I have fond memories of FVWM. I don't know where this was (Slashdot?), but back in the mid 2000's, someone posted a "Why are people not using FVWM? It's one of the most flexible window managers?", and linked to various people's FVWM setup. This led to a lot of folks (including me) switching to FVWM. I used it until switching to AwesomeWM around 2011.
I switched over to using it because (I think) it was much lighter on memory than the window manager I was using. I remember it being very responsive, and looking quite nice for the time.
I used it until I switched to GNOME2 at some point, and I also have fond memories. Just seeing the title of this post recalled the desktops I had had over the years.
My linux days started around 95/96, and I was always using low-resource environments due to necessity. Other than FVWM95 the other system I recall using for a long long time was IceWM which was something I switched to around 1999/2000.
I used it on an IBM Workpad Z50 (WinCE device, really quite cute) booted into NetBSD. It had a fairly slow MIPS processor and 16MB of RAM but with a 1GB IBM Microdrive (spinning rust in a CF card format) and a wifi card (Orinoco Gold, recovered from a scrap supermarket barcode scanner gun) it made an awesome portable setup.
I believe taviso still posts on here. Pretty sure we chatted on IRC at some point. Anyway, it was taviso who had the coolest configs and that's where I got all my inspiration from, using it.
You know what? I might just fire it up on something, I'm sure I've got a netbook around here somewhere.
I use this on my desktop. Started out as a curiosity but stayed once I realized it brought back more familiar icons such as the notepad and terminal icons. Clean start menu design too.
Wow, tried this in a VM and absolutely love it. Besides the nostalgia factor, there's just a concreteness and visibility to the UI elements that feels like it's been lacking in Linux desktop environments for a long time. Thinking about putting it on my home PC for a while. Might even throw caution to the wind and install it at work :-)
Does anyone remember MPX? It was a set of patches on top of X11 that let two people use one computer at the same time. Two mouse pointers for two mice, and two keyboards for input. It was super fun in a dorm environment (I was at Random hall at the time) to browse the Internet with friends. I wonder what it works take to revive it for Wayland.
It's part of XInput 2.0 and works as well as it ever did with upstream X.org. The more popular approach to multiseating these days involves logind, udev and two video cards (or drm-lease-manager). Then the two display servers are completely independent from each other, which may or may not be what you want.
fvwm is still one of the default graphical environments in Slackware (even in -current), and fvwm95 came packaged for some time, too. Now fvwm95 is no longer part of the basic Slackware distribution but there's a SlackBuild for it:
I like the Win95 aesthetic, but I like a close relative, KDE1, better; and I have configured my Plasma 6 setup along these lines.
Screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/Q9Gfs08
Back into FVWM, Slackware also has a SlackBuild for the next-gen fvwm3. FVWM configurability could be amazing, although it can be a challenge.
To me, the big aesthetic of early Qt/KDE1 is "Obvious Motif ripoff". Aside from the Win95/Warp style titlebars, if you don't have the big thick bevels and the distinct scroll bars, it's not quite right.
It really galls me that they removed the Motif style in Qt6, since I target that as my default look and feel. It gives a nice "This is expensive professional software with a codebase tracing back to the Reagan administration" vibe.
There are themes that come close in various attempts-- "Commonality" for Qt6/Kvantum, and some of the assets from NsCDE for GTK, but it feels like a pitched battle against design teams that desperately want to mimick whatever Apple is doing this week.
> To me, the big aesthetic of early Qt/KDE1 is "Obvious Motif ripoff". Aside from the Win95/Warp style titlebars, if you don't have the big thick bevels and the distinct scroll bars, it's not quite right.
Is this really a Motif ripoff? For me it's much more like Win95 with a better titlebar in the window decoration. To each their own, but it seems quite right to me.
I can recall trying Beta 4 and probably 1.0, but at the time it felt like a weird situation. It wasn't quite everything you needed, and a lot of the apps were still obviously sort of immature. The HTML-driven file manager was interesting (ISTR OS/2 offered a similar way to customize things on a per-directory level) but it seemed like a lot of resources when a 486/80 with an obscene 32Mb of memory was my Linux machine.
Of course you thought that was a Motif ripoff. The screenshot you reference is from an alpha pre-release version. KDE1 had neither the widget style nor the window decorations of that screenshot.
To each his own. I had a phase of emulating the classic W2K look, but like W95/98/ME all of this it feels too dark, dirty greyish for me now. Still in times of late KDE3 I then switched to https://store.kde.org/p/1100735/ but with different more colorful (soft pastel) icons which I can't remember the name of anymore, later then to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluecurve , but not like the ugly default depicted there. It could be customized to a mix of that Reinhardt style and Microsofts 'dot.net' style, still using the forgotten soft pastel icons. Which would then be applied to apps for other toolkits as well. Very consistent. I like consistency.
Meanwhile, Plasmas Breeze (light) does all of that for me, again. One could maybe depart from the breeze window decorations, and exchange them for 'Klassy', they can 'fit', there is much to change, chose from. I'm trying them out at the moment. The thing with Breeze is, many other apps have presets for that also, like LibreOffice, which leads to even more visual consistency :-)
My desktop is blank, a mix between soft pastel yellow and 'manila' paper. No icons, widgets, clocks, weather. I don't care about CPU or Network speed there. I wouldn't see them anyway, since I tend to have windows maximized. If something would be wrong Kget or Ktorrent would make themselves known, which they won't ;-> CPU speeds suffice, even if mostly clocked down to 800Mhz :-)
My 'taskbar' is at the top, only 24px high. I switch between 3 by 3 virtual desktops by either using that too small (for that arrangement, it should grow a little when hovering the pointer over it) widget in the taskbar, or by jamming the mousepointer into one of the four corners, which makes that 'expose'-like thing appear.
I concur in your liking of Breeze. It's an amazing teme, really. My only objection is that the default light color scheme is too light. Fortunately there are good color schemes such as Steel or StormClouds that solve that problem, a light theme that isn't too "white".
As for the monitors, I have them because sometimes I have issues with CPU speed (due to a hardware quirk of my laptop) and the network connection is kinda iffy at the time.
I tried both of them out. They are not for me, ATM. Maybe the too light for you results from different hardware. I have screens where I can adjust brightness and contrast separately, running at a color temperature of 5000K (warm).
That's different from what most laptops do, or fiddling with xgamma, or one of its frontends, using 'redshift', etc.
Even at brightest sunshine I don't go over 55% brightness, otherwise during the day, between 38% to 44%, at night just 20%, with contrast always two below these settings, or any I may use in between.
Despite all this, pictures look just right, even if I visit sites for calibration.
It uses a semi-flat design with raised 3D motifs to help give depth to icons.
I remember Noia, they were too 'shiny/glassy' and 'playful' for me. Looked different and funny for a while, but unusable for daily driving. I prefer something more 'serious', unobstrusive, not distracting.
It’s too bad tech seems so much to take away this kind of configurability in the name of “we know better”. There’s so much to be said for software that can last so long, as opposed to the constant treadmill of forced updates.
Fuck gnome eternally for destroying gtk and fuck Wayland.
Same here, still using fvwm2, and have tested fvwm3. I use it on large screens. fvwm is the main reason I dread wayland taking over. But at least the *BSDs will be on X for a while longer.
one of us, one of us ! there are literally hundreds out there !
i for one have migrated to fvwm3 (https://github.com/fvwmorg/fvwm3) almost everywhere i can. i don't think i am ever switching to anything else. reason: nothing better exists :o) not for the lack of trying mind you !
heck, even at work, where i log into a aws machine, i have it running with x-forwarding over an ssh session (using x2go) from within my mac. it looks something like this: https://ibb.co/DHYbM45J
unfortunately, i just realized, that on github, my config is not up to date, will update in a couple of days.
i would be remiss to not mention my huge thanks (fwiw) to mr. thomas-adam the current maintainer + project-lead of fvwm3. thank you !
2.6.9 is around 6yo now. I had been procrastinating for too long too, with my almost 30yo fvwm2rc, but finally migrated to x11/fvwm3 last month. Wasn’t too complicated in the end
This was a good one, but icewm was one better. FVWM2 went on to FVWM3, and FVWM95 was encouraged by power users and developers to stop being used in favor of FVWM3
Depends on if you like to make heavy use of virtual desktops. That's not really IceWMs department. FVWM is still king there. Otherwise, yes, (recent) IceWM is good. But so is (recent) Plasma/KDE, if you can spare the RAM.
I ran this at one time but it was a bit unstable. I remember corresponding with one of the authors who remarked that it was also attempting to emulate the stability of Windows 95. This was ... oh gawd ... back in 1997 or 1998 I think.
I have used a version of this called Qvwm, and even had branched it off at some point to fix some bugs... https://ahinea.com/en/tech/qvwm/
(I don't think github existed at the time or maybe I didn't know about it.)
I don't recall what was broken, but it was a few random things. I also added xrender image scaling on the window decorations, because they were hardcoded to a size that was tiny on modern DPI.
I'm using KDE since 3.x days, and still use the same setup, same controls and same workflows in KDE 6.x. It's just more modern and hardware accelerated.
KDE is a powerhouse. I probably replace 10-15 applications just by using what's built-in to that.
It's incredible how much charm there was in these interfaces, specifically in the bitmap fonts.
Were GUI applications more or less graphically diverse than now ?
The fact that almost anybody could make a Window Manager on X lead to a tremendous amount of experimentation and variety. Almost all of them were half baked and faded to obscurity, but it was a lot of fun to try them out. Also, if your bar is "better than TWM" then it's a pretty easy target to hit. These days the level of effort to even get to the baseline is way higher, one dude in a weekend can't try out some crazy idea.
fvwm95 was a fork of fvwm2 and has remained in that state, and never updated.
It was created at a time when the theming in fvwm was not as flexible, but it's completely possible to emulate all of fvwm95 in fvwm3, and behind the scenes, the application support in fvwm3 greatly outweighs the version of fvwm2 which fvwm95 wad forked from.
In other words, it remains a curio in fvwm's history, and that's where it should remain.
I remember this being installed on the unix workstations in the undergraduate engineering computer labs. The default option was CDE, but CDE was slow. You could pick fvwm2 or fvwm95. I liked fvwm2 better and theme it however you liked. I remember people running xsnow this time of year.
It was just the style at the time. There weren't a lot of HTML editors, even in 2001, and those that existed typically defaulted to an entirely blank page. People mostly wrote web pages in something like an emacs, vim, or notepad. Dreamweaver and Frontpage existed back then, but DW was only really popular with professionals, and nobody ever really used FP.
This style was a popular choice because it was easy to write, and could be displayed by just about any web browser. Compatibility and low resource usage was important back then.
It's pretty visually accurate, fonts notwithstanding. It even reproduces the slight gap between maximize and close that existed all the way back to the earliest Win95 builds with the "new" window style
I love lightweight desktops, like this one. I just wish we could have a lightweight browser. Seems like you spin up a chrome browser and all that saving goes out the window
In my last job we had some memory issues with the build, many times I ended up running out of memory, trying to build the huge Java monolith that was the stupid "product" we made. Automagically, the issues were resolved to a decent extent when switching from GNOME to XFCE, in Ubuntu 24.04.
There is still some use for lightweight even in today. You make better use of your memory/resources in some application, than in something so fundamental.
There are plenty of very light browsers you just have to give up on having a JS engine (which honestly can be a kind of nice way to surf, but probably not a good idea for work)
This and some of the other links on this topic are absolutely painful and a strain to read... DarkReader is borked and turning it off on the pages isn't much better.
This was a kludgey hack that never managed to land upstream, yet utterly dominated (for a brief moment) the headspace of the early linux desktop.
It's funny how quickly things were moving at the time. In the mid 90's, GUI design elements were still in their infancy. Even basic stuff like "what do windows do?" was in flux. Traditional X window managers hadn't settled on anything like a regular usage model: twm was still in regular use, fvwm mostly cloned its UI, Sun was still defaulting to OpenWindows which was pretty and clever but sort of an evolutionary dead end, and other commercial unixes were running Motif which was a lot like a monochrome Windows 3.1 that used too many pixels. Macs were still stuck in the only-one-foreground-app-is-enough model with System 7 and had nothing to offer.
Then Windows 95 landed like a bomb: there was a CLOSE button in the corner of the window finally! And there was a start menu and a little status bar! And that's what we all decided we wanted, really badly. So it got cloned and picked up pervasively. Basically everyone not already part of one of the X11 camps was running this.
But the window was small. KDE kicked off mere months later, Gnome followed quickly after that, and we all forgot about fvwm95. But we for sure all remember it.
It was actually NeXTSTEP that introduced the familiar "Windows 9x" 3D control appearance and close buttons on the top right. The first versions were released around '88.
And the Windows 1.0 UI [1] looks really similar to Mac OS (especially dialogs and buttons), so apparently Microsoft pilfered their UI design from Steve Jobs's companies not only once but twice.
The close button has always been there, you double clicked the top left menu button. That worked all the way until Microsoft started redoing window decorations in desktop mode with Windows 8.1, and even for a short period after.
This was also copied into other X window control styles. Even today, a Motif replicates the Windows 1.0-3.11 top-left menu+close button.
Only in win32 applications. When UWP and its successors arrived, the OS stopped providing that functionality. Some applications may still support it, but the automatic equivalence of double clicking the application icon to the close button was removed, because the application is mostly tasked with drawing these UI controls now.
Well, the standard window title bar still does. But with so many apps implementing their own borders, it's a bit of a crapshoot if it (or the window menu itself) will work with many apps. Even Microsoft apps sometimes forget, like Teams (of course...).
And that answer is precisely why (1) Windows 95 was such a revelation to the market and (2) nerds like us remain oblivious to that[1] even three decades on.
Yeah, yeah, I know CUA allows for a window close. No one knew. I worked IT at the time (as did lots of us here in our youth I'm sure) and was constantly teaching and re-teaching this trick to the poor people trapped with their CUA environments.
But suddenly with Windows 95 you could see how it worked.
[1] Even if we knew in our bones, c.f. this very discussion about the popularity of a cloned hack on Linux, that it was the Right Thing.
FVWM users with virtual desktops disagree. Windows 95 was a step back compared to the FVWM configurability. Deskbars? Why when you can have 3x3 desktops by default, and people even had a 16 (4x4) pane based environments?
You didn't switch between tasks, you switched between full opened desktops with Windows inside, one or two, the rest was somewhere else.
> Then Windows 95 landed like a bomb: there was a CLOSE button in the corner of the window finally! And there was a start menu and a little status bar! And that's what we all decided we wanted, really badly. So it got cloned and picked up pervasively. Basically everyone not already part of one of the X11 camps was running this.
Huh? Perhaps I'm misunderstanding, but Mac windows had close buttons even as far back as System 1.x in 1984. Multitasking didn't land until System 5 with the optional MultiFinder in 1987 (made standard in System 7), but window close buttons were absolutely not a Win95 innovation.
Mac UI as generally understood didn't involve moving windows around yet, not really[1]. "Window management" at the time was limited to the paradigm you'd see on the mac plus screen where you'd have one app window and some dialog boxes. Yes, you had a button to close it, but the paradigm didn't match the needs of the big workstation screens on which X11 evolved.
[1] These were the dark days of the mac. It was falling behind rapidly and the failure was accelerating. Jobs would walk back in the door within months of this moment too! Again, Windows 95 isn't felt to be notable in this community of true believers, but it was absolutely a bomb in the market as a whole. It changed everything, instantly.
On the Mac Plus and other Macs in a similar chassis, yes, there wasn't much room to move windows around, but it was still possible. Apple also released several larger Mac displays (around 16 by my count) prior to 1995, including two 21" models (in 1989 and 1991, respectively). Workstation-like window management absolutely happened on Macs in the late 80s and early 90s.
The thing that the earliest Macs lacked was multitasking (outside of desk accessories). It took until Hertzfeld created Switcher before you could run more than one full Mac app at a time, and even that required 512K RAM.
(I remain amazed at how people even today will argue like this trying to avoid talking nice about MS. You're misconstruing the point, seemingly deliberately.)
Sure, on $15k ($30k in 2025 dollars) Mac II's. See also the answer elsewhere about NeXTSTEP being a player in this space.
No one was doing it in the consumer space, no consumer knew about that stuff, Linux consumers on their 14" 800x600 monitors sure hadn't see it. And to repeat yet again, Microsoft Windows 95 landed like a bomb in this community and changed everything. And it happened very fast.
A Radius two page display was just not that expensive. Neither was a Mac II. By 1992, you could buy a Mac IIci for $2900 and a TPD for $900-1100. You couldn't buy it on your allowance but it was reasonably common.
Early GEM allowed arbitrary window sizing and positioning at least within the file manager, and Apple thus sued them, because they felt they had exclusive rights to ideas that they stole from Xerox
Also, the Amiga had the window management you refer to in its earliest versions, in 1984. Amigas cost a hell of a lot less than $15,000, even packed to the brim with expansions. I grew up with the Amiga, so your assertion that "No one was doing it in the consumer space, no consumer knew about that stuff, Linux consumers on their 14" 800x600 monitors sure hadn't see it." is anecdotally false.
I didn't flame at all in my comment. I just recounted the history, as it's known to have happened.
Windows 95 didn't bring that much to the table over Windows 3.1, in terms of basic window management. The taskbar is really about it.
GEM died when DRI lost their stalwart status, as well as when Apple sued them. Amiga died when Commodore refused to innovate in the hardware space, but the engineers always had top-notch innovative OS ideas.
> Mac UI as generally understood didn't involve moving windows around yet, not really[1]. "Window management" at the time was limited to the paradigm you'd see on the mac plus screen where you'd have one app window and some dialog boxes.
When Windows 95 was released, the top of the line was the PowerMac 81000 and the remaining Quadras, and 1024x768 was common. Overlapping windows and multitasking were not particularly unheard of… The Mac Plus had not been sold for half a decade. System 7 was released 5 years before, and 7.5 at about the same time. I mean, sure Windows 95 was successful, but let’s not rewrite history.
Amiga also had explicit close buttons very early, Mac-style (and also had full pre-emptive multitasking in its very earliest days, which happened in 1984). I've seen pre-release screenshots of revision 24.24 of Workbench that had them (for reference, v1.0 of WB was approximately revision 30, 24.24 was in the era of the Velvet prototype where the system couldn't fully bootstrap itself)
I have memories of being endlessly frustrated trying to use an iMac because "close" would just hide the window.
We've gone full circle, and now everything in windows likes to treat close as "minimize to system tray", but back in win9x era, the expectation was that close was "terminate the application".
With exception to single window utility programs, Mac windows have always truly closed with the resources taken by the represented document being freed and all that. The windows weren't hidden. It's just that closing the window ≠ quitting the application… the program can remain in memory even if it has no documents loaded.
This serves a couple of purposes: first, documents open more quickly (particularly when the program is loaded from a slow spinning HDD, floppy, etc) since the program doesn't need to be reloaded, and second, new document creation flows and non-document functions can be accessed without having a document open or requiring the developer to create a bespoke "home screen" UI that serves that purpose since the full menubar is accessible as long as the app is foregrounded.
It's just a different set of expectations. The original versions of the Mac OS should almost be thought of as a multiple-document interface. Consider the web browser you're reading this in. You wouldn't expect closing a single tab or window to quit the whole application, would you? That's really what was going on in early Mac system software. Go to infinite-mac and open Mac Paint on a System 1.0 machine. It becomes very obvious when you open the app, and all of the Finder windows and desktop icons disappear.
This is only confusing in comparison to Windows though. If you used graphical DOS applications, it was the exact same experience. You open the app, and can interact with your documents, but closing a document doesn't necessarily close the app.
Even Photoshop on Windows of the day worked the same way. When you opened Photoshop, a parent window would open that was the app. Closing documents left the app open, unless you also closed the parent window.
The comparison to modern browsers is odd and IMO plays into GP's point. You can't get a modern browser to be a single process so it is like your examples and bad for it.
I ran Motif from a terminal, and used command lines to bring up windows. Windows 95 felt like a toy in comparison, not to mention PC performance was pretty sad when compared to a high-end unix workstation. To each their own I guess.
It's not really fair to compare a bottom-of-the-barrel PC to a high-end unix workstation though. The high-end Windows boxes were running Windows NT 3.51, and later NT 4, and there just weren't many of them. NT 4 wasn't quite there yet, but it had a lot of what was good from the Windows 95 interface, but on a real, enterprise-grade OS.
It's almost a shame Microsoft clung to DOS compatibility for so long, that probably kept a lot of power users from seeing what Windows could do. But on the other hand, it's probably a good thing because it kept Unix popular and gave Linux and BSD room to grow.
I have fond memories of FVWM. I don't know where this was (Slashdot?), but back in the mid 2000's, someone posted a "Why are people not using FVWM? It's one of the most flexible window managers?", and linked to various people's FVWM setup. This led to a lot of folks (including me) switching to FVWM. I used it until switching to AwesomeWM around 2011.
You can see some (fairly old!) screenshots here: https://fvwm-themes.sourceforge.net/screenshots/
Glad to see it's still around.
Edit: Here's the thread (Gentoo Forums): https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=80517
The thread ran a total of 121 pages over 7 years.
I switched over to using it because (I think) it was much lighter on memory than the window manager I was using. I remember it being very responsive, and looking quite nice for the time.
I used it until I switched to GNOME2 at some point, and I also have fond memories. Just seeing the title of this post recalled the desktops I had had over the years.
My linux days started around 95/96, and I was always using low-resource environments due to necessity. Other than FVWM95 the other system I recall using for a long long time was IceWM which was something I switched to around 1999/2000.
I used it on an IBM Workpad Z50 (WinCE device, really quite cute) booted into NetBSD. It had a fairly slow MIPS processor and 16MB of RAM but with a 1GB IBM Microdrive (spinning rust in a CF card format) and a wifi card (Orinoco Gold, recovered from a scrap supermarket barcode scanner gun) it made an awesome portable setup.
I believe taviso still posts on here. Pretty sure we chatted on IRC at some point. Anyway, it was taviso who had the coolest configs and that's where I got all my inspiration from, using it.
You know what? I might just fire it up on something, I'm sure I've got a netbook around here somewhere.
There's a nice theme for XFCE, Chicago95, that looks a lot like this as well and is quite good!
https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95
I use this on my desktop. Started out as a curiosity but stayed once I realized it brought back more familiar icons such as the notepad and terminal icons. Clean start menu design too.
Wow, tried this in a VM and absolutely love it. Besides the nostalgia factor, there's just a concreteness and visibility to the UI elements that feels like it's been lacking in Linux desktop environments for a long time. Thinking about putting it on my home PC for a while. Might even throw caution to the wind and install it at work :-)
Oh man the teal text background brings back so many memories
I use this on my work machine, with Cortile for tiling.
Nice, Cortile is slick. Love that it's so modular.
That blue Microsoft Keyboard background... Oh man...
Does anyone remember MPX? It was a set of patches on top of X11 that let two people use one computer at the same time. Two mouse pointers for two mice, and two keyboards for input. It was super fun in a dorm environment (I was at Random hall at the time) to browse the Internet with friends. I wonder what it works take to revive it for Wayland.
It's part of XInput 2.0 and works as well as it ever did with upstream X.org. The more popular approach to multiseating these days involves logind, udev and two video cards (or drm-lease-manager). Then the two display servers are completely independent from each other, which may or may not be what you want.
It seems Wayland actually natively supports this via wl_seat, so multiple people can be at one computer! I can't wait to test this out!
fvwm is still one of the default graphical environments in Slackware (even in -current), and fvwm95 came packaged for some time, too. Now fvwm95 is no longer part of the basic Slackware distribution but there's a SlackBuild for it:
https://slackbuilds.org/repository/15.0/desktop/fvwm95/
I like the Win95 aesthetic, but I like a close relative, KDE1, better; and I have configured my Plasma 6 setup along these lines. Screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/Q9Gfs08
Back into FVWM, Slackware also has a SlackBuild for the next-gen fvwm3. FVWM configurability could be amazing, although it can be a challenge.
To me, the big aesthetic of early Qt/KDE1 is "Obvious Motif ripoff". Aside from the Win95/Warp style titlebars, if you don't have the big thick bevels and the distinct scroll bars, it's not quite right.
It really galls me that they removed the Motif style in Qt6, since I target that as my default look and feel. It gives a nice "This is expensive professional software with a codebase tracing back to the Reagan administration" vibe.
There are themes that come close in various attempts-- "Commonality" for Qt6/Kvantum, and some of the assets from NsCDE for GTK, but it feels like a pitched battle against design teams that desperately want to mimick whatever Apple is doing this week.
https://imgur.com/a/MWiFhkH
> To me, the big aesthetic of early Qt/KDE1 is "Obvious Motif ripoff". Aside from the Win95/Warp style titlebars, if you don't have the big thick bevels and the distinct scroll bars, it's not quite right.
This is a KDE1 screenshot: https://diit.cz/sites/default/files/kde1-snapshot01.png
Is this really a Motif ripoff? For me it's much more like Win95 with a better titlebar in the window decoration. To each their own, but it seems quite right to me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_Desktop_Environment_1#/media... Evidently they offered both the Win9x and Motif-like themes back then too, I guess I never bothered with it.
I can recall trying Beta 4 and probably 1.0, but at the time it felt like a weird situation. It wasn't quite everything you needed, and a lot of the apps were still obviously sort of immature. The HTML-driven file manager was interesting (ISTR OS/2 offered a similar way to customize things on a per-directory level) but it seemed like a lot of resources when a 486/80 with an obscene 32Mb of memory was my Linux machine.
Of course you thought that was a Motif ripoff. The screenshot you reference is from an alpha pre-release version. KDE1 had neither the widget style nor the window decorations of that screenshot.
To each his own. I had a phase of emulating the classic W2K look, but like W95/98/ME all of this it feels too dark, dirty greyish for me now. Still in times of late KDE3 I then switched to https://store.kde.org/p/1100735/ but with different more colorful (soft pastel) icons which I can't remember the name of anymore, later then to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluecurve , but not like the ugly default depicted there. It could be customized to a mix of that Reinhardt style and Microsofts 'dot.net' style, still using the forgotten soft pastel icons. Which would then be applied to apps for other toolkits as well. Very consistent. I like consistency.
Meanwhile, Plasmas Breeze (light) does all of that for me, again. One could maybe depart from the breeze window decorations, and exchange them for 'Klassy', they can 'fit', there is much to change, chose from. I'm trying them out at the moment. The thing with Breeze is, many other apps have presets for that also, like LibreOffice, which leads to even more visual consistency :-)
My desktop is blank, a mix between soft pastel yellow and 'manila' paper. No icons, widgets, clocks, weather. I don't care about CPU or Network speed there. I wouldn't see them anyway, since I tend to have windows maximized. If something would be wrong Kget or Ktorrent would make themselves known, which they won't ;-> CPU speeds suffice, even if mostly clocked down to 800Mhz :-)
My 'taskbar' is at the top, only 24px high. I switch between 3 by 3 virtual desktops by either using that too small (for that arrangement, it should grow a little when hovering the pointer over it) widget in the taskbar, or by jamming the mousepointer into one of the four corners, which makes that 'expose'-like thing appear.
I concur in your liking of Breeze. It's an amazing teme, really. My only objection is that the default light color scheme is too light. Fortunately there are good color schemes such as Steel or StormClouds that solve that problem, a light theme that isn't too "white".
StormClouds: https://store.kde.org/p/1001459
Steel (no longer shipped by default, but still available at the KDE Store): https://store.kde.org/p/1311274
As for the monitors, I have them because sometimes I have issues with CPU speed (due to a hardware quirk of my laptop) and the network connection is kinda iffy at the time.
I tried both of them out. They are not for me, ATM. Maybe the too light for you results from different hardware. I have screens where I can adjust brightness and contrast separately, running at a color temperature of 5000K (warm).
That's different from what most laptops do, or fiddling with xgamma, or one of its frontends, using 'redshift', etc.
Even at brightest sunshine I don't go over 55% brightness, otherwise during the day, between 38% to 44%, at night just 20%, with contrast always two below these settings, or any I may use in between.
Despite all this, pictures look just right, even if I visit sites for calibration.
Noia icons maybe. On KDE3, I liked the Slick icon theme, it looked futuristic but grounded.
Nope. Primary. https://store.kde.org/p/1002483
I see system76 is doing something similar for their PopOS?
https://store.kde.org/p/1327259 / https://github.com/pop-os/icon-theme
It uses a semi-flat design with raised 3D motifs to help give depth to icons.
I remember Noia, they were too 'shiny/glassy' and 'playful' for me. Looked different and funny for a while, but unusable for daily driving. I prefer something more 'serious', unobstrusive, not distracting.
I see someone did a Noia KDE Reloaded in 2019: https://store.kde.org/p/1293856
For shiny things, these did work for me, for a while, or could, if I retried them again:
Faenza https://store.kde.org/p/1012545 ,
Faience https://store.kde.org/p/1012543 ,
Meliae https://store.kde.org/p/1012498 ,
Delft https://store.kde.org/p/1199881 , https://www.opendesktop.org/p/1169579 ,
but I'd rather go to something like Flat Remix instead.
https://store.kde.org/p/1012430 , https://drasite.com/flat-remix ,https://github.com/daniruiz/Flat-Remix
Hedera would look good, too, if not abandoned: https://store.kde.org/p/1207800 / https://gitlab.com/sixsixfive/Hedera-icons
If they were as comprehensive & complete as Breeze I'd go for Retrofukation https://store.kde.org/p/1012499 or IndigoMagic https://store.kde.org/p/1015788 instead.
But they aren't. So Breeze it is, which is bliss...
I'd love the Tango2 icon theme being updated. It was like the old Tango one but slightly more current.
Beautiful. I miss the late 90s aesthetic of these window managers. KDE 2 was particularly nice. Motif was ugly, but I look at it fondly now.
This looks a little too Windows 95, but the dock is a nice reminder that it’s X Windows.
I still use it (shout out taviso iykyk).
https://github.com/zy/zy-fvwm/blob/master/fvwmrc/taviso.fvwm...
Someone made a full cde style desktop with fvwm: https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE
It’s too bad tech seems so much to take away this kind of configurability in the name of “we know better”. There’s so much to be said for software that can last so long, as opposed to the constant treadmill of forced updates.
Fuck gnome eternally for destroying gtk and fuck Wayland.
I'm still using fvwm2
Very happy with it :-)Same here, still using fvwm2, and have tested fvwm3. I use it on large screens. fvwm is the main reason I dread wayland taking over. But at least the *BSDs will be on X for a while longer.
one of us, one of us ! there are literally hundreds out there !
i for one have migrated to fvwm3 (https://github.com/fvwmorg/fvwm3) almost everywhere i can. i don't think i am ever switching to anything else. reason: nothing better exists :o) not for the lack of trying mind you !
heck, even at work, where i log into a aws machine, i have it running with x-forwarding over an ssh session (using x2go) from within my mac. it looks something like this: https://ibb.co/DHYbM45J
unfortunately, i just realized, that on github, my config is not up to date, will update in a couple of days.
i would be remiss to not mention my huge thanks (fwiw) to mr. thomas-adam the current maintainer + project-lead of fvwm3. thank you !
ps-01: for folks getting into it, this: https://www.zensites.net/fvwm/guide/index.html is not-too-shabby a launch point.
ps-02: deep wiki has fvwm3 indexed here: https://deepwiki.com/fvwmorg/fvwm3
2.6.9 is around 6yo now. I had been procrastinating for too long too, with my almost 30yo fvwm2rc, but finally migrated to x11/fvwm3 last month. Wasn’t too complicated in the end
The original fvwm was my first window manager in Linux back in 1995, I was not a fan of the evolution into fvwm-95, though.
By then I was already into other window managers.
IIRC fvwm95 was not meant as a next-gen fvwm, but as a customization of the existing fvwm desktop.
Nevertheless, I never got the point to use another platform to look just like Windows 95, Mac, Amiga or whatever.
While you may get the Look, you will never get the Feel.
I liked window maker and enlightenment, both of a which appeared a bit later.
I only used Enlightenment for a while, now AfterStep/Windowmaker were my favourite window managers.
This was a good one, but icewm was one better. FVWM2 went on to FVWM3, and FVWM95 was encouraged by power users and developers to stop being used in favor of FVWM3
https://ice-wm.org/
Depends on if you like to make heavy use of virtual desktops. That's not really IceWMs department. FVWM is still king there. Otherwise, yes, (recent) IceWM is good. But so is (recent) Plasma/KDE, if you can spare the RAM.
"Page last updated: Nov 26, 2001."
That page even looks a tad dated for 2001!
Well it doesn't disclose when it was first updated.
I ran this at one time but it was a bit unstable. I remember corresponding with one of the authors who remarked that it was also attempting to emulate the stability of Windows 95. This was ... oh gawd ... back in 1997 or 1998 I think.
I have used a version of this called Qvwm, and even had branched it off at some point to fix some bugs... https://ahinea.com/en/tech/qvwm/ (I don't think github existed at the time or maybe I didn't know about it.)
P.S. Oh, there is the official Qvwm page: https://sourceforge.net/projects/qvwm/files/qvwm/
About 5 years ago I got qvwm working on a modern system and put it on github: https://github.com/asveikau/qvwm
I don't recall what was broken, but it was a few random things. I also added xrender image scaling on the window decorations, because they were hardcoded to a size that was tiny on modern DPI.
I'm on JWM since Ubuntu switched away from gnome 2x in 2012 (13 years) and my desktop is unchanged every since.
I don't update OS to relearn basic controls every 2 years, I update OS to get latest versions of apps.
I'm using KDE since 3.x days, and still use the same setup, same controls and same workflows in KDE 6.x. It's just more modern and hardware accelerated.
KDE is a powerhouse. I probably replace 10-15 applications just by using what's built-in to that.
“ The main distribution site has moved from mitac11.uia.ac.be to sourceforge.”
The last time I revisited one of these old X projects, I wound up wasting time with libraries that have been deprecated for a decade or more.
xmkmf. I feel your pain.
Related: https://xclass.sourceforge.net/index.html
A C++ GUI toolkit with the Windows 95 look and feel.
Xaw95 https://sourceforge.net/projects/sf-xpaint/files/sf-xpaint/x... You don't need to install it globally, an LD_PRELOAD env var pointing to ./libXaw95.so.8.0 will do the trick.
Usage:
Test:For anyone following this thread, that link goes to a download itself rather than a page where you choose whether or not to download.
Insane homepage pull vro
It's incredible how much charm there was in these interfaces, specifically in the bitmap fonts. Were GUI applications more or less graphically diverse than now ?
The fact that almost anybody could make a Window Manager on X lead to a tremendous amount of experimentation and variety. Almost all of them were half baked and faded to obscurity, but it was a lot of fun to try them out. Also, if your bar is "better than TWM" then it's a pretty easy target to hit. These days the level of effort to even get to the baseline is way higher, one dude in a weekend can't try out some crazy idea.
A big list, in Spanish: http://galeriawm.hol.es
You don't need to know Spanish, the screenshots speak from thelselves.
Bit of a mix, but less diverse depending on the platform. Apples Skeuomorphic Era, was likely the height of "anything goes" in the mainstream.
fvwm95 was a fork of fvwm2 and has remained in that state, and never updated.
It was created at a time when the theming in fvwm was not as flexible, but it's completely possible to emulate all of fvwm95 in fvwm3, and behind the scenes, the application support in fvwm3 greatly outweighs the version of fvwm2 which fvwm95 wad forked from.
In other words, it remains a curio in fvwm's history, and that's where it should remain.
I remember this being installed on the unix workstations in the undergraduate engineering computer labs. The default option was CDE, but CDE was slow. You could pick fvwm2 or fvwm95. I liked fvwm2 better and theme it however you liked. I remember people running xsnow this time of year.
That type of webpage style was quite common in the late 90s. Compare it to
https://www.circlemud.org/
I think the html editors of the time defaulted to some of style we now find quaint/quirky.
It was just the style at the time. There weren't a lot of HTML editors, even in 2001, and those that existed typically defaulted to an entirely blank page. People mostly wrote web pages in something like an emacs, vim, or notepad. Dreamweaver and Frontpage existed back then, but DW was only really popular with professionals, and nobody ever really used FP.
This style was a popular choice because it was easy to write, and could be displayed by just about any web browser. Compatibility and low resource usage was important back then.
Dreamweaver was extremely popular with amateurs too - they just didn't pay for it
lol maybe it just wasn't popular in my neck of the woods. I never knew anyone who even bothered with it. Now Flash, on the other hand...
Anything more complicated than this was just too difficult with the early HTML standards (there was no CSS).
It's pretty visually accurate, fonts notwithstanding. It even reproduces the slight gap between maximize and close that existed all the way back to the earliest Win95 builds with the "new" window style
I love lightweight desktops, like this one. I just wish we could have a lightweight browser. Seems like you spin up a chrome browser and all that saving goes out the window
In my last job we had some memory issues with the build, many times I ended up running out of memory, trying to build the huge Java monolith that was the stupid "product" we made. Automagically, the issues were resolved to a decent extent when switching from GNOME to XFCE, in Ubuntu 24.04.
There is still some use for lightweight even in today. You make better use of your memory/resources in some application, than in something so fundamental.
There are plenty of very light browsers you just have to give up on having a JS engine (which honestly can be a kind of nice way to surf, but probably not a good idea for work)
This and some of the other links on this topic are absolutely painful and a strain to read... DarkReader is borked and turning it off on the pages isn't much better.
I really really miss the internet of the 90s/early 00s. So much wonder that is missing today.
This was the default window manager on Red Hat Linux (not RHEL) 5.0, if I recall correctly.
This was a kludgey hack that never managed to land upstream, yet utterly dominated (for a brief moment) the headspace of the early linux desktop.
It's funny how quickly things were moving at the time. In the mid 90's, GUI design elements were still in their infancy. Even basic stuff like "what do windows do?" was in flux. Traditional X window managers hadn't settled on anything like a regular usage model: twm was still in regular use, fvwm mostly cloned its UI, Sun was still defaulting to OpenWindows which was pretty and clever but sort of an evolutionary dead end, and other commercial unixes were running Motif which was a lot like a monochrome Windows 3.1 that used too many pixels. Macs were still stuck in the only-one-foreground-app-is-enough model with System 7 and had nothing to offer.
Then Windows 95 landed like a bomb: there was a CLOSE button in the corner of the window finally! And there was a start menu and a little status bar! And that's what we all decided we wanted, really badly. So it got cloned and picked up pervasively. Basically everyone not already part of one of the X11 camps was running this.
But the window was small. KDE kicked off mere months later, Gnome followed quickly after that, and we all forgot about fvwm95. But we for sure all remember it.
It was actually NeXTSTEP that introduced the familiar "Windows 9x" 3D control appearance and close buttons on the top right. The first versions were released around '88.
And the Windows 1.0 UI [1] looks really similar to Mac OS (especially dialogs and buttons), so apparently Microsoft pilfered their UI design from Steve Jobs's companies not only once but twice.
[1] https://www.pcjs.org/software/pcx86/sys/windows/1.00/
I love that interface. If I ever get a lodpi monitor again I'm going straight back to Windowmaker.
The close button has always been there, you double clicked the top left menu button. That worked all the way until Microsoft started redoing window decorations in desktop mode with Windows 8.1, and even for a short period after.
This was also copied into other X window control styles. Even today, a Motif replicates the Windows 1.0-3.11 top-left menu+close button.
It actually still works to this day. Doubleclick the top left menu button (the one with the app icon) and your window closes.
Only in win32 applications. When UWP and its successors arrived, the OS stopped providing that functionality. Some applications may still support it, but the automatic equivalence of double clicking the application icon to the close button was removed, because the application is mostly tasked with drawing these UI controls now.
Well, the standard window title bar still does. But with so many apps implementing their own borders, it's a bit of a crapshoot if it (or the window menu itself) will work with many apps. Even Microsoft apps sometimes forget, like Teams (of course...).
This doesn't work on some newer apps, like W11 Calculator.
And that answer is precisely why (1) Windows 95 was such a revelation to the market and (2) nerds like us remain oblivious to that[1] even three decades on.
Yeah, yeah, I know CUA allows for a window close. No one knew. I worked IT at the time (as did lots of us here in our youth I'm sure) and was constantly teaching and re-teaching this trick to the poor people trapped with their CUA environments.
But suddenly with Windows 95 you could see how it worked.
[1] Even if we knew in our bones, c.f. this very discussion about the popularity of a cloned hack on Linux, that it was the Right Thing.
FVWM users with virtual desktops disagree. Windows 95 was a step back compared to the FVWM configurability. Deskbars? Why when you can have 3x3 desktops by default, and people even had a 16 (4x4) pane based environments?
You didn't switch between tasks, you switched between full opened desktops with Windows inside, one or two, the rest was somewhere else.
Yet we are back to hamburger menus.
> Then Windows 95 landed like a bomb: there was a CLOSE button in the corner of the window finally! And there was a start menu and a little status bar! And that's what we all decided we wanted, really badly. So it got cloned and picked up pervasively. Basically everyone not already part of one of the X11 camps was running this.
Huh? Perhaps I'm misunderstanding, but Mac windows had close buttons even as far back as System 1.x in 1984. Multitasking didn't land until System 5 with the optional MultiFinder in 1987 (made standard in System 7), but window close buttons were absolutely not a Win95 innovation.
Mac UI as generally understood didn't involve moving windows around yet, not really[1]. "Window management" at the time was limited to the paradigm you'd see on the mac plus screen where you'd have one app window and some dialog boxes. Yes, you had a button to close it, but the paradigm didn't match the needs of the big workstation screens on which X11 evolved.
[1] These were the dark days of the mac. It was falling behind rapidly and the failure was accelerating. Jobs would walk back in the door within months of this moment too! Again, Windows 95 isn't felt to be notable in this community of true believers, but it was absolutely a bomb in the market as a whole. It changed everything, instantly.
On the Mac Plus and other Macs in a similar chassis, yes, there wasn't much room to move windows around, but it was still possible. Apple also released several larger Mac displays (around 16 by my count) prior to 1995, including two 21" models (in 1989 and 1991, respectively). Workstation-like window management absolutely happened on Macs in the late 80s and early 90s.
The thing that the earliest Macs lacked was multitasking (outside of desk accessories). It took until Hertzfeld created Switcher before you could run more than one full Mac app at a time, and even that required 512K RAM.
(I remain amazed at how people even today will argue like this trying to avoid talking nice about MS. You're misconstruing the point, seemingly deliberately.)
Sure, on $15k ($30k in 2025 dollars) Mac II's. See also the answer elsewhere about NeXTSTEP being a player in this space.
No one was doing it in the consumer space, no consumer knew about that stuff, Linux consumers on their 14" 800x600 monitors sure hadn't see it. And to repeat yet again, Microsoft Windows 95 landed like a bomb in this community and changed everything. And it happened very fast.
A Radius two page display was just not that expensive. Neither was a Mac II. By 1992, you could buy a Mac IIci for $2900 and a TPD for $900-1100. You couldn't buy it on your allowance but it was reasonably common.
The finder was always a multi-window interface.
I just don't know where your memory is from.
Early GEM allowed arbitrary window sizing and positioning at least within the file manager, and Apple thus sued them, because they felt they had exclusive rights to ideas that they stole from Xerox
Also, the Amiga had the window management you refer to in its earliest versions, in 1984. Amigas cost a hell of a lot less than $15,000, even packed to the brim with expansions. I grew up with the Amiga, so your assertion that "No one was doing it in the consumer space, no consumer knew about that stuff, Linux consumers on their 14" 800x600 monitors sure hadn't see it." is anecdotally false.
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I didn't flame at all in my comment. I just recounted the history, as it's known to have happened.
Windows 95 didn't bring that much to the table over Windows 3.1, in terms of basic window management. The taskbar is really about it.
GEM died when DRI lost their stalwart status, as well as when Apple sued them. Amiga died when Commodore refused to innovate in the hardware space, but the engineers always had top-notch innovative OS ideas.
Nope, Linux users in mid 90's where about FVWM until they got IceWM; but tons of people didn't care about Windows 95 like setups at all.
> Mac UI as generally understood didn't involve moving windows around yet, not really[1]. "Window management" at the time was limited to the paradigm you'd see on the mac plus screen where you'd have one app window and some dialog boxes.
When Windows 95 was released, the top of the line was the PowerMac 81000 and the remaining Quadras, and 1024x768 was common. Overlapping windows and multitasking were not particularly unheard of… The Mac Plus had not been sold for half a decade. System 7 was released 5 years before, and 7.5 at about the same time. I mean, sure Windows 95 was successful, but let’s not rewrite history.
Amiga also had explicit close buttons very early, Mac-style (and also had full pre-emptive multitasking in its very earliest days, which happened in 1984). I've seen pre-release screenshots of revision 24.24 of Workbench that had them (for reference, v1.0 of WB was approximately revision 30, 24.24 was in the era of the Velvet prototype where the system couldn't fully bootstrap itself)
Did the mac close actually close?
I have memories of being endlessly frustrated trying to use an iMac because "close" would just hide the window.
We've gone full circle, and now everything in windows likes to treat close as "minimize to system tray", but back in win9x era, the expectation was that close was "terminate the application".
With exception to single window utility programs, Mac windows have always truly closed with the resources taken by the represented document being freed and all that. The windows weren't hidden. It's just that closing the window ≠ quitting the application… the program can remain in memory even if it has no documents loaded.
This serves a couple of purposes: first, documents open more quickly (particularly when the program is loaded from a slow spinning HDD, floppy, etc) since the program doesn't need to be reloaded, and second, new document creation flows and non-document functions can be accessed without having a document open or requiring the developer to create a bespoke "home screen" UI that serves that purpose since the full menubar is accessible as long as the app is foregrounded.
"closing the window ≠ quitting the application"
See this is what I mean, that's completely alien to a MS Windows user in the mid-nineties.
It's just a different set of expectations. The original versions of the Mac OS should almost be thought of as a multiple-document interface. Consider the web browser you're reading this in. You wouldn't expect closing a single tab or window to quit the whole application, would you? That's really what was going on in early Mac system software. Go to infinite-mac and open Mac Paint on a System 1.0 machine. It becomes very obvious when you open the app, and all of the Finder windows and desktop icons disappear.
This is only confusing in comparison to Windows though. If you used graphical DOS applications, it was the exact same experience. You open the app, and can interact with your documents, but closing a document doesn't necessarily close the app.
Even Photoshop on Windows of the day worked the same way. When you opened Photoshop, a parent window would open that was the app. Closing documents left the app open, unless you also closed the parent window.
The comparison to modern browsers is odd and IMO plays into GP's point. You can't get a modern browser to be a single process so it is like your examples and bad for it.
I ran Motif from a terminal, and used command lines to bring up windows. Windows 95 felt like a toy in comparison, not to mention PC performance was pretty sad when compared to a high-end unix workstation. To each their own I guess.
It's not really fair to compare a bottom-of-the-barrel PC to a high-end unix workstation though. The high-end Windows boxes were running Windows NT 3.51, and later NT 4, and there just weren't many of them. NT 4 wasn't quite there yet, but it had a lot of what was good from the Windows 95 interface, but on a real, enterprise-grade OS.
It's almost a shame Microsoft clung to DOS compatibility for so long, that probably kept a lot of power users from seeing what Windows could do. But on the other hand, it's probably a good thing because it kept Unix popular and gave Linux and BSD room to grow.
NeXTStep and MacOS already had a CLOSE button. Stop trying to spread bullshit.
I've realized I am more fond of WinXP rather than Win95.