Windows-95 VS Home Manager using Nix

You can supplement Chicago95 with an experimental GTK4 theme from the b00merang project https://github.com/B00merang-Project/Windows-95 You will have to install it manually by overwriting your user-level GTK4 config, but then it will give you proper styling with the latest apps, including full support for mobile UX 'convergence'.

(Since it seems that the b00merang repo has gone mostly unmaintained, it would be nice if it got imported to Chicago95 itself.)

Chicago95 is nice, but these days you should also install the (experimental) GTK+4 theme from b00merang https://github.com/B00merang-Project/Windows-95 to get proper styling in the latest apps.

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/B00merang-Project/Windows-95 has a theme for GTK+4 with classic widgets. Unfortunately you'll need to replace your GTK+ user config outright to use it because the new version has no support for themes.

Have you tried https://github.com/B00merang-Project/Windows-95 or any of the similar themes by that project? There's a bit of extra padding still but it's vastly more usable than the Adwaita default. (And of course you don't need to bother w/ the retro icon packs shown in the screenshot, the basic GTK+ theme is plenty enough.)

You should install the Windows 95 theme for Mint to match the wallpaper: https://github.com/B00merang-Project/Windows-95/

windows 95 by b00merang project

So I decided to marry the best of both worlds. This is my 2012 laptop running Linux Mint 20.2 running the Windows 9x theme made by b00merang over on GitHub. It gets very close to looking like the Windows classic theme. So much so that it has actually fooled me a couple times when I was not paying attention.

Continuing my series of trying out Windows-like themes on Linux. This is the Windows 95 theme by, you guessed it, b00merang

It's probably overkill for what you are trying to do. But I have been using home-manager [0] as a way to quickly restore my working environment.

[0] https://nix-community.github.io/home-manager/

$ home-manager --version 23.05 $ nix-channel --add https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager/archive/release-23.11.tar.gz home-manager $ nix-channel --update $ nix-shell '' -A install [...] All done! The home-manager tool should now be installed and you can edit /home/MY-USERNAME/.config/home-manager/home.nix to configure Home Manager. Run 'man home-configuration.nix' to see all available options. $ home-manager --version 23.05

Unfortunately until we find more volunteers in this area, it is hard to see status quo changing. See also https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager/issues/607 and this ongoing project https://github.com/pjones/plasma-manager

> Channels are, AFAIU, a reference to some point-in-time/commit/version of nixpkgs

It's not specifically nixpkgs, but any Nix code generally.

Per the Nix manual[0]:

> Channels are a mechanism for referencing remote Nix expressions and conveniently retrieving their latest version.

e.g. home-manager's suggested channel is just the github tarball for the relevant branch[1]:

  nix-channel --add https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager/archive/master.tar.gz home-manager

It sounds like you'd benefit a lot from Nix/NixOS [1], if not just home-manager[2].

1. https://nixos.org/

2. https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager

nix-channel --add https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager/archive/master.tar.gz home-manager nix-channel --update nix-shell '' -A install

I'm using flakes and home manager and not really sure how to go about managing my neovim configuration. I've read through some other posts, github issues, and various articles trying to suss out a good way to do this. Reading through other people's configs and posts was somewhat helpful but there is a lot going on I don't understand and everyone's examples I've seen vary wildly.

Said store path contains the home-manager repo. After the home-manager run, the store path is recreated.

I can't answer all your questions, but home-manager does have a dconf module that would probably be better to use than that external tool. Everything inside the options block are the things you can pass to the dconf module.