fvwm is still one of the default graphical environments in Slackware (even in -current), and fvwm95 came packaged for some time, too. Now fvwm95 is no longer part of the basic Slackware distribution but there's a SlackBuild for it:
I like the Win95 aesthetic, but I like a close relative, KDE1, better; and I have configured my Plasma 6 setup along these lines.
Screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/Q9Gfs08
Back into FVWM, Slackware also has a SlackBuild for the next-gen fvwm3. FVWM configurability could be amazing, although it can be a challenge.
To me, the big aesthetic of early Qt/KDE1 is "Obvious Motif ripoff". Aside from the Win95/Warp style titlebars, if you don't have the big thick bevels and the distinct scroll bars, it's not quite right.
It really galls me that they removed the Motif style in Qt6, since I target that as my default look and feel. It gives a nice "This is expensive professional software with a codebase tracing back to the Reagan administration" vibe.
There are themes that come close in various attempts-- "Commonality" for Qt6/Kvantum, and some of the assets from NsCDE for GTK, but it feels like a pitched battle against design teams that desperately want to mimick whatever Apple is doing this week.
> To me, the big aesthetic of early Qt/KDE1 is "Obvious Motif ripoff". Aside from the Win95/Warp style titlebars, if you don't have the big thick bevels and the distinct scroll bars, it's not quite right.
Is this really a Motif ripoff? For me it's much more like Win95 with a better titlebar in the window decoration. To each their own, but it seems quite right to me.
I can recall trying Beta 4 and probably 1.0, but at the time it felt like a weird situation. It wasn't quite everything you needed, and a lot of the apps were still obviously sort of immature. The HTML-driven file manager was interesting (ISTR OS/2 offered a similar way to customize things on a per-directory level) but it seemed like a lot of resources when a 486/80 with an obscene 32Mb of memory was my Linux machine.
Of course you thought that was a Motif ripoff. The screenshot you reference is from an alpha pre-release version. KDE1 had neither the widget style nor the window decorations of that screenshot.
To each his own. I had a phase of emulating the classic W2K look, but like W95/98/ME all of this it feels too dark, dirty greyish for me now. Still in times of late KDE3 I then switched to https://store.kde.org/p/1100735/ but with different more colorful (soft pastel) icons which I can't remember the name of anymore, later then to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluecurve , but not like the ugly default depicted there. It could be customized to a mix of that Reinhardt style and Microsofts 'dot.net' style, still using the forgotten soft pastel icons. Which would then be applied to apps for other toolkits as well. Very consistent. I like consistency.
Meanwhile, Plasmas Breeze (light) does all of that for me, again. One could maybe depart from the breeze window decorations, and exchange them for 'Klassy', they can 'fit', there is much to change, chose from. I'm trying them out at the moment. The thing with Breeze is, many other apps have presets for that also, like LibreOffice, which leads to even more visual consistency :-)
My desktop is blank, a mix between soft pastel yellow and 'manila' paper. No icons, widgets, clocks, weather. I don't care about CPU or Network speed there. I wouldn't see them anyway, since I tend to have windows maximized. If something would be wrong Kget or Ktorrent would make themselves known, which they won't ;-> CPU speeds suffice, even if mostly clocked down to 800Mhz :-)
My 'taskbar' is at the top, only 24px high. I switch between 3 by 3 virtual desktops by either using that too small (for that arrangement, it should grow a little when hovering the pointer over it) widget in the taskbar, or by jamming the mousepointer into one of the four corners, which makes that 'expose'-like thing appear.
I concur in your liking of Breeze. It's an amazing teme, really. My only objection is that the default light color scheme is too light. Fortunately there are good color schemes such as Steel or StormClouds that solve that problem, a light theme that isn't too "white".
As for the monitors, I have them because sometimes I have issues with CPU speed (due to a hardware quirk of my laptop) and the network connection is kinda iffy at the time.
I tried both of them out. They are not for me, ATM. Maybe the too light for you results from different hardware. I have screens where I can adjust brightness and contrast separately, running at a color temperature of 5000K (warm).
That's different from what most laptops do, or fiddling with xgamma, or one of its frontends, using 'redshift', etc.
Even at brightest sunshine I don't go over 55% brightness, otherwise during the day, between 38% to 44%, at night just 20%, with contrast always two below these settings, or any I may use in between.
Despite all this, pictures look just right, even if I visit sites for calibration.
It uses a semi-flat design with raised 3D motifs to help give depth to icons.
I remember Noia, they were too 'shiny/glassy' and 'playful' for me. Looked different and funny for a while, but unusable for daily driving. I prefer something more 'serious', unobstrusive, not distracting.
https://slackbuilds.org/repository/15.0/desktop/fvwm95/
I like the Win95 aesthetic, but I like a close relative, KDE1, better; and I have configured my Plasma 6 setup along these lines. Screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/Q9Gfs08
Back into FVWM, Slackware also has a SlackBuild for the next-gen fvwm3. FVWM configurability could be amazing, although it can be a challenge.