Chicago95 VS bedrocklinux-userland

If that's a concern for you, there are themes for GTK3 and GTK4 that replicate classic 3D widgets and remove much of the excess padding in modern apps. https://github.com/B00merang-Project/Windows-95 https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95 (You should install both; Chicago95 is more actively developed, but B00merang gives you a GTK+4 theme that's currently missing from Chicago95.) Works reasonably well as a daily-driver, giving you a similar look to the modern SerenityOS GUI on a standard Linux system. Even the modern GTK+4 "responsive" apps work as designed, with some non-critical graphical quirks.

https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95

Chicago was the code name for the development version of the highly anticipated Windows95

Haven’t tried it, but there’s https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95

Might be looking for something closer to this: https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95

I bloody want my Linux and apps on it to 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

Chicago95

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

It works really well.

Back when I used a debian based distribution I made use of https://bedrocklinux.org/ to make use of the AUR. It's not for everyone though.

Now this is interesting... apparently it is possible to run Nix AKA "The Nix Package Manager" on Alpine -- despite the fact that Alpine is Busybox and Musl based and NixOS is Coreutils and Glibc based!

Well done Nix engineers and contributors!

(I may switch to Alpine w/Nix Package Manager in the future, depending on how well it works!)

Related:

Bedrock Linux: https://bedrocklinux.org/

Sure, just install Bedrock Linux and add the Arch stratum on top

There's a Bedrock Linux distro already...

Bedrock Linux. It is allows you to make a system out of various seemingly-incompatible parts of other distros. I haven't gotten around to trying it myself, but it's really cool.

If you want to actually use multiple distributions at once integrated tightly into each other (like using Ubuntu with AUR packages) I highly recommend https://bedrocklinux.org/. It uses some chroot and symbolic link magic to share files across filesystems.