What does HackerNews think of Chicago95?

OS/2 Warp, PowerPC Edition | Oct 2023

I bloody want my Linux and apps on it could look like this or something of this flavour. Most retro themes are poor quality shams (Chicago95[1] is the only good one, yet still not perfect). I feel like I would gladly pay serious money for a really high quality conversion of all the parts, including themes for all widget libraries and no quirks.

[1]https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95

Exploring Windows XP on macOS ARM64 | Aug 2023

Related: you can make Linux look like Windows 95 (98/2000/XP), icons and all: https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95

It works really well.

Can SGI’s enthusiast community bring IRIX back to life? | May 2023

I agree, as far as my workstation goes, it's like putting eye candy on a hammer.

I use this: https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95

Rust hello world app for Windows 95, cross-compiled from Linux, no MSVC | May 2023

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Currently running Chicago95 on Linux! https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95

My long goodbye to Windows XP (2022) | Apr 2023

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Change its appearance theme to the windows one (in the settings app), disable the bottom bar/dock and move the top bar down to the bottom. Now you've got a typical windows style start menu. XFCE is very flexible and you can configure the docks/bars to feel like old windows, old Mac, etc. Its file manager (thunar) is basically a a perfect copy of Windows file explorer from the XP era.

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

The Graphical User Interface Gallery | Mar 2023

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https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95

Windows 98 icons are great (2015) | Jan 2023

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Scrollbar fix: edit /etc/profile.d/gtk.sh, add this:

      #!/bin/sh
      export GTK_NO_OVERLAY=1

Chmod +x it.

On theming: https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95

It works best with Ubuntu Mate. With Ubuntu Gnome it will work but not so integrated.

Win16 Retro Development | Dec 2022

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https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95

XFCE 4.18 Released | Dec 2022

> If you just want "Win98, but in 2022," you've found your desktop environment.

If you want Windows 95 in 2022: https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95

Fresh version of XFCE, the oldest Linux desktop of them all in Xubuntu builds | Dec 2022

I've been a fan of Xubuntu (and XFCE in general) for 14 years or so. You can even dress it up as Windows 95: https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95

98.css – design system for building faithful recreations of Windows 98 UIs | Oct 2022

Awesome! I like this a lot.

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)

with the last one probably being the most important one next to `button`. ...and this still does not catch all, because you wouldn't believe how often web devs just take some div and put an onclick handler on it without making it accessible.

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

Everyone seems to forget why GNOME and GNOME 3 and Unity happened | Jul 2022

I still think Win95 is peak U, but it's what I grew up with, so that's probably expected.

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

Not So Common Desktop Environment (NsCDE) | Jul 2022

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The Win95 interface, being rather well-known, was a frequent emulation target and generally easier to do than OS X, although the finer details are usually missing from both (e.g. good keyboard control).

https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95

https://sourceforge.net/projects/xpde/