FVWM-95 (2001)
fvwm95.sourceforge.net
fvwm95.sourceforge.net
You can see some (fairly old!) screenshots here: https://fvwm-themes.sourceforge.net/screenshots/
Glad to see it's still around.
Edit: Here's the thread (Gentoo Forums): https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=80517
The thread ran a total of 121 pages over 7 years.
My linux days started around 95/96, and I was always using low-resource environments due to necessity. Other than FVWM95 the other system I recall using for a long long time was IceWM which was something I switched to around 1999/2000.
I believe taviso still posts on here. Pretty sure we chatted on IRC at some point. Anyway, it was taviso who had the coolest configs and that's where I got all my inspiration from, using it.
You know what? I might just fire it up on something, I'm sure I've got a netbook around here somewhere.
https://slackbuilds.org/repository/15.0/desktop/fvwm95/
I like the Win95 aesthetic, but I like a close relative, KDE1, better; and I have configured my Plasma 6 setup along these lines. Screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/Q9Gfs08
Back into FVWM, Slackware also has a SlackBuild for the next-gen fvwm3. FVWM configurability could be amazing, although it can be a challenge.
Meanwhile, Plasmas Breeze (light) does all of that for me, again. One could maybe depart from the breeze window decorations, and exchange them for 'Klassy', they can 'fit', there is much to change, chose from. I'm trying them out at the moment. The thing with Breeze is, many other apps have presets for that also, like LibreOffice, which leads to even more visual consistency :-)
My desktop is blank, a mix between soft pastel yellow and 'manila' paper. No icons, widgets, clocks, weather. I don't care about CPU or Network speed there. I wouldn't see them anyway, since I tend to have windows maximized. If something would be wrong Kget or Ktorrent would make themselves known, which they won't ;-> CPU speeds suffice, even if mostly clocked down to 800Mhz :-)
My 'taskbar' is at the top, only 24px high. I switch between 3 by 3 virtual desktops by either using that too small (for that arrangement, it should grow a little when hovering the pointer over it) widget in the taskbar, or by jamming the mousepointer into one of the four corners, which makes that 'expose'-like thing appear.
StormClouds: https://store.kde.org/p/1001459
Steel (no longer shipped by default, but still available at the KDE Store): https://store.kde.org/p/1311274
As for the monitors, I have them because sometimes I have issues with CPU speed (due to a hardware quirk of my laptop) and the network connection is kinda iffy at the time.
That's different from what most laptops do, or fiddling with xgamma, or one of its frontends, using 'redshift', etc.
Even at brightest sunshine I don't go over 55% brightness, otherwise during the day, between 38% to 44%, at night just 20%, with contrast always two below these settings, or any I may use in between.
Despite all this, pictures look just right, even if I visit sites for calibration.
I see system76 is doing something similar for their PopOS?
https://store.kde.org/p/1327259 / https://github.com/pop-os/icon-theme
It uses a semi-flat design with raised 3D motifs to help give depth to icons.
I remember Noia, they were too 'shiny/glassy' and 'playful' for me. Looked different and funny for a while, but unusable for daily driving. I prefer something more 'serious', unobstrusive, not distracting.
I see someone did a Noia KDE Reloaded in 2019: https://store.kde.org/p/1293856
For shiny things, these did work for me, for a while, or could, if I retried them again:
Faenza https://store.kde.org/p/1012545 ,
Faience https://store.kde.org/p/1012543 ,
Meliae https://store.kde.org/p/1012498 ,
Delft https://store.kde.org/p/1199881 , https://www.opendesktop.org/p/1169579 ,
but I'd rather go to something like Flat Remix instead.
https://store.kde.org/p/1012430 , https://drasite.com/flat-remix ,https://github.com/daniruiz/Flat-Remix
Hedera would look good, too, if not abandoned: https://store.kde.org/p/1207800 / https://gitlab.com/sixsixfive/Hedera-icons
If they were as comprehensive & complete as Breeze I'd go for Retrofukation https://store.kde.org/p/1012499 or IndigoMagic https://store.kde.org/p/1015788 instead.
But they aren't. So Breeze it is, which is bliss...
It really galls me that they removed the Motif style in Qt6, since I target that as my default look and feel. It gives a nice "This is expensive professional software with a codebase tracing back to the Reagan administration" vibe.
There are themes that come close in various attempts-- "Commonality" for Qt6/Kvantum, and some of the assets from NsCDE for GTK, but it feels like a pitched battle against design teams that desperately want to mimick whatever Apple is doing this week.
This is a KDE1 screenshot: https://diit.cz/sites/default/files/kde1-snapshot01.png
Is this really a Motif ripoff? For me it's much more like Win95 with a better titlebar in the window decoration. To each their own, but it seems quite right to me.
I can recall trying Beta 4 and probably 1.0, but at the time it felt like a weird situation. It wasn't quite everything you needed, and a lot of the apps were still obviously sort of immature. The HTML-driven file manager was interesting (ISTR OS/2 offered a similar way to customize things on a per-directory level) but it seemed like a lot of resources when a 486/80 with an obscene 32Mb of memory was my Linux machine.
This looks a little too Windows 95, but the dock is a nice reminder that it’s X Windows.
https://github.com/zy/zy-fvwm/blob/master/fvwmrc/taviso.fvwm...
Someone made a full cde style desktop with fvwm: https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE
It’s too bad tech seems so much to take away this kind of configurability in the name of “we know better”. There’s so much to be said for software that can last so long, as opposed to the constant treadmill of forced updates.
Fuck gnome eternally for destroying gtk and fuck Wayland.
$ pkg info fvwm
fvwm-2.6.9_4
Name : fvwm
Version : 2.6.9_4
Installed on : Mon Dec 8 02:01:51 2025 GMT
Origin : x11-wm/fvwm2
Architecture : FreeBSD:15:amd64
i for one have migrated to fvwm3 (https://github.com/fvwmorg/fvwm3) almost everywhere i can. i don't think i am ever switching to anything else. reason: nothing better exists :o) not for the lack of trying mind you !
heck, even at work, where i log into a aws machine, i have it running with x-forwarding over an ssh session (using x2go) from within my mac. it looks something like this: https://ibb.co/DHYbM45J
unfortunately, i just realized, that on github, my config is not up to date, will update in a couple of days.
i would be remiss to not mention my huge thanks (fwiw) to mr. thomas-adam the current maintainer + project-lead of fvwm3. thank you !
ps-01: for folks getting into it, this: https://www.zensites.net/fvwm/guide/index.html is not-too-shabby a launch point.
ps-02: deep wiki has fvwm3 indexed here: https://deepwiki.com/fvwmorg/fvwm3
By then I was already into other window managers.
While you may get the Look, you will never get the Feel.
Perhaps for many of us this is exactly as intended. The look of W95 or something else, the feel (and power) of Unix.
That page even looks a tad dated for 2001!
P.S. Oh, there is the official Qvwm page: https://sourceforge.net/projects/qvwm/files/qvwm/
I don't recall what was broken, but it was a few random things. I also added xrender image scaling on the window decorations, because they were hardcoded to a size that was tiny on modern DPI.
I don't update OS to relearn basic controls every 2 years, I update OS to get latest versions of apps.
KDE is a powerhouse. I probably replace 10-15 applications just by using what's built-in to that.
The last time I revisited one of these old X projects, I wound up wasting time with libraries that have been deprecated for a decade or more.
A C++ GUI toolkit with the Windows 95 look and feel.
Usage:
xmkmf -a
make
export LD_PRELOAD=./libXaw95.so.8.0
xcalcIt's incredible how much charm there was in these interfaces, specifically in the bitmap fonts. Were GUI applications more or less graphically diverse than now ?
You don't need to know Spanish, the screenshots speak from thelselves.
I think the html editors of the time defaulted to some of style we now find quaint/quirky.
This style was a popular choice because it was easy to write, and could be displayed by just about any web browser. Compatibility and low resource usage was important back then.
There is still some use for lightweight even in today. You make better use of your memory/resources in some application, than in something so fundamental.
It was created at a time when the theming in fvwm was not as flexible, but it's completely possible to emulate all of fvwm95 in fvwm3, and behind the scenes, the application support in fvwm3 greatly outweighs the version of fvwm2 which fvwm95 wad forked from.
In other words, it remains a curio in fvwm's history, and that's where it should remain.
It's funny how quickly things were moving at the time. In the mid 90's, GUI design elements were still in their infancy. Even basic stuff like "what do windows do?" was in flux. Traditional X window managers hadn't settled on anything like a regular usage model: twm was still in regular use, fvwm mostly cloned its UI, Sun was still defaulting to OpenWindows which was pretty and clever but sort of an evolutionary dead end, and other commercial unixes were running Motif which was a lot like a monochrome Windows 3.1 that used too many pixels. Macs were still stuck in the only-one-foreground-app-is-enough model with System 7 and had nothing to offer.
Then Windows 95 landed like a bomb: there was a CLOSE button in the corner of the window finally! And there was a start menu and a little status bar! And that's what we all decided we wanted, really badly. So it got cloned and picked up pervasively. Basically everyone not already part of one of the X11 camps was running this.
But the window was small. KDE kicked off mere months later, Gnome followed quickly after that, and we all forgot about fvwm95. But we for sure all remember it.
Huh? Perhaps I'm misunderstanding, but Mac windows had close buttons even as far back as System 1.x in 1984. Multitasking didn't land until System 5 with the optional MultiFinder in 1987 (made standard in System 7), but window close buttons were absolutely not a Win95 innovation.
[1] These were the dark days of the mac. It was falling behind rapidly and the failure was accelerating. Jobs would walk back in the door within months of this moment too! Again, Windows 95 isn't felt to be notable in this community of true believers, but it was absolutely a bomb in the market as a whole. It changed everything, instantly.
Sure, on $15k ($30k in 2025 dollars) Mac II's. See also the answer elsewhere about NeXTSTEP being a player in this space.
No one was doing it in the consumer space, no consumer knew about that stuff, Linux consumers on their 14" 800x600 monitors sure hadn't see it. And to repeat yet again, Microsoft Windows 95 landed like a bomb in this community and changed everything. And it happened very fast.
Also, the Amiga had the window management you refer to in its earliest versions, in 1984. Amigas cost a hell of a lot less than $15,000, even packed to the brim with expansions. I grew up with the Amiga, so your assertion that "No one was doing it in the consumer space, no consumer knew about that stuff, Linux consumers on their 14" 800x600 monitors sure hadn't see it." is anecdotally false.
The finder was always a multi-window interface.
I just don't know where your memory is from.
When Windows 95 was released, the top of the line was the PowerMac 81000 and the remaining Quadras, and 1024x768 was common. Overlapping windows and multitasking were not particularly unheard of… The Mac Plus had not been sold for half a decade. System 7 was released 5 years before, and 7.5 at about the same time. I mean, sure Windows 95 was successful, but let’s not rewrite history.
I have memories of being endlessly frustrated trying to use an iMac because "close" would just hide the window.
We've gone full circle, and now everything in windows likes to treat close as "minimize to system tray", but back in win9x era, the expectation was that close was "terminate the application".
This serves a couple of purposes: first, documents open more quickly (particularly when the program is loaded from a slow spinning HDD, floppy, etc) since the program doesn't need to be reloaded, and second, new document creation flows and non-document functions can be accessed without having a document open or requiring the developer to create a bespoke "home screen" UI that serves that purpose since the full menubar is accessible as long as the app is foregrounded.
See this is what I mean, that's completely alien to a MS Windows user in the mid-nineties.
This is only confusing in comparison to Windows though. If you used graphical DOS applications, it was the exact same experience. You open the app, and can interact with your documents, but closing a document doesn't necessarily close the app.
Even Photoshop on Windows of the day worked the same way. When you opened Photoshop, a parent window would open that was the app. Closing documents left the app open, unless you also closed the parent window.
This was also copied into other X window control styles. Even today, a Motif replicates the Windows 1.0-3.11 top-left menu+close button.
Yeah, yeah, I know CUA allows for a window close. No one knew. I worked IT at the time (as did lots of us here in our youth I'm sure) and was constantly teaching and re-teaching this trick to the poor people trapped with their CUA environments.
But suddenly with Windows 95 you could see how it worked.
[1] Even if we knew in our bones, c.f. this very discussion about the popularity of a cloned hack on Linux, that it was the Right Thing.
You didn't switch between tasks, you switched between full opened desktops with Windows inside, one or two, the rest was somewhere else.
It's almost a shame Microsoft clung to DOS compatibility for so long, that probably kept a lot of power users from seeing what Windows could do. But on the other hand, it's probably a good thing because it kept Unix popular and gave Linux and BSD room to grow.