Funny this should be posted. I was just considering this for a Boot CD project a few months ago.

Very cool! Love the crystal icon set. I remember when that was first released, it was mind blowing.

Wow! This looks like XP/Win2k. Gotta put this on the parents computer, they'll be happy they got their old Windows back. (They don't really like Xfce)

The Q4OS distro has an addon called XPQ4 which has some old Windows themes https://xpq4.sourceforge.io/

I like these kind of themes in theory, but they're always a bit janky. Not that they have to be pixel perfect, but they're always broken enough that they're not a pleasure to use.

Maybe they like LXQt more.

XFCE can be themed to be almost identical to XP.

theres a windows 9x total conversion out there iirc

I don't think it's complete but I have that mostly set up with LXQT on NixOS on my Framework desktop. I love it

Chicago95 theme for XFCE is great

Looks more legit than Redmond97.

If we go retro then I would go for a MacOS 9 look. Like what this user achieved: https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/tsric2/xfce_color...

Beautiful results there!

Takes some tuning but Chicago95 can become a very convincing clone of early Windows GUI. Back when they did user research and every element had methology and reason behind it.

Any chance of an rPi image?

i imagine it’s trivial to install on raspian?

https://edeproject.org/wiki/binarypackages Don't see anything for ARM, but might be as simple as getting the source package and (de)building debs for it.

I tried to search their wiki for wayland, but got zero hits so I guess this is for X11 only?

Edit: nevermind, I see this is relatively "ancient" software. Last release over 10 years ago :)

Will take it for a spin on an old computer though

they posted literally just the wiki article for MUDs earlier, slow news day

> EDE (Equinox Desktop Environment) is a simple and fast desktop environment for *nix-like systems. It uses the FLTK GUI toolkit and offers a familiar look and feel. EDE is designed according to the UNIX philosophy, which means it offers seperate executables for each component to “do one job and do it good”. This makes EDE very modular and also easy to alter for any user's special needs and requirements.

TIHI, but I can definitely see places where this would be useful. Based on the name, I thought it was just Enlightenment/E rebrand or something.

I like the look of this. It looks like mate, which I presently use. I wonder what the difference is

Well, FLTK instead of GTK is a big one. Also, EDE more closely mimics the Win98 Explorer rather than GNOME. EDE is also lighter weight.

But it's the same desktop, menus, windows, icons thing with nothing fancy tacked on pretty much. Right?

Not quite. The crystal icon set is not, to my knowledge, the default in any GNOME version though it was in some KDE3 releases. The menus and window design of EDE are very Win98, while those of GNOME are slightly different depending upon the Metacity theme in use. EDE has a few other tweaks and add-ons, but it lacks the MATE/GNOME2 plugin ecosystem.

Have we arrived at where everybody knows what a desktop environment should look like?

I mean, an end to experiments and variants and improvements. We all know how it should be and anything else is wrong.

I would like that.

Different people want different things because they use computers in different ways. That's ok.

I personally am very happy with my sway setup - it works fantastically for me but most people would honestly hate it. That's ifne - I wouldn't force anyone else to use it.

And yet for 99% of the cases we have a certain way we like them to be. And I'm in that 99%. And we know exactly what I'm talking about. So for all intents and purposes, fuck the edge cases. Let's focus on the archetype.

Not 100% sure what point you’re making. Mainstream desktop O/Ss strive to service this 99%, so you have an abundance of choice. Windows, MacOS, KDE, Ubuntu are all there to cater to you.

It depends... I've found things I like and dislike with every DE I've ever touched... from early windows, to OS/2, Mac old and new, Amiga, BeOS, and even some bits from more modern Windows. On my personal desktop, I've been running Cosmic, as it's close to what I want. I had run Budgie desktop previously and had it tweaked very specific to my liking, but it was a hodge-podge and I just wanted an out of the box experience easier to deal with.

I think there is/was a lot to like with the Win9x interface that I feel advanced a lot through to Windows 7 even. I think the current taskbar in windows is relatively nice too, but the start menu itself has taken a few steps back. I'd like to see Cosmic get a bit closer to the taskbar, but keeping it's application menus and settings, which get better with each iteration imo. There's still something alien about the spacing on the dock's corners though.

No?

Be forced to use Gnome because some royal 'We' decided that's what a DM should be? No farking way. Force someone else to use KDE because I think Gnome is kinda awful? No. Give up on low-resource desktop environments because Gnome or what ever is The One True DE? Sorry...no.

I would not like that.

Oh nice. I occasionally mention EDE in desktop roundups on El Reg. Glad it is not forgotten.

It's based on FLTK, and although the effort to create FLTK 2.0 faltered and died a few years ago, last year there was a new point release, FLTK 1.4, the first in 13 years.

I wrote about it almost exactly a year ago:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/11/26/fltk_14_released/

(In researching that I discovered that apparently it's not pronounced "eff ell tee kay" but "full tick".)

Since then it's got up to 1.4.4, and they're working on FLTK 1.5. And yes it supports Wayland now.

So maybe it's time for a new release of EDE to go with it. :-)

https://www.fltk.org/

If anyone wants some screenshots: https://edeproject.org/page/screenshots

EDE is a standalone WM/DE with a Windows 9x look

XPde was a similar project, but with a Windows XP look. Their site seems dead, though I'm sure the software could be found out there somewhere https://web.archive.org/web/20070825005617/http://www.xpde.c...

How does it compare to using icewm or fvwm95?

Oh I remember EDE being briefly reviewed some 20 years ago in local Linux magazine and if I'm not mistaken being a part of Mandrake packages selection

There's Dillo and Florb (Open Street Maps client). Now we just need a simple MPV UI and some kind of FLMail client. On office suites, someone should modernize Siag Office with XFT and Unicode support.

If anyone says "that's outdated crap", Siag supports RTF, and the spreadsheet module could just use plugins written in Scheme with incredible features related to number crunching. Printing? PostScript and PDF, problem solved.