Chicago95 – Windows 95 Theme for Linux
github.com
github.com
As your global theme, use 'Reactionary'. Set your application style to 'MS Windows 9x'. For your icons, use 'Memphis98'. For cursors, 'Hackneyed (scaleable)'. Your Plasma style, colours, and window decorations should all follow your global theme (Reactionary). I keep the default Noto fonts because I find them quite easy on the eyes, but this is easy to change if you yearn for classic fonts.
My task bar (bottom bar) is set to use full names and not combine apps; I also use the application menu that looks like W95, and I've got it set to use a little W95 Start icon for that touch of nostalgia. Otherwise it's all very minimalist.
I've used this set-up for years and it works really well for me. I find it very conducive to being productive - it's stable, unchanging, and respectful of my attention and focus. I also don't need to hack away at anything or worry about updates - KDE officially supports theming and handles all of this really seamlessly.
The old UI is good but I am not a fan of the everything is folders and files idea of the start menu. Maybe I'm misremembering but iirc as a child I used to forget which sub menu inside the thing I needed was except for the ones I used frequently.
I like being able to just type obs and press enter in the new windows. I preferred the old theme better than windows XP Luna theme. I had a copy of tune up software and it said the old theme is somehow easier on my ram? iirc I only had 128MB on my pentium 4 computer.
Which is quite strange, because even P2 level machines already had 64-128MBs of RAM, eg look at Quake 3 sysrq.
my bottom end pentium 4 presario came with 128 mb and the slowest hard drive in the world.
Office XP/2002 and Windows XP both called for 128mb minimum as far as I remember, so a lot of the machines were targetting that number.
I did eventually get a 256 MB stick of RAM. iirc I was already out of high school at that point.
One point I don't hear being talked about too much is how hopeful and stupid we were in the late nineties and early two thousands. We were supposed to have 10GHz processors by 2005, or I mean mass market for consumers by the end of the decade, at the latest?
https://www.anandtech.com/show/680/6
https://old.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/5sqw20/the_future...
To put things in perspective, my parents practically never used the computer. For all intents and purposes, the computer was for a child to learn by parents who were not very computer savvy in a time when computers were advancing (or at least so we thought) very rapidly.
If I aould be in tbe mood and stance I would reply again, but I for what it gives I'm really grateful for my parent who indulged in this thing, despite it being a total terra incognita for them.
I think a lot of those predictions came from a world unconcerned with cores and threading.
The jump from sub ghz to 1 ghz (p2 to p3) came about suddenly, the jump from 1ghz to 3ish ghz came about suddenly (p3 to p4); and then things moved to prioritizing chip real estate for cores/threading/parallelism.
The chips we have now are great, but it would be damn nice to have a 10ghz core somewhere.
( I eventually upgraded my RAM before ditching the Presario, too, but I think it's because at the time I wanted to play Dark Age of Camelot without lagging to death in team fights.)
Clock speeds were always more about marketing than actual performance.
There are a few power-user applications where a 10X to 1000X speed bump would be very welcome - mostly video, audio, and AI.
For example - if you generate/process audio at 32X or 64X oversampling you can eliminate all of the usual DSP and conversion artefacts, even for difficult processes like non-linear distortion.
But for most applications, most users have more cycles than they need.
Today's CPUs are literally like 10-50x faster than CPUs of that era depending on how many cores you're using at once. Storage is an order of magnitude faster as well. Mission accomplished! Software is in general more bloated, so things don't always "feel" faster, but for raw computational tasks like e.g. video encoding they truly are orders of magnitude faster.
I've got plenty of complaints about how the industry has changed since then, but raw hardware performance certainly isn't one.
Sure, but look at the decade prior. I had a 486 DX-50 in 1992. Within a decade, we had processors clocked in the GHz. A decade after that, clock rates had pretty much stagnated as we have shifted to multiple cores. We saw something similar happen with memory capacity (huge jump in the late 1990's, and near stagnation over the past decade). The switch from hard drives to solid state drives actually resulted in a huge step backwards (in terms of capacity, though we got a huge bump in performance).
There has been progress with modern computers, but the benchmarks we used in the late 1990's are practically irrelevant these days.
It's not that meaningful of a number. A modern 3.8 GHz leaves an identically clocked P4 in the dust:
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/1081vs3733/Intel-Pentiu...
If you were real lucky you'd get a Sony VAIO; but fashion be damned it had the same crap specs as the rest of the grandma gifts.
So of course I checked. It’s bizarre that they ever sold them with 128mb…
Your comment is Ribbon/magic-search-bar vs hierarchical-organization preference in a nutshell.
I've decided there are two mutually-exclusive sorts of people: (a) those who want search to surface things for them, and hate having to remember where to find things & (b) those who want to remember where/how to find things, and hate relying on fuzzy search to surface them.
IMHO, there's enough of each type that any given UI should support both.
Ribbon would have gotten less flak if they hadn't also simultaneously made a mess of the organizational hierarchy behind the scenes. (MS Office-style "select things to show from a giant list in a tiny scrollbox" is terrible)
Funny because I belong in both camps, but for different things.
I prefer fuzzy, flat search for launching applications (I mean we basically do the same on the CLI right? Hierarchy for apps seem more like arbitrary labels. Some things don't neatly fit into one label.
And prefer to locate files by hierarchy. With the exception of less familiar and very large file systems and codebases, where I will resort to either fuzzy filename find or grep like tools. I use broot for my file manager which caters to all of these modes quite nicely.
The first time we each had to debug a $PATH search order issue makes this a yes&no answer from me.
There's still a hierarchy and locations... but most of the time we can just ignore it and get on with things.
I'm in this camp, but with a bit of nuance. Fuzzy search tends not to work well for me -- if I can't remember the exact name of the application I want to use (and I often can't), then search is an iffy way to locate it.
But mostly, it's about not liking to switch between using the mouse and using the keyboard. If I'm firing up a program, I'm almost certainly using the mouse at the moment. Switching to keyboard adds a bit of unnecessary disruption.
> Ribbon would have gotten less flak if they hadn't also simultaneously made a mess
My problem with the ribbon is that the contents move around, which means I'm constantly having to search through it for the thing I want to do.
This might be one of the few useful features that I take for granted in modern Windows. That and Win + tab which I think GNOME does better. The "Windows" key in GNOME brings up the overview but also brings up search where you can either click which window you want or type what you want. Intuitive
The trick was to create your own folders to flatten the hierarchy, so you never have to look inside the "Programs" sub menu. You could even move your most frequently used items to the top level, with no folders at all, so they're available with a single click.
This got a lot easier with Windows 98 (or with the IE version that included the shell update) where you could just drag and drop to rearrange the menus.
When I saw developers using the default setup it was usually a pretty reliable clue as to their skill level.
Of course... Linux users would have said the fact that I was using Windows was an even bigger clue about my skill level.
But in which direction? I'm very skilled, and used to customize things like this -- but at a certain point, I stopped doing it because I'd develop muscle memory for my customizations that would really mess me up when using someone else's computer.
So now, I don't customize anything. It makes my life easier.
People who argue that you should just type into a search bar 100% of the time to find and launch apps are naíve. First of all, unless you have a trivial number of applications, it's absurd to expect everyone to remember the name of every program on his computer. Oh gee, what was that SD-card-formatting utility again? I don't know, but hey in two clicks I'm in my Utils folder and there it is. I'm not scouring a disorganized, flat list of 100 applications to find it.
Maybe you should relook at this again; they don't work like that anymore - you don't need to remember "Brasero" when searching for a CD burning tool, the menu items all have a description field which is also searched.
So for your specific example, all you'd need to do is search for "SD Card", even if the name does not have the text "SD" or "Card" in it.
In most cases, when you have to type something longer than "SD Card", the difference in launching speed is even greater.
Even if such a field is 100% accurately and adequately populated for every application (which I doubt), I don't want to invoke a text-based search and have to start typing a query.
They definitely got a lot of things right, though. The basic aesthetic was pretty good and very discoverable.
https://baloo.neocities.org/TheGuide/TheGuide-Part1 (bottom of page)
It exists, but need to check where.
Edit: No idea where I got it from. I know I installed the 98 theme first from this thing, and then downloaded a WinXP theme that I selected in all of the places it mattered.
I used to follow the XPDE project avidly back in the day but it seems to have just withered on the vine and never went anywhere.
https://web.archive.org/web/20200502011912/http://xpde.holob...
My experience suggests "not pixel perfect" usually means severely imperfect to the point of very ugly when Linux WMs try to imitate Windows 95. "Redmond" themes have been around for decades, always ugly as hell, only reminding of Windows 95 very loosely.
Same story at my previous job. Actually, my work laptop had been faster than my personal one for a while because I had gotten a special purchase due to the nature of my work and IT didn't know what to do with it (we contracted IT services out to a 3rd party. We were a small non-tech company). But then someone caught wind and I was made to figure out how to get IT's tracking software installed for them. And that's when I started working from home all the time (a situation I could manage as the non-tech company wanted me to own the code personally. Yes, a little weird, but it was all a tiny sure other for the company).
It's not the tech, it's the bureaucracy.
Haha, I know this. I could be doing absolutely nothing and my 10th Gen work laptop CPU is chugging along at 40% utilization.
I tried to run DSL (damn small linux) on my P60 around 2003-4 and felt what you've just described. The UI seemed to respond before the interaction!
Then, a few months ago I spent a an evening or two messing with Microsoft Bob (Win 3.11) then Win 95 trying to code a simple website compatible with the tech of the time, using the tools available at the time. Everything felt so snappy.
I don't mind animations applied thoughtfully (e.g. short UI transitions emphasising the state change), but what annoys me the most is animation jank, drops in frame rate, unpredictable delays. Older Windows versions weren't that great in that regard either (do you remember how much time it used to take for the "Open With" dialog, or event file context menu to show up on Win, when you right clicked on a file in Win9x-7?)
I wish Apple would let me watch each of their oh-so-clever animations one time to give these “designers” their satisfaction, and just jump-cut to the final state from that point on.
That's because you installed a ton of 3rd party shit which were registered as a handler for this/all filetypes so when the Explorer needed to show that menu it had to query every registered handler, extract an icon and if those .dlls weren't in the RAM, then you waited for the slow disk access.
That meant burning CPU cycles just for doing IO.
because hard drives. Now we have SSDs and the desktop is slower than ever still.
Apple adopted the UI conventions, and refined, polished, and extended them to create first the Lisa system and then the Mac. But early Mac OS ("System" in those days) was very much based on a procedural, Pascal-based API without much in the way of object orientation. Your app had to handle the close button and the resize grabber itself, for instance -- actually listen for mouse events, determine if there was a click in the appropriate region, and close the window or buzz in a loop drawing the resize rectangle. Utility functions were provided to help with this process, but it still had to be part of your main loop. Dialog boxes were defined with Pascal records.
Microsoft, by contrast, hired some of the Xerox PARC engineers away -- guys like Charles Simonyi. The design of Windows reflects this, as Windows more closely reflects the Xerox PARC work at an architectural level. It had from the very earliest days something like an object system. A window belonged to a window class, which contained a single method (the window procedure or WndProc), that processed messages from a flexible and extensible message system. Windows could even be "subclassed" by substituting a different window procedure. This more flexible design allowed the system to provide the necessary decorations (minimize and maximize buttons, a system menu, resize grips and even scrollbars) and the client window would receive messages from them to let it know that, for example, it had been resized or scrolled. The actual mechanics of how these decorations worked could be delegated to the system. The API was still in C, not OO like we know it today, and was a bit cumbersome to use -- but it had more of those object-oriented ideas than early Mac did.
Of course, Steve Jobs didn't make the same mistake twice, and for his first post-Mac system, NeXT, he had it based all around object orientation.
The turning point was MS switching to C# for everything. Now built in apps load slow because the code is not JIT compiled yet, and I bet other issues...
A typical XFCE system on startup will allocate around 500MB of RAM, but with the way memory management works on Linux I think it doesn't really need all of that and lets go of it if something else does.
It is kind of a barebones desktop environment, but certainly has a lot more stuff packed in than Win9x did and for a little extra disk space you can cherry pick whatever Gnome and KDE utilities you want anyway.
So I think this phenomenon of slow modern desktops is a Windows/Mac problem, if you want one that's lightning fast, they're out there.
I'll try this for my new NUC, thanks for the tip!
"how fast would Windows 95 be if you ran it on modern hardware"
It is actually just astounding, to the point that you end up feeling "jesus is my hardware really that fast?".
(more or less Ubuntu sans snaps, though their Cinnamon desktop is also reasonably okay, even if not quite as snappy as XFCE)
The big one is desktops that I like, working out of the box: Cinnamon, XFCE or even MATE (can install more, of course, but these ones are supported and tested). XFCE is really snappy and lightweight, whereas Cinnamon is pretty polished and will also be familiar to folks coming from Windows (nice distro to recommend for that, for people with limited Linux experience).
Another big thing is not having snaps forced down my throat like Ubuntu increasingly seems to do. In that regard, Mint is closer to Debian, although if you want to, there is nothing holding you back from using AppImage, Flatpak or anything else (even snaps).
Compatibility that is otherwise pretty close to Ubuntu, as well as a long EOL period: after the demise of CentOS, Ubuntu remains one of those distros that you can just "install and forget about" (hopefully with regular updates), both locally on your workstation and in any of your servers. I can even base my containers on Ubuntu/run it on servers (pretty much every provider has support for it) but use Linux Mint locally and have pretty much everything work.
Now, frankly I could also opt for Debian without too many issues (they also have an LTS variety, albeit less advertised), but Mint is basically Ubuntu without some of the things that annoy me - boring and dependable, mostly just works.
Only annoying thing: if you ever need to setup an apt repo that points to packages that are compatible with Ubuntu and the script for doing that gets the release codename, it might get one that doesn't correspond to the correct Ubuntu release, but instead will grab the Mint name. Sometime need to fix that manually in the apt repository list with a text editor.
Due to that “training” I still hit CTRL-S obsessively even when it hasn’t been needed for years.
I'm mostly in the `:w` camp now, but still...
Same here, but because I used to forget to save before tabbing over to something else that depended on the changes I made. Now I never forget to save...
It certainly wasn't for me! At the time I had my first it job in a local pc repair shop and we had a series of 24h burn in tests. If the newly installed pc crashed during it, there was something wrong with the hw. My personal windows 95 definitely didn't crash more than once every few weeks of heavy use. Programs did crash, explorer did crash, but the actual BSOD was quite rare.
Sounds like you just happened to luck into reliable hardware with well-written drivers.
For me, something about using CorelDraw with my video card led it to crash probably about once every twenty minutes of use.
On the other hand, if I just stuck to working in Word and wasn't trying to simultaneously play MP3's while also downloading files, I'd be fine.
You didn't need heavy use; there was a signed 32 bit integer bug that would cause W95/98 to lock up consistently every 31.5 days or so.
You can load Windows 95 into a VM today and still get the same results every 31.5 days.
[EDIT: 49.7 days]
I did a lot of optimization on my systems. Not drastically hacking crap, just obsessively pruning unnecessary services and software etc. Registry cleanup tools. Etc. Also always had as much RAM as I could afford.
I'm not sure if there was a correlation there but it sure felt like it. Seemed like folks with constant blue screens had PCs filled with crapware. Maybe the difference was purely hardware or, purely luck, I dunno.
You better keep that habit when working in big MS Word files. It still randomly crashes and I've lost some amount of work several times due to this shit.
Same. I psychotically hit cmd-S or :w after every line of text I write; there was one time my computer crashed and I lost my entire 4th grade book report because I didn't save. I didn't know how to touch type then, so it took forever for me to retype it. Never again!
I didn't switch away from 98SE on my home computer until XP SP2 (which I immediately theme to look like 98 because I hated the primary colour nonsense).
Actually, every Windows installation from then until I switched to Linux was "shrunk" and tweaked (can't remember what tool I used, but it wasn't an official MS thing). Having a full licenced copy of InstallShield at work was extremely handy too - every app was repackaged into a fully automatic installer and bundled with the OS. It almost felt like a cloned PC. In fact when I got a job managing fleets of PCs, that XPCD Builder script was like a superpower.
Are you running win10 on a P4? Madman :)
> sure do feel nostalgic how fast and responsive the desktop “felt” back in those days
Wasn’t referring to the retro computing setups of today.
That's not how I remember it. Windows 9x was slow and
constantly crashing.
If you had a did your own clean Windows installs, had an extra $100 of RAM, defragged the HDD regularly, and disabled crapware and unnecessary services etc. the UI felt real sharp and instant.
However this was not the typical experience. Typical experience for most people was that you clicked the Start menu and then listened to the HDD grind away.
I recall using an AMD 5x86@133 with 64mb ram with Win95 then NT4 and it was very usable at the time. It wasn't the best for gaming, my cpu/gpu weren't great, but for general work/productivity use it was pretty great for the time. I had received the wrong ram by mistake, and it worked... was supposed to be 16mb.
edit: I also recall paying extra to add in a cache module on that mb.
I'm on Gnome because I prefer the design, but if you want fast it might be worth a shot.
If this only affected Gnome, I wouldn't mind so much. But so many regular non-Gnome apps I use are GTK-based, even if I pick a different DE (which I do), I can't personalise my own user experience in a way that's consistent. The UX I keep behind a password, so I doesn't matter if anyone else would get confused if they tried to use it, because they can't.
I can still try to pick QT-based desktop apps where possible. And for some fairly simple apps, there are both GTK and QT implementations (e.g. calculators), so that's feasible. But a lot of apps have one main implementation in their niche, and you either have no choice, or if you pick the one with fewer developers some features just aren't there.
I really feel like we've lost something significant from where things were 15-odd years ago.
You can change the colors of Adwaita using https://github.com/GradienceTeam/Gradience it even has a mode to extract colors from your background like current android versions
I get that developers don't want their app to be stylized and broken by distro maintainers, but now none of them look native or good. It's like that time Android apps all started inventing their own bad UI themes, nothing feels native anymore and everything is a chore to use.
In theory, if every app kept their libadwaita versions and modifications up to date, you can still offer themes and everything works great. I practice, there's inconsistency everywhere and theming is impossible to apply to every application.
This is the case for a lot of languages. I believe Qt being written in C++ hurts its adoption much more than some might think… plain C bindings are must for UI toolkits.
Yeah, I miss that a lot. My favorite example is the iTunes sidebar icons going from clearly distinguishable different colors to flat uniform monochrome.
Why? Because someone decided it made the interface look "better" as an art object, rather than being a better user experience.
My subjective experience agree with the study too. But since the entire industry (be it cooperate or non-profit org) collectively lost their mind and decided flat is the one true way and purged the entire internet of anything vaguely 3D, I can't really compare the experience again in a more objective manner.
I'd always go back to [Ross Scott's video of how a "non-expert" view modern GUI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AItTqnTsVjA) whenever I want some reminder on what good GUI should do. I don't agree with everything he say since a lot of it is subjective, but this video cursed me to pay far more attention on how shitty modern GUI is in my everyday interaction with the computer and phone.
(Ross's video essay style is more akin to how a cultist on the street preaches about the UFO or the end-of-the-world and doesn't even care if anyone listen. I personally love it but it may not be everyone's cup of tea)
As a "family admin" I'd want to update for security reasons, or if the new version is better optimised or lacks some bugs, but for many elders (IME) any significant changes to UI are devastating to their comfort in using the OS.
MS just don't seem good at making windows (a DE), IMO.
But judging by the abysmal state of Microsoft modern UI toolkits, and Microsoft's complete inability to adhere to any consistency between the different frameworks that render toolkits, I just don't see any way Microsoft could offer cross-OS theme support that would work in any meaningful way. This was possible up to and including Windows 7, but then Microsoft just derped in their UI development, and it has been more and more embarrassing with every Windows release.
Click the "System DSN" tab, then "Add", Double-click the top entry ("Driver Da Microsoft..."), uncheck "Use Current Directory", then click the "Select Directory" button.
Also try the "help" button.
[1]: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/747297210613498216/10...
The open source Windows all I maintain still uses this paradigm, and there's not really a good migration path to anything else, and Microsoft refuses to fix the chrome.
Aero looks like this:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/df/Aero_Example....
To be less niche and reach even more nostalgic users it could be something like a RetroWM with modes for like Windows 95, XP, maybe even Mac OS 9.
If I only had unlimited time on my hands… :D
Finding the time to do that is a challenge though, particularly with the higher activation energy of having to learn the ins and outs of X11, Wayland, and other bits and pieces involved in building a functional *nix desktop.
I guess my best bet would be retaking the original pictures (the OG MS Natural Keyboard, CDs, etc.) and recreating it, but it sounds like plenty of work
I'm thinking of achieving something like https://github.com/nestoris/win98wallpapers, and maybe Midjourney's img2img (as the other commenter suggested) might be able to do something like that, I don't know.
Unrelated (Maybe related actually) this tool for applying old-school style dithering to an image with a bunch of settings and dithering algos: https://doodad.dev/dither-me-this/
Also, lots of *BSD people liked IceWM with Metal themes for similar reasons. The Windows UI was already peaking at usability, so they used that among virtual desktops and the power of Unix utilities on shells, tools and services.
Linux is a kernel and does have a graphical interface. This theme is for XFCE, one of the many "desktop environments" that can run on the Linux kernel.
Other being: Gnome, Plasma (KDE), LXQt, and many more.
To make it more interesting, XFCE also runs on FreeBSD (another open source kernel/OS).
I saw this and clicked into it and then saw I can't use it without using XFCE.(well, only for kicks)
Pure UI that works from before the word "ux" was invented.
I tested Windows 11 recently and I was really shocked. Apparently, it has two basic themes: my-eyeballs-hurt white and what-is-the-point-of-living black.
What it did do however is remind me just how much space can actually fit on a 1920x1080 screen, and that was very special for the experience and applications that did work (which was most of them).
But people mostly only knew Windows 95, so that's what they remember.
Another thing about Win95 aesthetics (which peaked at the time of Windows 2000) was the extreme consistency which had been simply absent before that in the DOS/Win3/PC world. Maybe Apple could brag about it too, can't say about SGI (was it all like Motif in all applications, with colors/hotkeys set platform-wide, or was it the ugly Motif/Xaw/Athena mix seen elsewhere and each application having a mind of its own?). Man, you can't find it these days, especially since Electron.
I'm purposely omitting Qt/GTK, as they have always felt like also-ran toolkits, mimicking the conventions of the platforms they inhabited, and I can't for the life of me remember when it was that they actually set any trends instead of mimicking some hotness of the day introduced by the dominant platforms.
Not here to fight, but I dunno, slow and steady wins the race I guess?
Also, don't be owned by capital lol.
There also is (or, perhaps, was? I haven't cheecked for a year) a problem with GTK3 apps which don't get skinned this way even if they use uncustomized window decorations.
In fact it fascinates me how hard it appears to restyle your widows to look like whatever you want.
I've got a screenshot somewhere of using this theme while playing the dos game Jetpak Christmas in dosbox with Xsnow running, it was fun.
I would say the pinnacle of the skeumorphism era in term of desktop aesthetics and behavior was QNX photon microgui:
Give me that with dpi scaling capabilities and modern font rendering and I will be happy:
http://nixon-development.com/guis/qnx/mediaplayer.png
http://nixon-development.com/guis/qnx/apps.png
With BeOS 5 in close second and MacOS 9 in third.
The windows 9x/2000/XP were all ugly in comparison.
edit: I've recently been using Chromafiler (https://github.com/vanjac/chromafiler) and I'm realizing we've gone off in completely the wrong direction since the 90s.
This is probably a niche opinion but I think we have been steadily devolving and going backwards in terms of user design. We waste so much space, require so many clicks for worse usability than we started with. With the death of skeumorphism and textual UIs we regularly have to guess or hover buttons to find out what they are. Even scrollbars are starting to be unusable - I can barely see some of them because they are small, low-contrast and auto-hiding.
I can theme some things (unless some modern packaging tech makes the app ignore my theme), I can make the ones in Firefox usable but ugly (with widget.gtk.overlay-scrollbars.enabled and widget.non-native-theme.scrollbar.style), and so on. But I can see where we are heading. Scrollbars are one of many UI features that were too useful, so they must be destroyed.
I did not expect to feel so old at such a young age.
TL;DR millennial shakes fist at cloud
But I feel we need only point to Microsoft Word as an example of how the statement.
>Everything was so clear, neat, and discoverable back then
just isn't true. The only difference now is that we have dozens of pieces of software in our lives now instead of the half dozen we used in the 90s, and we don't have one company monopolistically decreeing what the status quo of UI design is.
Meaningful competition is also why I think there is no WIMP in mobile. And that's a double-edged sword.
Press some hot key, and then type the name of your command in a pop up window with full-text search, autocomplete and a hint what the hot key and toolbar icon for that particular command is. Probably single most useful thing that became mainstream roughly after the ubiquitous CLI-phobia mostly went away.
I want the internet back where everything looked like that phpbb stuff. You just got the information then. Now you have to solve the CCS/JS puzzle first.
I think it includes smaller, denser text.
And something about the borders. Chunkier, more ornate, or griadients/light or something.
And then Windows 8 aesthetic came in, suddenly flat and a few colors with very reduced palette of available widgets became en vogue, but at the same time somehow the load and render times of sites bragging to be "simple" and "minimalistic" and "lightweight" soared with megabytes of assets none of your old sites sporting image borders and marble backgrounds ever had.
On Windows XP, beside the childish theme, the window buttons were very usable.
Ditto with XFCE with some xfwm4 with a round-surface squared buttons on yellow, green and red, you can find it under the last items of the list.
Let's talk about the icons and usability. On overy modern Gnome3/XP icon theme, the icons seem contrastless and very hard to see.
Meanwhile, the Tango icons are still standing a lot on the file manager's white background, with clear outlines.
Altough I must 'konfess' that the Keramik theme with the Noia icons and some handwritting font made reading advanced man pages in Konqueror a lot less "dramatic" and careless, thus, keeping the stress down.