[1] https://www.digibarn.com/collections/screenshots/RedHat%20v8...
Recently I used Windows 10 a bit because I had to test some things, and it's just so ... chaotic. Buttons everywhere, the "flat" UI just makes it hard to see what's what (including what's a button), and "clippy" is basically built-in now given how often the thing whines and nags notifications at you.
The Windows 2000 UI wasn't perfect, but it clear, simple, and mostly "just worked".
Incidentally, 2000 & ME had a lot of design elements common to them. There was a cleaner zen startup of the famous 4-color artsy shaded logo, an improved taskbar, various desktop shading, inbuilt media slideshow & full screen view option, folder & icon themes, which didn't look pixelated. Windows media player 7 was odd shaped but funky & having some visualization out of the box. There was winamp & Sonic media players too. All running in usually 32MB RAM & 20 GB hard drive. Screensavers & desktop themes could be installed (thanks Chip/Digit magazine!) & they were actually fun.
The teenage me installed a Virtua Girl desktop application out of curiosity & imagine the horrors when it starts stripping on your desktop, "standing" or "sitting" on the taskbar. Good grief! Those were days of having a single PC for the whole family.
Good ol' times.
Edit: The worst offender was Windows 8 with Metro UI. I couldn't figure out how to safely shutdown. The reveal of the power menu to the screen border was purely accidental
The race to customizability & the notion that GUI correspondence could win some Win9x fence sitters over, really did it big time for future Gnome & KDE.
This is the reason behind all the s/C/K naming substitutions within the KDE ecosystem!
It honestly escapes me, given the vast variety of themes out there, that since the RHL era, no other distro has ever coordinated its themes across all desktops that way. It's a great way to bring a coordinated look across a distro.
Ubuntu's old Ambiance and Radiance themes have been a strong part of its brand for a decade or more. Why doesn't Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Lubuntu etc. modify and adopt the standard Ubuntu house style?
Fedora's GNOME themes are also great looking, even speaking as someone who doesn't like the desktop itself. Jakub Steiner is a design genius: https://jimmac.eu/
The other Fedora respins should adopt the look, and present a unified brand.
Same for openSUSE, Debian and any other distro with multiple desktops.
Theme: https://github.com/Rakksor/Blueshell
As for the font, just use the one named Go.