My childhood home's computer said 38911 BYTES FREE.

`/var/home/afidel/`

There are some pretty good desktop environments for Linux which emulate the Windows desktop, so that old Windows users would feel at home immediately.

But I've never seen them emulate the filesystem, which is what took most old Windows users the biggest effort to understand. And the Linux filesystem raises it to a new level of complexity, which makes every old Windows users want to go back to Windows immediately.

With "old" users I don't mean experienced users.

Is there some kind of overlay which does all this `C:\User\afidel\Desktop` mapping for those users?

I love the niche of enthusiasm that exists for the Windows 95 UI. It's not an original point that aside from nostalgia it's a really clear and usable design; but that leads me to wonder, are there any modern UIs/themes/etc that are inspired by (rather than necessarily directly mimicking) Windows 95?

Would be interesting to see what a modern version of Windows 95 would look like, or what general design lessons can be learned from it's niceties.

anyone remember XPDE? I'm not sure it was ever finished / packaged in any major repo but came across someone doing a walkthrough of it the other week and it looked pretty complete.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFKx8nCl1Vw

It is hard for me to distinguish between the functional simplicity of desktop computing in that era, with the overall excitement that the explosion of connectivity brought to the world. The internet was a lot of fun and had so many surprising corners. Practically all of it was personal, niche, or experimental content for awhile.

I wonder if Windows 9X was really all that exceptional, or if it was just what people remember driving with as they navigated the new world.

The best modern equivalent to that desktop paradigm I've found is LXQt, although when I use it I find I kind of miss some of the accouterments of the modern desktops.

This looks great with some apps that have matching themes, but I wonder if it quickly falls apart once you rely on apps with very non-consistent UIs (audio/video software, Discord, Spotify, Slack, and basically all other Electron-based apps). Although I guess there might be some matching CSS injection hacks available for the Electron ones?

I've done something like this with the windows 2000 look from time to time, but something I found frustrating with theming xfwm4 window decorations is the non existent ability to create a horizontal gradient across the top of the window like in Windows 2000.

I believe this is the reason you cannot find a proper windows 2000 theme for xfce.

That's just the chicago theme I'va had for years now on my XFCE, I think it's a bit lame to steal that theme (not from Microsoft but the maker of that xfce theme), put it in a repository, give it a different name, and pose it as your own work?

The repo literally adds nothing, just a name change.

While neat, I would love to see a desktop that has similar design to either Windows XP/2000, classic Mac OS, or mac OS x cheetah.

Turns out they do have Windows XP: https://github.com/winblues/bluexp

Neat! It's probably just nostalgia, but I still don't think any modern desktop has been as good as Windows 2000 was. Perfect blend of minimal without hiding things (well, excluding the Office 2000 menu hiding disaster which we will conveniently ignore)

What are the benefits/drawbacks of using this vs. actually running Windows 95 or XP?

I'm assuming the PC will be mostly used for "educational software" (games), which you would want to run on XP. What benefit is there to running Fedora?