And so I discovered that Cinnamon is also a very good option when it comes to « a better Windows 2000 ui ».
It’s also not incredible on HiDPI but at least Cinnamon is pretty good at not breaking everything when you increase font size by 150 or 200%. On XFCE if you do this everything becomes ugly.
First because usually it is only text that I want to be larger so I can read it. Increases the size of "everything" just decreases UI density with no benefit (while things that conform to the text like button still increase in size to contain the text).
Second because scaling "everything" often leads to ugly results. E.g. I use a program to browse local media files that generates thumbnails for those files. The size of the thumbnail generated matches the size of the widget it displays for that file. If the widget is scaled 1.5x due to UI scaling, it will show a blurry upscaled thumbnail.
Go to Settings, Appearance, Advanced, set the font DPI to something like 144 or what works for your screen.
The only thing that does not obey this is Firefox; the way to adjust it is to set layout.css.devPixelsPerPx to something like 1.5 in about:config.
How so? We support setting GTK's UI scaling to 2x, and (as of 4.18) I believe all the bugs around blurry icon rendering have been fixed.
What exactly becomes ugly for you?
Been using WSL full time for over a year and have no plans to go back..