Yeah, it was really nice. I ran one of those Redhat versions (8.1?) for a while and Gnome just felt great.

I never used Gnome (any version) all that much, but I have similar feelings about Windows 2000.

Recently I used Windows 10 a bit because I had to test some things, and it's just so ... chaotic. Buttons everywhere, the "flat" UI just makes it hard to see what's what (including what's a button), and "clippy" is basically built-in now given how often the thing whines and nags notifications at you.

The Windows 2000 UI wasn't perfect, but it clear, simple, and mostly "just worked".

I can agree. Windows 2000 had 15,000+ minor-major issues pre-release. But Microsoft really did churn to get that right quickly before release & over service packs, minor updates etc. Especially with the flak Windows ME got & antitrust lawsuit of late 2000-mid 2001, they were really serious about the existential crisis of their cash cow. Windows was the major money pull before Office & further, cloud services took over.

Incidentally, 2000 & ME had a lot of design elements common to them. There was a cleaner zen startup of the famous 4-color artsy shaded logo, an improved taskbar, various desktop shading, inbuilt media slideshow & full screen view option, folder & icon themes, which didn't look pixelated. Windows media player 7 was odd shaped but funky & having some visualization out of the box. There was winamp & Sonic media players too. All running in usually 32MB RAM & 20 GB hard drive. Screensavers & desktop themes could be installed (thanks Chip/Digit magazine!) & they were actually fun.

The teenage me installed a Virtua Girl desktop application out of curiosity & imagine the horrors when it starts stripping on your desktop, "standing" or "sitting" on the taskbar. Good grief! Those were days of having a single PC for the whole family.

Good ol' times.

The situation was also comparable with KDE, I think KDE 3 was for me peak Desktop. It seems afterwards the race to be like Windows started. Although the common Linux Desktop environments were far more advanced than Windows especially in terms of flexibility - just the application variety was lacking behind.

The design aesthetics of early Gnome, KDE was influenced a lot by classic Macintosh, BeOS and the likes. And classic UI was genuinely great. It never came in the way - agreed that you had to live with the defaults most times - but the defaults were mostly good.

The race to customizability & the notion that GUI correspondence could win some Win9x fence sitters over, really did it big time for future Gnome & KDE.

KDE 1.x in particular took a lot of influence from CDE. See the design of the taskbar, virtual desktop switcher, window decorations, scrollbars etc in these screenshots: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_Desktop_Environment_1

This is the reason behind all the s/C/K naming substitutions within the KDE ecosystem!

I wasn't a big GNOME fan even back then, but I agree, the Bluecurve theme was lovely, and it looked great on both GNOME and KDE. KDE has never looked so good, before or since.

It honestly escapes me, given the vast variety of themes out there, that since the RHL era, no other distro has ever coordinated its themes across all desktops that way. It's a great way to bring a coordinated look across a distro.

Ubuntu's old Ambiance and Radiance themes have been a strong part of its brand for a decade or more. Why doesn't Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Lubuntu etc. modify and adopt the standard Ubuntu house style?

Fedora's GNOME themes are also great looking, even speaking as someone who doesn't like the desktop itself. Jakub Steiner is a design genius: https://jimmac.eu/

The other Fedora respins should adopt the look, and present a unified brand.

Same for openSUSE, Debian and any other distro with multiple desktops.

On the GTK/QT3 icons, Tango/Tango2 have a similar design.

Theme: https://github.com/Rakksor/Blueshell

As for the font, just use the one named Go.