What does HackerNews think of Chicago95?
A rendition of everyone's favorite 1995 Microsoft operating system for Linux.
It works really well.
I use this: https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95
If you want to go full old windows it's an easy next step to run this theme's setup script: https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95
#!/bin/sh
export GTK_NO_OVERLAY=1
On theming: https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95
It works best with Ubuntu Mate. With Ubuntu Gnome it will work but not so integrated.
I've run variants of this: https://b00merang.weebly.com/desktop-themes.html on GNOME for quite some time, without putting in the effort to recreate the start menu. My coworkers definitely looked at me weird for my Windows XP theme but it felt very nostalgic. Small details are off, though, unless you go in manually and tweak the CSS even further to correct for the differences between the author's DE and yours.
For LXDE, this project: https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95 goes further than just a theme, restyling some common utilities as well. It's not Windows 95, but if you'd told me it was designed around that time I would've believed you.
This post: https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/tijkr3/plasma_wel... shows a very good KDE Plasma theme. Some icons are Win98, though, so you may need to replace those for the authentic look and feel.
What I myself would love is for someone to make a proper Windows 7 Aero theme for Linux. The icon sets and the backwards compatibility themes are available everywhere, but there's no Aero theme that's not jarring. In a perfect world, I'd like the frosted glass effect as well, but that's probably too much to ask. I've thrown some Windows DLLs into Ghidra to try and find the frosted glass theme engine code, but I had no idea where to look and couldn't find anything.
If you want Windows 95 in 2022: https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95
Recently, I've been attempting to create a global user style sheet that applies a reasonable set of nicely accessible rules to every website, essentially forcing buttons to look and behave like buttons, and to have a consistent theme across the internet. I started out by applying Window 95-like styles, and this is how it currently looks: https://waritschlager.de/share/0E7AB89CE86B1319A671D35EA2697... (background not changed to grey for now), not finished yet. Turns out, writing a global stylesheet is really difficult. For example, you cannot just "make all buttons grey":
First of all, there are many different ways to identify a button. This is a subset of my current button matching rule:
button, input[type=submit], input[type=button], a[class*="btn" i], a[class*="button" i], *[role=button], *[role=tab], *[role=menuitem], *[role=menuitemcheckbox], a:not([role=button] ...etc) > *:not(div ...etc)
Secondly, as soon as you overwrite the background color of all buttons, you will lose its background images which may be important. This happens way too often, also surrounding elements which actually have nothing to do with button semantics. So you need to apply a partially transparent background color. While it can still look perfect with the right tuning, it will then look horrible on non-white backgrounds.
There are also way too many nested buttons and empty buttons out there, it all needs consideration.
Finally, to detect a "pressed down" state, you'd normally use `aria-selected`, but barely anyone ever uses that, so it's back to matching class names `.active` and `.selected`, but then you also need to exclude `.inactive`, `.interactive`, `.deselected` and so on...
My conclusion so far is that building a global style sheet is definitely possible, but can get ugly sometimes. And instead of hand-crafting my own styles, I can now integrate 98.css's ones, that's great :-)
Also worth mentioning: A near-perfect win95 XFCE theme: https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95
Minus some of the non-resizable windows, some newer UI elements that are clearly better, etc.
I still run "it" via XFCE and Arch Linux: https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95