which was limited to black, white and two greys.

I hated gradients on Windows. They looked as if the "stepped out" from the GUI. They broke the "3D layering" illusion.

Gradients would have looked bad with 8-bit color, which was still very much in use in the 1990s. Solid color was the reasonable choice back then.

Windows 98 didn't allow gradients on 256 color (8-bit) modes. You had to use at least high color (16-bit). (Win 95 didn't have gradients.)

> It seems to me that preference for UI styles is completely personal, probably being influenced by what OS we initially used. As someone (potentially a lot) younger than many of those on HN, I like newer designs, and vice versa holds as well.

I agree that most of the preference is personal. I am not so sure on the age thing. I am likely on the old end of the curve here, yet mostly prefer the flat appearance. That said, there are a few elements of those old designs that I prefer. There are a few areas where those old interfaces shone: being able to distinguish between UI elements, higher contrast, consistency, and exposing functionality. That is to say: buttons don't need to be raised and links don't need to be underlined, but it is useful to know when you are looking at a button and a link.

I originally used a ZX-81. Can't say I miss the UI.

I grew up with a Commodore 64, can't say that I miss the UI either. That said, I recently learnt that it was possible to cursor up to a prior command/statement to edit and re-execute it (in other words, the screen was the history buffer). That's an awesome feature. It is also an illustration of how older user interfaces had some redeeming and forgotten UI features.

I grew up with a Commodore 128, and it had two screen buffers---one for 40-column mode and one for 80-column mode. I remember listing some code on the 80-column side of things so that I could edit it there and insert it into the code I had over on the 40-column side. I felt clever that day.

I find it astonishing how Win/Mac UI divides people with different, opposite I'd say, mindsets. Really, way too often I see completely different people arguing over some subject who turn out to be Apple vs. Android users. Or mac/win users. Sometimes it's as vivid as than cultural or religious division. I could draw a psychological portrait of a typical representatives of these groups but it'll be a bit biased :) But the sad part is - they both fall into hands of evil corporations, who only pretend to give users a choice...

I’m a greybeard, my first OS was either DOS or some OtherDOS, my first GUI environment was System 7 (Mac). The latter was mostly flat other than some dithered shading mostly on icons, significantly flatter than macOS is today. Even with MacOS 8 which gained more depth in its design I always found Windows’ hard bevels through 2k/ME overstated, and when I did use Windows I’d do my best to configure it to be as flat as possible. So yeah I think early GUI exposure might be a contributing factor, probably moreso than age.

System 7 added depth to things like title bars, and then there were extensions like Greg’s Buttons that went all in for apps that used the default controls. With system 7, finder icons went seriously 3D because it was finally allowed to have multiple icons for different color depths. The use of color or even grey was one place where System 4.2-6 had fallen behind Windows 3.0, even though the graphics hardware was more advanced.

https://www.macintoshrepository.org/1644-greg-s-buttons

You're probably on to something with that. My tastes are such that I'd love a System 6 version of this project. 7 always felt wrong, like they were forcing something the hardware wasn't ready to do yet.

System7 had clear widgets over flat menus.

I go the other direction: NeXT (WindowMaker), or good old twm.

> I personally find more modern (like MacOS 10) styles to look the best, and flat designs to be just as usable as more skeumorphic ones.

Shouldn’t we separate looks from usability? KDE’s multifunctional search bar (similar to Spotlight on OSX) was a game changer for me. Every time I booted back into Windows (to play Anno 1602) I felt crippled.

Never cared much about looks, but functionality like that is what separates a great UI from an OK one. For me at least.

I completely agree with you. I don't miss Windows and quite despise the UI. Even the modern one. I've been using Macs since several years and the only thing that comes close to a distant second is Gnome. I'm actually quite surprised to see how many actually like Windows 95!

Well, Mac OS Tiger and Windows 95 are perfectly usable, but anything newer than Snow Leopard looks unusable.

To me Amiga OS looks weird and "chaotic", but Windows 95 it's the perfect OS on usability, on par on Mac OS 6 and 7.

A long time ago I noticed that Internet cafe/computer lab users did not conceptualize things like “which operating system is being used” and simply looked for “familiar way to open a browser”

So any home screen+icon+square application representation was fine for them

at a certain point Ubuntu with just a browser icon reduced user error and friction

I remember that installing RH 5.2 (Hedwig? Apollo?) in 1999 and getting FVWM95 installed using rpm. It closely resembled Windows 95. From memory, icewm also had a similar theme. I miss the simplicity of the gui from this era, not Windows 95, but Windows NT 4.0. The dark blue boot screen was quite nice and the system was fast and quite stable around SP6a.

It won't convincingly look like Windows 95 to me without a ton of Invalid Page Faults in kernel32.dll. (Can somebody give me a basic explanation of what that was??)

Ok, so a page fault is when you try to access a memory address that's not mapped by the MMU, or a write to a memory address that's mapped as read only. The MMU works in pages though, not individual addresses, on x86, standard pages are 4096 bytes, although larger pages are available. A valid page fault is when the OS has allocated that page in the current context, but not actually mapped it; it could be a not yet mapped in page from a memory-mapped file, or a page that was swapped to disk, or a page that was allocated but not yet used (not sure if win95 does that), or a write to a page that is allocated as read-write but is currently mapped as read-only and needs copy-on-write (COW) processing now. An invalid page fault is a read or a write to a page that the MMU doesn't have a mapping for and the OS also doesn't have a mapping for. These errors can be caused by many things; often a programming error leads to pointers being overwritten with unrelated data, when they're dereferenced it could access the wrong data or it could cause an invalid page fault. Hardware errors can also result in bad addresses in a pointer. Sometimes it's unintended interactions between running software or software and hardware.

My lasting memory of all Win9x editions will be "The program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down" error messages which were rampant back then.

Also I remember people freaking out about those messages.

One thing is PC hardware back then was often complete crap. You could run diagnostics and get a lot of memory and disk errors, but Windows 95 still ran "okay". It was definitely a lot more stable if you spent the money on good stuff.

Part of it was low expectations too. The half-life for Windows 3.1 crashes was about 4 hours. If your computer stayed up all day, that was considered a massive improvement. It took people a long time to discover the "49 day bug" that was in both Windows and OS/2.

Install the BSOD x11-screensaver hack.

(I used this for a while in rotation with others ... cow-orkers would occasionally tell my my laptop had crashed. I'd enter my password and continue working...)

The best guess I have is buggy programs passing invalid pointers to kernel32 functions (e.g. OpenFile/WriteFile).

invalid page faults

In early 2000s I've created a few .theme files in Win98, all with different shades of main window color. And, with minimal tweaking, I made it work in EVERY version of Windows from 95 to 7! That's what I liked about backwards-compatibility. (and, most likely, I won't be using Windows after 7 anymore).

https://archive.org/details/winfiles_cmfriend_202005

Ah, so that is what the semi-popular cyan-greyish colour theme is. Random encounter: <http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/tabs.htm> I've been looking for the origin for twenty years.

I like it, it's relaxing for the eyes, like the blue tints of Sun Solaris with CDE: http://toastytech.com/guis/sol.html

Note that CDE is open source since a few years ago. I personally compiled and run it on Debian 10. Getting it similar to screenshots you linked is not too much of a work.

I feel like that's just a slight variant (with the font, mainly) of the built-in Rainy Day theme.

It was actually fairly popular at the end of the 90s to run FVWM95, which was basically FVWM 2 skinned to look like Windows 95. It looked pretty similar to this project, for obvious reasons.

http://fvwm95.sourceforge.net

It makes me feel rather old when only your comment and another one are the only references to fvwm95 among 92 comments.

It really shows how much current generations have lost from Linux early days, or how old some of us are.

Yeah I remember we used to run it as a joke.. On our HP-UX systems with VUE at the time.

The sysadmins hated it when we made our terminals look like what they viewed as an inferior system (which to be honest it was, at the time with its DOS underpinnings)

The Fox Toolkit [0] always looks like Windows 95, and is still getting updates.

Its lack of themeability is presumably one of the reasons it's so fast and lightweight.

[0] http://fox-toolkit.org/

I thought my dream came true, but... There's one thing he isn't showing - the infamous GTK's "Cancel-OK" message box combination. As much as I respect Lunduke's work, it's GTK-based. And my Linux environment is completely 95% Qt5 (it'll be 100% if I figure out how to migrate to Qt-based browser). The main advantage of OS/2 or Win9x-like UI is its speed and consistency. And it soesn't allocate/read/render 9 PNG files per element (like button). Works using Line()s and FillRect()s. If modern KDE could do that, I'd have no complains...

I know it doesn't do it efficiently, but there are a whole bunch of plasma themes, window decorations, cursor sets and so on that emulate win 95/98/xp (and even vista) in KDE Plasma, and you can install them right from the system settings.

Thanks! I tried. But at that time there were lots of inconsistencies. I tried going full-95, but couldn't find exact controls. And in most themes there were bitmap or vector images to mimic control appearance. It's nothing like disabling effects on Win7 brings back natively-drawn imageless UI. Generally, I tried even making my own theme, but it looked odd. ) Especially when the start menu ignored all the theme colors and lived on its own. I've heard they've fixed it in newer Plasma releases though.

Now, that's cozy!

I very much prefer the "physical" design of windows 9x to the more graphic one of XP and whatever the shit you want to call that horribly ugly clusterfuck of a mess that is 10.

Totally agree. I'm ready for the tides of fashion to turn once more and skeuomorphism to be the way again.

Only if we can skip right past Windows 95 and have XView/OpenWindows back, thank you in advance.

Heh, the nice thing about XP was that I didn't feel obligated to force my Linux desktop into cross-toolkit consistency anymore. I seem to recall Outlook pulling from the XP widgets for the Inbox scrollbar and the 9x widgets for the Preview scrollbar. At first, disgust; followed by relief.

icewm is a bit different, but it has a "windows95" type theme that, while it doesn't look nearly as good, is insanely functional.

I've found it to be a window manager that is easy to script, easy to use, and gets out of the way for the most part. I spent a lot of time looking for a good window manager, trying all the usual ones (gnome, kde, xmonad (stayed there for a while!), dwm, etc.), but I've found this one to be the best and least obtrusive of any of them.

Definitely worth a look if you're still in the hunt and not necessarily keen on making something look pretty.

https://ice-wm.org/

I still fucking love that Win95/Win98/Win2K look and feel. Its no nonsense and perfect in my opinion.

If the first thing that comes to mind is fvwm95, does that mean I’m old?

Remember, win95 GUI allow us to place the taskbar wherever we want without causing issues.

Gnome 2 did, too, except it was almost unusable in that mode because they used to have a repeated "1px by I don't remember how much" for a taskbar background. Even Windows 11 only lets people have the thing on the bottom

It is 2022, and Windows 95 still have better font rendering.

Compared to my main desktop running Windows 3.11 [1], I have to say, this 95 thing is quite the looker - extremely visually appealing.

3.11 is starting to feel a bit dated, now that my wife is showing off her TRS80.[2] Her machine is actually a portable that can be placed on a desk anywhere and plugged into any outlet! This 95 seems a fine upgrade path to newer hardware!

[1] https://winworldpc.com/product/windows-3/311

[2] http://www.trs-80.org/model-1/

Can anyone think of a reason why to do this? Apart from personal fun project, of course!

Because we hit peak desktop right around Windows 2000. Just about everything since then has been a step backwards in speed and usability.

The Mac Finder is a hot mess and seems to get worse with every release.

The 964 different desktops available for Linux are in general a hodgepodge of slow impossible-to-use disasters. A notable exception is XFCE but it's a bit of a second-class citizen and even things in XFCE don't work well. (Example: network configuration, you need to be logged in as root to use this applet.)

Edit: I would like to point out that the Win2k desktop was blazing fast on a machine with 256MB of RAM. I can't get Debian to install on a machine with less than 512MB without complaining.

IMO the last decently desktop version of Windows was 7. After that, it was utterly ruined by the existence of touchscreens and Microsoft's insistence that they're the next big thing in computers.

My main issue with current macOS is the combined toolbars and titles, including in finder. There's too much padding but then everything feels unnecessarily cramped. My second issue with modern macOS is their new icon system where literally nothing is aligned to the pixel grid. But there's still a surprising amount of dense UIs — I guess it helps that Apple has a clear separation between touch (iPad) and non-touch (Mac) product lines.

It's possible to disable toolbars and use a menu-bar/shortcut oriented workflow like in the Classic Mac OS.

Speak for yourself, my riced out linux desktop is fast and usable AF

No. I love my 2022 Gnome look and looking at old Windows UI makes me nauseous. I'm over 40 so yes, I did use Windows extensively and hate everything about its UI maybe with the exception of Windows XP.

I never had any issues recognising what is a button and what isn't with Gnome. Never understood HN's fetish for these old UIs.

>I never had any issues recognising what is a button and what isn't with Gnome

That's easy to say when there's only a single hamburger button...

All kidding aside, this scourge has made its way to Windows. One of the new anti-features in Windows 11 is the truncated (right click) context menus. Where most options are now hidden under a 'show more options' entry, requiring a separate mouse click.

What’s even worse is Debian running on 256 MB environment, you’ll need swap or pip will be killed by the OOM reaper.

Linux used to be embedded first but nowadays most Linux distros are strangely oriented toward desktop and don’t work correctly on low memory environments without heavy customization.

Linux was NEVER embedded first. Linux was unix for 386s PCs a very expensive machine.

Not sure how desktop orientation is at all strange as any linux distro you are likely to install on your PC has been specifically prepared to install on a PC. If its anticipated to also be used as as server it also provides a minimal install which will almost certainly be less useful.

I get that it's easier to run on low RAM systems. I just don't think Windows95 was the pinnacle of UI design and was minimalistic only because resources were scarce. These days it's actually a lot harder to get low RAM machines. Unless you're working in the embedded space, and a UI like this is pointless there too.

I haven't been using Linux (or Windows) much since several years now. But a stripped down version of Gnome or KDE or MATE are prefect as they were. The Windows UI in its current form or old (95, 98 or 2000) is hardly the best UI choice. The reason I can think of is nostalgic fun experiment. And there is nothing wrong with that. Not everything has to have a practical function. :)

> The 964 different desktops available for Linux

83% of people are using just 4. Hell 65% are using just 2 and its the same 2 as in 2003.

https://linux-hardware.org/?view=os_de&colors=30

> slow impossible-to-use disasters

We are actually spoiled for choice if you just omit gnome 3. Mostly entirely usable

> even things in XFCE don't work well. (Example: network configuration, you need to be logged in as root to use this applet.)

This is like someone exclaiming loudly manual transmission cars are OK but how is everyone driving while sitting on that hard space between seats and reaching between their legs to shift. Well we aren't doing that. You don't need to log in as root to use the applet to configure your network options your system was just misconfigured probably because of something interesting you did manually.

Out of the box on basically every distro that isn't entirely do it yourself you see a little networking icon you click it and you connect to a network just like on windows.

> : I would like to point out that the Win2k desktop was blazing fast on a machine with 256MB of RAM. I can't get Debian to install on a machine with less than 512MB without complaining.

I cannot think of a worse metric of utility than ability to run well on amounts of memory that are found only in machines older than some people reading this forum. 4GB modules now cost as little as $17. Windows 2000 crashed, it leaked memory, it developed weird problems for no reason that could only be fixed by reinstalling. I don't miss any version of windows from this era.

My linux and freeBSD desktops at the time were faster/more responsive than my win2k one and I have plenty of choice for apps that would use less memory.

It is silly to compare to todays requirement. Nowadays system use more memory because we have more available.

I'd argue that we hit peak desktop with OSX Snow Leopard.

> we hit peak desktop right around Windows 2000

I could not disagree more strongly. Win2000 buttons are tiny, drag areas are tiny, basically everything is tiny and unclickable. I strongly prefer the generously-proportioned, touch-inspired interfaces of the last 4-5 years.

They are not tiny if you run it on a 800x600 screen

Please, go install Windows 2000 under Qemu at 1024x768 resolution, then press ctrl-alt-f to set the Window to a scaled fullscreen desktop. Do you feel it as tiny? That's how we saw Windows 2000 back in the day on a CRT monitor.

People who have to actually get work done on a computer are almost always good with using a mouse and keyboard, so we understand how to move with precision and speed.

I am just describing a preference.

AFAIK, Windows 95 was the last UI design with a published design methodology that includes numerous laboratory test sessions. I'm not sure the original URL, but it was republished [1]. It's listed at ACM [2] as published April 1996, so they were sharing how they did it pretty soon after it was done.

I just don't think Microsoft continued to do lab testing of their design, at least they haven't told us that they did, but it feels like a lot of things have gotten harder to do rather than easier to do, which doesn't match their earlier design goals. Windows 95 wasn't the peak, but it was a huge step vs Windows 3.1. IMHO, Apple clearly doesn't care about desktop experience (and anyway, their keyboard shortcuts are wrong, so I'm not using their design), and I don't think any OSS desktop environment is funding user studies (but I'd be happy to see evidence otherwise). Given that situation, I'd rather use the UI that had design goals I like and a design process that allowed developing towards those goals.

[1] https://socket3.wordpress.com/2018/02/03/designing-windows-9...

[2] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/238386.238611

Both a more efficient use of screen space (at least, compared to the default themes of XFCE, crucially, but also KDE, GNOME, and others), and an aesthetically better visual design. I am surprised to have just written this latter observation, considering this came from Microsoft, but I suppose the era when it was designed demanded it, both as a result of the lower screen resolutions used, and the the contemporary marketing needs for the release of Windows 95.

I wouldn't say marketing so much as Microsoft did a lot of usability testing back then where psychologists threw people in a room and took notes while they interact with the UI. I don't think any OSS projects have this luxury (or money needed to throw around for that sort of thing).

Raymond Chen vaguely references it here https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20120126-00/?p=84...

Also, back then, you had to make the best with the resources you had. Computers were slow so UIs had to be lightweight out of necessity. Yet here we are in 2022 and GUI applications have become so bloated they take longer to open up then they did in the 90s. And yes I'm looking at you, GTK and Windows 'Modern' apps.

and GUI applications have become so bloated they take longer to open up then they did in the 90s.

...while somehow being even less graphically complex.

The Gnome project performs usability tests pretty often. That's what led to decisions like deprecating the secondary app menu (app menu in the title bar) and the newer horizontal workspace layout, iirc.

And the Gnome project consistently gets it wrong because they keep forgetting their primary target users are not rando's that have never used a computer but mostly season Linux vets.

Because that desktop is honestly clearer and faster to understand that today's chromeless trends. Buttons look like buttons, and text boxes are obvious.

And there is just enough whitespace. Not waaayyyyy toooooo muuuuccchhh.

And there’s consistency. Not eight generations of UI redesigns for each control.

And you can actually tell which window has the focus.

Every time our screens get bigger, designers eat the space!

AWS's recent redesign makes every single UI element have 16px of whitespace. What exactly was the point?

I use it as my daily driver, and all the answers are here, plus familiarity.

I haven't tried this one, but I will. My reason is that I quit Linux because they took away the two pane, file tree in the left, file explorer from me.

I was using lxde and suddenly they decided to "redesign" the explorer (more like redoing it from scratch) and the new one had not the file tree pane. I was using lxde because I didn't like Plasma, another imposed "redesign". Now that was the last straw.

15 or 20 years ago... I can't understand why people think it's OK to shit on my muscle memory and habits.

Some people don't understand the time value of habits. Makes me angry.

I am currently using KDE with the Reactionary theme [1], which gives my desktop a nice Windows95 look. I love it because the meaning of the buttons on the title bars of windows is very clear, and I know exactly which visual elements can be pressed and which one not.

(Disclaimer: I started using computers in late '80s and used Windows95/98/2000 a lot before moving to full Linux when Windows XP came out, so I was already pretty used to the interface.)

[1] https://store.kde.org/p/1253201/

Nostalgia mostly. However, Win95 had very clear UI elements that made it nice to use.

Some people like very simple interfaces, icons and schemes. It's a very utilitarian interface and works fine. I often use lxqt which is pretty barebones on VMs to cut down a bit on the memory footprint.

Talking point if out in public (assuming you have this on a laptop or similar) or at a meetup?

The 90s were a decade of unbridled American power and optimism. The Soviet union had crumbled and the world was America's oyster.

This week's events will cause a resurgence in 90s nostalgia in the West.

If the best we could do was Win95 then that explains the decline in American imperialism.

I've always liked those briefcase icons but could never figure out what they did.

They were early two-way synced folders. [0] Like the idea of Dropbox et all, but for anything Windows supported. FTP, Samba, another physical drive, or just another local location.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Briefcase_(Microsoft_Windows)

My first computer had Windows 95 and I had no idea what it did either until now.

https://www.howtogeek.com/396628/what-was-the-windows-briefc...

Sadly 99% of these modifications are surface level and don't go far enough in terms of actual usability. It's always the little things that break the spell, stuff like being able to open tree views using the keyboard.

.. this is an easter egg in the bootmenu of our distro, c.f. https://github.com/fsfw-dresden/usb-live-linux/tree/master/f...

After booting into 'windows mode' and a delay, the hidden cloud intro from the win95cd (youtube:MaU5ED3LyXM) is being autoplayed fullscreen. There's also a qemu icon on the desktop that boots a random 50MiB win95 image I found on archive.org : D

For a more complete experience it should remove sound drivers and alsa from kernel and force you to find a binary copy on a floppy that you pray still works to make the speakers function .

Now I regret a little bit that I have switched from linux to a macbook

The Office theme is off, somehow. Also, Word 97 has a much nicer, cleaner layout than 95 (assuming Clippy has been totally disabled, of course). Not sure if the icons are any different, though. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/4a/Office_97_on_...

Now someone should make a browser theme to give me back the three rows of Ask Toolbar and other goodies. (I know, that’s the XP era, not 95.)

> Is this ridiculous? Is this blasphemy? Is this… wonderful?

I was thinking of a use-case here, and blending in at the Starbucks wifi whilst you do your clandestine Linux activities is one good use-case. Reminds me of Kali Linux's Windows 10 theme that you can enable if you don't want to be judged as a 'hacker type' in public areas (or arouse suspicion).

26 years since the release of Win95 and Linux still cannot make a pixel perfect copy of the GUI with proper alignment and padding.

The vertical text alignment is all wrong. :(

It's good, though like things that have done this since the end of the 90s, the details are quite there which leads to it not looking like Windows 95.

Especially, the spacing around the text labels on icons, the spacing on text around menu controls.

With a bit more work on details this could be really hard to tell the difference.

For a while now I've thoroughly enjoyed using with the q4os w/Trinity DE: https://q4os.org/

I hope MS gives us Lindows (anyone remember that catch song Lindows Rocks lol) ... Linux + Win2k DE ...

This is really pretty i won't lie. I might just install this on my devbox at home <3

Fun project, but I don't miss old Windows (I don't miss Windows at all really).

Wouldn't QVWM work better with some configuration?

https://www.ahinea.com/projects/qvwm/

I wish I could get windows 10/11 to look like that. Seems like the last version of windows that would let you use that style of window decorations was Windows Server 2008.

Even though I love the overall GUI feel of Windows 95/98, I absolutely hate the command prompt. Linux terminals are so much more ergonomic

But does it support thumbnails in the file picker?

Ah I need to teach my Win10 qt project this look. Tried hard but the best I got was win7 style.

Is there something similar for mac?

Haha, the memories :D nicely done.

You had me at Netscape navigator.

Man, that’s all I really wanted.

I really like this pixel-based layout.

But how well would it work on a high-DPI “retina” display?

Has anyone tried?

Very cool! I've actually been looking for something like this recently

This is what Red Hat 5 looked like out of the box. (More or less.)

Can it also make Linux as good for gaming as Windows 95?

Isn't this what fvwm95 did all the way back in 1995? :)

Very nice. Someone needs to do Windows 3.1 :)

I'd support this.

https://github.com/jcs/progman

Someone already has.

From JCS I suggest reading it's timeline on Mac OS System 6 C programming too.

This properly looks good.

very nice

With the hotdog stand theme, no less!

The only crack in the spell is the program launcher. Apparently, it's a left-click on the desktop to get a menu, like in the old Stiletto program for WIN31: http://www.technofileonline.com/texts/tec092098.html

Why would I want this? Windows 95 is ugly af.

desktop Linux always looked like windows 95 to me

Love love these nostalgic takes, reminds me of this Windows 98 demo in a 3D simulation I recently came across. There is a real demand for 90s aesthetics

https://twitter.com/PCBANGio/status/1493850712471527426

I feel like the era of flat panel displays and the error of windows 98 really didn't intersect much. Though it might just be bias because of how broke I was at the time.

Fun enough that reminds me of the smell in the computer room in our house.

Musty carpet?

Exactly!

yeah 90s' good stuff's way more good than today's good stuff somehow xD

Why?

Why not?

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