90s-2000s GUI in 2020s

In late 2010s it has become a problem to change UI into 90s style, not speaking of 2000s styles. Windows 8 and 10, GTK3 made style switch a non-trivial task, and what's also important - new UI elements, which didn't exist in these times: burger menu bubbles, on/off switchers (which are rather weirdly styled checkboxes), tab switchers disconnected from tabs. How do we make into classic style which would look authentic?

IIRC Raleigh is shipped with GTK3. You could also use this: https://github.com/jpfleury/clearlooks-phenix.

>How do we make into classic style which would look authentic? There is no going back. Even if you manage to make a good theme, the GTK update that comes next day will break it. What's worse, there are multiple different GUI frameworks. You would have to at least support Qt as well. It's a waste of time. Now, it would be fine if the GUI was modern, but at least it make it consistent then. I don't know how framework developers think that changing things every week is a good idea. Developing applications takes time and by the time application is finished your GUI framework is already obsolete, so you have to use workarounds, random patches found on some forum and "LTS" releases, but since everything changed your applications does not look like rest of your system. >GTK+ will continue to publish major, minor and micro releases. New major versions will be released once new features have stabilised, which is expected to be roughly every 2-3 years. When bumping to a new major version deprecated API will be removed. After that, this API series will be considered stable. This pisses me off so much. Why do you need to change this every 2-3 years? Why can't you make this cycle 10-20 years? >Meanwhile, Gtk 4.0 will not be the final stable API of what we would call 'Gtk 4'. Each 6 months, the new release (Gtk 4.2, Gtk 4.4, Gtk 4.6) will break API and ABI vs. the release that came before it. These incompatible minor versions will not be fully parallel installable; they will use the same pkg-config name and the same header file directory. We will, of course, bump the soname with each new incompatible release — you will be able to run Gtk 4.0 apps alongside Gtk 4.2 and 4.4 apps, but you won’t be able to build them on the same system. This policy fits the model of how most distributions think about libraries and their 'development packages'. They just love wasting time, don't they? That's probably also why a lot of scientific software still uses motif.

LXDE

>>17263 >They just love wasting time, don't they? That's probably also why a lot of scientific software still uses motif. Almost certainly. This sort of thing is what makes me really appreciate Linus' number one rule: don't break userspace. It's a different domain (kernel instead of a UI framework), but I think the comparison is still valid. Software developers can trust kernel developers to not deliberately break anything. I think it's what has actually led to the Linux kernel being used damn near everywhere, even moreso than the open development model or the free license. People developing layers on top of the kernel should adopt the same approach. Deprecate only as a very last resort, and with years of advance notice.

Windowmaker, OneStepBack gtk{2-3} theme and kvantum qt engine with qtstep theme. And as a plus, palemoon with moonscape theme and urxvt with NeXT scrollbar. the problem on the future would come to GTK as its theming approach relies on the themes themselves, if there was to release qt6 tomorrow, by next week I would have qt6 kvantum and use all my themes

Using MATE with Raleigh made my install look pretty 90s. No real danger of MATE shaking things up like GNOME is doing at the very least I think.

>>17267 Raleigh looks definitively not 90s, more like early-mid 00s fedora core or some soykaf

>>17263 >You would have to at least support Qt as well. I omitted Qt because it is said it's one of frameworks which is still can be tuned to 90s look.

I wanna go back, but it is what it is. It's hard to recapture the past, but this site does help considering how terrible most other imageboards are these days.

>>18004 It's impossible to capture the past, because most of the value the past has comes from the person you were back then. Most of what you miss has less to do with old things being better and more to do with you being older and more cynical.

>>18084 A real hit to nostalgia but its true. The thing we miss the most is what we were in the past.

XFCE / Xubuntu Windows 95 Total Conversion https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95

>>18086 You're right I do miss being happy

>>18113 I grew up with windows 95, and I never saw a single of these conversion themes that would look the same. I am considering making a 1:1 clone of the interface myself, as it seems there are quite a few people who would use something like this. I never touched any window manager code though. I wonder which window manager I could use as a starting point. I am thinking something like openbox.

>>18116 IceWM and JWM are both already very win95-like, so if it were me I'd use one of those as a base

>>18116 The window manager will only get you so far. It only draws the window borders, which is why what is inside the windows is jarring.

>>18131 That's not entirely true. Window managers can do way more than just render windows. A lot of older WMs were just short of being desktop environments unto themselves

I love the style of old computers. It's been a while since I riced my *nix like this.

>>18142 >afterstep My melanin enriched brother

>>18130 FVWM95 does what you're doing better

>>18270 FVWM95 is also really, really dated though. The last time it was updated was back when windows XP was still the newest version of windows.

>>18271 You might be interested in https://flaterco.com/util/index.html

>>18113 Disabling font smoothing has improved my life tenfold. gfx.text.disable-aa for firefox.

>>18323 You may also want to try adding img { image-rendering: -moz-crisp-edges; } to your chrome/userContent.css

your best bet would be to do a maximum in emacs/terminal since gtk2 is nearly dead and neither qt nor gtk3 look retro. also get fvwm and put bitmap fonts everywhere

I really want to into FVWM, theres so much customization options, you get the wm you want, but you get exactly the wm you put in the config files, and it's kind of a steep learning curve. Old, good, tech that is still getting some updated

>>18326 Ty.

>>17264 this is the best option if you want your UI to look anything like windows 2000

>>17268 >Raleigh looks definitively not 90s, more like early-mid 00s fedora core or some soykaf for years, i wanted a decent recreation of redhats bluecurve theme, but no one ever made a good one. imho bluecurve was the best middle ground between "90's standard grey" and "early 2000's colourful skeumorphic design". i already gave it up and settled with LXQT, at least it looks clean without visual gimmicks. >>18130 >IceWM and JWM are both already very win95-like, so if it were me I'd use one of those as a base unfortunatly, icewm is very dated and one feels it. having oldschool aesthetics is fine, but the user experience, not so much.

>>18113 Based