Old-School aesthetic distro?

[kov]

Hi, I'm looking for a linux distribution that looks like 2010-2012
If anyone knows a distro or a DE that looks like the attached images I would be very grateful, thanks.

 

[KGIII]

Hmm... I've not recently messed with things like opacity, but there's the LXQt desktop environment. It's the replacement for LXDE, more or less. The goal is simple and basic, but you can customize it. If you're into it, you can create your own themes.

The major distro families will likely have a version, official or community, with LXQt already installed as the default DE.

 

[CaffeineAddict]

If anyone knows a distro or a DE that looks like the attached images

The first image is from backtrack, this is now Kali Linux, so you can try that if you want to do pentesting.
Their desktop of choice is XFCE, and it has the same look and feel as decade ago in backtrack.

I'm not fan of it due taskbar looking like on Mac.

LXQt which @KGIII suggested may be better option.
Just don't go for LXDE, it's no longer maintained.

 

[KGIII]

Just don't go for LXDE, it's no longer maintained.

It is still maintained, but no longer a priority. Security and bug fixes will continue for some time. Most of the team focuses on LXQt, but some devs are still working on it. You're not going to get new features or anything like that.

LXDE

The LXDE desktop repositories. LXDE has 22 repositories available. Follow their code on GitHub.

github.com

If you dig around there, you'll see that it's still being worked on. If you want to see how recently, you can just use this link:

LXDE

The LXDE desktop repositories. LXDE has 22 repositories available. Follow their code on GitHub.

github.com

It is just in maintenance mode. They've never announced a specific date when they'll go EOL, but they're heavily based on GTK2, and that is EOL. Rather than rewrite it all for GTK3, the core team decided to migrate to the Qt toolchain. They had a handful of good reasons to go the Qt route.

But it's on its deathbed. As you said, "Just don't go for LXDE." With an unknown EOL, being based on a toolchain that is no longer maintained, and with just a few folks keeping it alive, means that you probably shouldn't use it unless you're really a hardcore fan.

 

[MikeWalsh]

@kov :-

My response to that is simply this. it's nothing to do with having a complete distro - or more specifically, a desktop environment - that's been built to look like that.

It's all down to customization. Give me a couple of hours, and I could have any of my Puppies looking like any of those images.....simply though downloading/installing some new themes & fonts, spinning up a few new background wallpapers ( I do a LOT of this; graphic design is a long-standing passion of mine, going back well over 40 years) and then spending a while "tweaking".

I can tell you now, the monitor to the right of image number 3 is Bill Wilson's 2-series gKrellM.....and if I don't miss my guess, sporting what looks like Matthew Bogosian's "Twilight" skin.

(I'm a long-standing user of gKrellM. The source code is still available, and it compiles remarkably easily. Doesn't take long, either!)

Most 'mainstream' distros will have gKrellM in the repositories.


Mike.

 

[MikeRocor]

I've been told my jwm setup looks "old school" though I'm not entirely sure what the commenter meant by that.

The screen shot below shows jwm with a tray across the top and icons confined to a "dock" (wbar, set to blend in almost completely with the bacjground) along the right hand side, aterm running with some transparency and a vanilla conky config, all running on Tiny Core, though I suppose it would look similar on pretty much any Linux OS. There's no "desktop environment" other than the above. If I were planning on staying with that bushfire background, I'd probably re-theme the jwm application menu colors a bit.

 

[MikeWalsh]

@MikeRocor :-

Yeah, I'm not entirely certain what's meant by "old-school". Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.....one person's setup from 10-15 years ago will not necessarily be to another's liking. I've seen "desktops" from all those years ago that wouldn't look out of place in some of today's cutting-edge offerings.....and I saw one, just a few weeks ago, that immediately reminded me of Win 95/98.

To me, there is no such thing as a 'standard' desktop. It's all down to what that individual wants, and is happy with. Linux has always been the king of customization. You've only got to look at some of the Compiz stuff from 20 years ago to see that.....especially when the famous "wobbly windows" and 'desktop cube' are a part of the mix..!

My own desktops don't try to emulate any kind of "look". Yes, they're 'busy' - and to some, 'messy' & untidy! - but they encapsulate a range of ideas I've either adopted, modified or worked-on over the years. They work for me.....and really, that's all I'm concerned with. I couldn't care if anybody else likes 'em...

(shrug...)


Mike.

 

[f33dm3bits]

My response to that is simply this. it's nothing to do with having a complete distro - or more specifically, a desktop environment - that's been built to look like that.

100% agree with this. So OP should probably look what DE's are being used in shared screenshots and see if those are still available one of distributions.

 

[craigevil]

LXDE on rpios. XFCE looks similar, and is more user friendly.

 

[bob466]

Welcome to the Forum.

 

[MikeRocor]

Yeah, I'm not entirely certain what's meant by "old-school". Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.....one person's setup from 10-15 years ago will not necessarily be to another's liking. I've seen "desktops" from all those years ago that wouldn't look out of place in some of today's cutting-edge offerings.....and I saw one, just a few weeks ago, that immediately reminded me of Win 95/98.

That.

When I was using MS Windows, I liked the Win95 UI a lot - probably mostly due to the contrast with the Win 3.1 UI, which I despised to the point I just refused to load Win 3.1 on my own PCs.

• So, when I moved to Win 2K, i tried to make it look (and work) as much like Win 95 as I could.
• Same with Win 2K -> Win XP.
• Same with Win XP -> Win 7.

Same with Win 7 -> Win 10. Oops - that didn't work! And I hated the Win 10 UI. So I treated Win 10 much like Win 3.1 - Not having it on my own PCs, though of course, I had to use it at work. Actually, it remains -present- on several of my hand-me-down systems but, when those systems run at all, they run Linux.

When I first used a GUI on Linux, in the DSL 3.x days, I initially didn't really like jwm (because I didn't know how configurable it was) and I fooled around with fluxbox a little bit - wasn't thrilled with that, either.

Once I mover to Tiny Core (late 2008), I did learn how to set up jwm and I actually kept (recreated) an MS Windows UI feature that I found useful: the "Start" button. But my start button is improved in two ways. First, it's not called "Start" which I always thought was stupid on a level right up there with "My Documents" and "My Computer". I use the host name as the label for my start button. The second improvement is that my OS has no knowledge of the start button or the start button menu. That means that, unlike the desktop right-click menu, no matter what software gets loaded or unloaded, the start button menu never changes unless I explicitly change it. Of course, having such a button implicitly requires displaying a system tray for it to live on and that's just fine because jwm has nice features to customize that, too, but it does look enough like the older MS Windows "Task bar" that it adds to the "Old school" vibe.

So I guess my "old-school" desktop -looks- like it harks back to Win 95 at first glance. The resemblance, at lest for me, pretty much ends at that first glance. My wall paper is kind of "old school", too, I suppose - I ditched the bushfire one and went back to my old favorite "envane" which I first encountered as the default background in one of the DSL 3.x versions... Although I did get daring earlier this year and photoshopped (*) the BDE and her partners in crime into the middle of it.

I keep my icons confined to a dock thingy (wbar) instead of strewn all over the desktop which, I think, is less "old-school" looking than some schemes.

But the gist of it all is that every visible facet of the desktop UI is just the way I want it... with one tiny little exception:
I keep the icons on the icon bar de-emphazised to the point of being almost invisible until I mouse over them and they all look great that way except for one icon: The WindowShot icon, which shows up as a glaring black square. Grrrr! In the grand scheme of things, not a biggie, but I think Ima swap in some other icon. Sadly the way applications are packaged in Tiny Core makes it almost too much of a PITA to bother modifying it for something so trivial. Not so sadly, I already have a script inplace for updating an icon on a running wbar - I had to have the firefox icon run "apulse firefox" instead of just "firefox" and a similar mechanism will just point to a different icon image.

So, as it turns out, when I get sleepy, I start to ramble. Thanks for reading, if you made it this far.

*: GIMP, not really photoshop, but that doesn't make such a nice verb. "I GIMPed the image" just sounds odd.

 

[MikeWalsh]

When I first used a GUI on Linux, in the DSL 3.x days, I initially didn't really like jwm (because I didn't know how configurable it was) and I fooled around with fluxbox a little bit - wasn't thrilled with that, either.

Once I mover to Tiny Core (late 2008), I did learn how to set up jwm and I actually kept (recreated) an MS Windows UI feature that I found useful: the "Start" button.

@MikeRocor :-

Yup; Joe's Window Manager is, I think, one of the little-known gems of the open-source world. It's not much to look at, but damn, is it configurable. And for those that like "old-school", the fact that it runs entirely from text files probably adds to its "charm"...

My own 'Start' button is a bit more than just a button, 'cos I have It dolled up with quite a large font in ~/.jwm/jwmrc-theme's 'Tray' section to a 20px font (in a 22px-height 'tray'). The rest of the tray is iconified, though, so you only see that large font where I want it.

The Menu's 'Multimedia' section has a second layer of sub-menus for all my video-editing & capture stuff. One of our members figured out how to do this - essentially an 'encapsulated' copy of the 'Multimedia' section (between its own <JWM> tags, saved as a separate file, then called by the _root_jwmrc file via <Include> tags whenever you run:-

fixmenus

.....followed by:-

jwm -restart

.....which incorporates the modified section as though it were an integral part of the process. ('fixmenus' is a Puppy-native script. I don't know how TinyCore handles the menu rebuild stuff).

This gives me complete control over the Multimedia section, if nothing else....though it DOES need to be manually-edited whenever I add new items.

T'other Mike.

 

[MikeRocor]

And for those that like "old-school", the fact that it runs entirely from text files probably adds to its "charm"...

That does indeed add to its charm, at least for me. .jwmrc is technically "xml" but there's nothing really obfuscated in there so it's as good as plain old text as far as I'm concerned. I used to work in EDI so mucking about with formatted data files is second nature to me. And it can handle "include" files to keep the config modular and limit the complexity of any one file.

I don't know how TinyCore handles the menu rebuild stuff).

Tiny Core has a menu set up for a handful of system utilities and updates an include file for .jwmrc for every application as it is loaded, so there's a desktop right-click menu that has an entry for every loaded app that has a .desktop file - with that I could get by without any desktop icons, though I like having an icon bar and almost never use the desktop menu. There's also a menu for any applications that are loaded "onboot" (sorta loaded but not fully loaded until you actually use them, which I think is just a dumb idea).

Other than those three specific items, which are handled in include files, Tiny Core never touches the jwm config - and that's important to me as I'm a bit of a control freak about such things. My general "start button" menu has items like "edit a remote file on the postit note server" and "open an ssh session to the backup server" and "run the script that fixes the firefox icon to load ff under apulse"... shtuff like that.

I'll probably be revamping these things a little in a project I'm starting. I'm building a generic bootable USB stick that I'll be able to use on any of several physical machines. Based upon what host it detects it is running on, I'll want it to be able to reconfigure some stuff including

• /etc/motd
• .jwmrc
• .conkyrc
• what services get started
• what applications get loaded

The control system for this, rudimentary though it still is, is called "Lord of Hosts" 'cause that was just to fitting to pass up.

I'm not sure the whole mess is even a really good idea, but it will be fun and working out the technical issues will provide lots of good learning opportunities.

 

[Brickwizard]

I would not call it old school, but this was my foray into a static distribution instead of hopping around.
September

2006 Mint 2.0