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I can't speak about the grayness, but the lack of snappiness I think is thanks to the bloat and complexity of modern UIs. KDE in particular is a beast with a ton legacy code built up over the time, and a lot of bits and pieces put together by people from around the world, which results in a lack of cohesiveness... but that goes for most Linux DEs.

XFCE comes a bit closer to the old UX and cohesiveness, but is still a bit off. In saying that, Chicago95[1] for XFCE does a really great job of bringing that classic Win9X look to XFCE, so it's worth giving a shot. There's also a fork of it called MENT2K[2], which recreates the Win2K experience, also worth checking out.

The DEs I've seen being closest to recreating that classic experience have unfortunately been outside of Linux: ReactOS being the most obvious choice, and the other one being SerenityOS. Although not viable for daily driving yet, still fun to play around with in a VM.

[1] https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95/

[2] https://github.com/User738git/MENT2K

by xg1526 days ago|

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Thanks a lot for the writeup and all the pointers. Yeah, I think incoherence might play a role here.

Will definitely check out those themes and have a look at ReactOS (what I wanted to anyway but was procrastinating)

by ndiddy26 days ago|

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> KDE or XFCE seem to mimic the Windows 2000 design in many ways, but they are still far away from feeling as snappy or as well-thought out than Windows 2000 did. They also paradoxically feel more "gray" than I remember Windows, even though the "grayness" of Windows from that era is sort of famous.

I haven't used XFCE, but you can attribute the lack of snappiness in KDE compared to early Windows to compositing and having more animations. There's not much you can do about compositing, it's kind of necessary on high resolution computers, but Wayland latency has been getting better and if you use a recent distro like Fedora it feels about the same as Windows 7 with compositing enabled. For animations, you can speed them up or disable them entirely using the "global animation speed" slider in the settings. For the grayness, you can re-enable colored window titlebars in the settings by going to "Colors & themes" -> "Colors" and then selecting "Breeze Classic". I don't know why they have them disabled by default.