TDE’s CDE window decoration style pretty much matches the screenshot. There’s also a matching widget style (Motif). I’d guess that the icon set exists Somewhere Out There On The Internet. So you can get this look if you want it badly enough to install a non-default DE that’s currently limited to X11.
Ooh damn. Mandrake was my first distro, I remember being sooo excited when the CDs came in the mail. It was I think 4 discs?
The experience was absolutely not good lol. At the time I only had one computer (some eMachines something or other) and a 56k line that only went to 14400 or 2600 baud depending on the weather. My NIC wasn’t supported and after some banging my head on the desk I ended up going back to windows 98se after a few days because it was the family computer I messed up and caught sooo much flak for wiping.
Returned some years later when it was called Mandriva and had a better experience with a custom built AMD machine. The eMachines machine by then was still around as a network file server running a flavour of BSD that served media to my OG xbox played through XBMC (now Kodi).
Great post OP and thanks for the trip down memory lane!
I think that’s the old locolor icon theme. The version I have around is modified for TDE, but the original should exist somewhere out there (if OpenSUSE is still offering KDE3, then they probably have it).
Jesus, UI design was terrible back then. I’m not talking about technical limitations, I don’t need fancy transparency effects or something like that, but I’m sure that you could come up with something much better using the old UI libraries as long as you follow modern design principles.
It’s probably just familiarity bias, but I really like the classic 3D design elements of the '90s desktops. I was a big fan of the Windows classic shell, NeXTSTEP and Openbox UIs. And even though I think both GNOME and KDE look fantastic today, I would still happily use a CDE-style UI if I could do so consistently.
I tried using Enlightenment years ago - it looked amazing, and then… I found all the bugs, incompatibilities, etc… and it’s lackof progress was disappointing.
I tried Bodhi Linux and even they gave up, creating their own Moksha desktop environment too…
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