Windows-95 VS wayfire

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

Unusable until moving your mouse to the edges of the screen and clicking makes it hit the scrollbar, or the exit button. Right now it initiates a resize.

Illustrated example from a different compositor https://github.com/WayfireWM/wayfire/issues/570

It's the only DE I'm excited about it so I hope they fix that. Very very promising and the best part is that it made the GNOME people mad.

GNOME: "Sorry I don't see the use case for that, PR closed. Make your own project. "

One of the developers just responded on the github issue referecing this thread.

"After a bit of discussion on HackerNews, I got a bit better understanding of the actual problem. People don't want to just configure the keys according to a particular layout - the actual 'issue' here is that they expect the key binding changes together with the layout. Unfortunately, the 0.8.0 changes didn't make this possible to implement as a plugin.

I would reconsider adding this as an option if there are enough interested people. React with a thumbs up to this comment if you are interested in having this option (though the defaults will certainly remain as they are now). Please, react only if you actually use Wayfire or would use it if it had this feature :)"

https://github.com/WayfireWM/wayfire/issues/1601#issuecommen...

I have been on Wayfire for over a year now, and I can't possibly praise it enough. It's entirely modular, so you can make it look and behave exactly as you want. It does tiling, it does Compiz-style wobbly windows and 3D desktop cubes, configurable rules and hotkeys, everything. It's stable and handles gaming flawlessly.

Your impression of Wayland is going to be very much determined by the quality of the compositor implementing it, and I've found Wayfire to be the best, by far - but oddly, also the one least talked about. Everybody's paying attention to stuff like Hyprland, Sway and Mutter - you're barking up the wrong tree there. Wayfire is fantastic, has most of the bells and whistles Compiz on X11 has, and is as pretty or as functional as you want it to be.

- VR support

I thought so too not long ago, but Wayland compositors needed some time to mature, and some of them are getting pretty damn good. Ever since I discovered Wayfire I'm a total believer, it's better than any X window management solution I've used. Much lighter too.

might be a small window when wayfire releases a version, before master identfies as the next release number. (see: https://github.com/WayfireWM/wayfire/blob/master/meson.build )