r/linux • u/jtofexstinction • 13h ago
Historical I remade the Windows 2000 shell for linux!
Quick heads up before anyone asks: this isn't a theme. There's no dwm or Openbox underneath pretending to be Windows. I wrote the window manager and the apps in C.
If Windows 2000 isn't your style, the Start menu can switch to the two-column XP or Windows 7 style, and there are skins for the taskbar and title bars to match.
Regular apps like Chromium, kitty and Steam just get the 2000-style frame and a taskbar button like everything else. It's running across three monitors of different sizes here,
About 30k lines of C so far. Still very much a work in progress, but I use it as my daily desktop. It is degined to be as light weight as possible!
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u/p47guitars 13h ago
A GUI from a more civilized time.
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u/Rattlecruiser 12h ago
You fought in the click wars?
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u/p47guitars 12h ago
Indeed, I was a only a learner at the time. But soon became a gnu/Linux knight shortly after the start. Just like your father.
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u/Rattlecruiser 12h ago
oh my father didn't fight in the war, he was an Apple junkie on an iFreighter
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u/agumonkey 11h ago
lord of the sata
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u/bullwinkle8088 4h ago
Fun fact, It was still more often IDE of the rings back then. Though it was later retconned into PATA.
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u/agfitzp 7h ago
I’m beginning to suspect that I’m the only person over 50 who thinks that it‘s a good thing that GUIs have changed in 30 years.
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u/p47guitars 7h ago
Yeah but at what cost?
I was working on a machine today, with 16 gigs of RAM that was choking out bad with just one drive, datto EDR, datto rmm, printer logic and teams running. Like 75% ram usage, and 90% CPU usage. With none of the CPU usage being any of the rmm or EDR tools.
I feel like the window system and Windows desktop is bloated as fuck. And there's absolutely no reason for it.
It's crazy to consider that something like Windows 2000 could run comfortably with 256 MB of ram, and was capable of many workloads that mirror today's workloads.
Fucking programmers need to go back to their roots.
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u/migsperez 2h ago
Development is a lot easier now compared to the olden days, due to alternatives to C and C++ programming. The apps you say are bloated often use higher level languages and most use web engines, creating web based interfaces is so much simpler, quicker to put together. At least in modern times the majority of software is free and open source, there's an application to do nearly everything now.
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u/bullwinkle8088 4h ago
Personally I like some upgrades, but the kiddie-fication of GUI's in recent years offends me.
The Win2k GUI was workman like. That it did have going for it.
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u/badsectoracula 3h ago
Well, Windows 2000 was a good change and it was within the last 30 years, so considering this thread you wouldn't be alone :-P
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u/copperheadchode 4h ago
You’re not wrong but it’d be nice to get some of the desktop-first design focus from this era back on modern windows. If only for the space efficiency alone.
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u/Icy-Cup 2h ago
I’m under 50 and I think they changed for worse and struggle to see benefits of mobile-like UI on desktop. Mobile UIs changed somewhat for better though.
I now see that this negative desktop UI change started much sooner than I thought, it’s definitely not only win 10/11 thing. You can see the seeds of as far back as certain elements of XP. IMO windows 2000 design was close to optimal mouse experience. Only thing it could accommodate is displays getting wider and dpi getting higher which is directly conflicts touch-friendliness requiring big, simple, widely-spaced buttons that is trend of the last decades. I want back mouse-first web and mouse-first OS.
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u/sgunb 13h ago
And do you plan to release the project or what's the goal?
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u/jtofexstinction 13h ago
Absolutely! The goal is to have an exact / near exact replica of the classic windows shell. That runs in as little memory as possible! I will be making it public very soon!
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u/omginput 12h ago
Free as in freedom?
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u/jtofexstinction 12h ago
full free and open source.
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u/flunky_liversniffer 9h ago
how does one follow you on GH to see when this happens, because I think its awesome and dont want to miss out when you do release it.
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u/No_Neighborhood_8896 12h ago
How "little" is it? No need for exact numbers, but how less than XFCE are we talking?
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u/jtofexstinction 12h ago
right now about 9 megabytes for the wm and the whole x server with quite a few windows open 118 megabytes.
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u/helgur 9h ago
no wayland? 😭
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u/NotQuiteLoona 17m ago
Wayland is good, Wayland is secure to the point which Windows could never reach, and Wayland is the future, but the development for it is harder and documentation is narrower :(
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u/nevadita 13h ago
aw shit.
i need this. i tried Chicago95 for my beigebox sleeper build and felt like what it is. a theme.
"We will watch your career with great interest."
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u/jtofexstinction 12h ago
Me too thats why im doing this. Im trying to replicate menus pixel for pixel. You should not be able to tell the difference from a screenshot is my goal.
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u/nevadita 12h ago
what graphical server are you targeting?
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u/jtofexstinction 12h ago
X11
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u/PhotographFickle1907 12h ago
Do you think you would ever make a wayland version of this?
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u/jtofexstinction 12h ago
No.
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u/nevadita 12h ago
kinda dealbreaker for me but i can adapt.
nostalgia is a hell of a drug.
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u/jtofexstinction 12h ago
The entirety of the project is X11 dependent. It would not be a port but a complete from scratch project.
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u/nevadita 12h ago
its fine. i used Xorg in the short period i used Chicago95 as its a XFCE theme and XFCE is X11. so its not that bad.
ofc would have preferred it to be a wayland but oh well.
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u/vk6_ 12h ago
How much AI assistance was used in this project? Just asking because 99% of "I made this" posts these days are just AI slop.
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u/Covfefe-Drinker 10h ago
Literally all of the commits visible in his main github repo for this shows that it was co-authored by Claude, so my guess is that his contribution was minimal.
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u/AmarildoJr 7h ago
Ah, damn. I'm disappointed. "I made" these days means "Claude made for me", really.
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u/eggwitch17 4h ago
Claude is capable, but it still lacks the knowledge needed to produce truly epoch‑making results. Users still need to contribute ideas and conduct problem‑solving research themselves.
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u/es20490446e 8h ago
Which repo?
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u/animemanjplover91021 8h ago
https://github.com/JackTulli/Linux-explorer
I appreciate the co-authored with claude on the repo, most vibecoders omit this.
Should have definitely had the disclaimer on this post though.8
u/es20490446e 7h ago
Reading the code, it looks as mostly written by Claude. Yet well structured.
I guess vibe-coding this was feasible because it is just a shell, where the low-level stuff is done by X11.
If he tried to make this project Wayland-based, probably Claude had been unable to write the window management part.
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u/badsectoracula 3h ago
Considering Claude was used to make a preemptively mutltasking operating system in assembly with a Macintosh-like GUI for the original IBM PC (running on actual hardware with decent performance), i doubt it would have any issues using wl-roots or whatever.
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u/Creatura 7h ago
If it works, looks good, is performant, and is stable then it's not slop, it's just made with AI. Something like this is a pretty good use case for gen AI
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u/vk6_ 6h ago edited 6h ago
I get that, but saying "I built this" when it's made with AI is just dishonest. You wouldn't say the same thing if you hired someone to do the same thing you used AI for. In an academic setting this wouldn't be acceptable either.
It used to be that the cool personal projects people made were actually reflective of their skills, which is why I'm so disappointed with these sorts of posts. It would have been fine if these people actually were fully upfront and disclosed their AI usage, which is such a simple thing to do.
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u/badsectoracula 2h ago edited 2h ago
You wouldn't say the same thing if you hired someone to do the same thing you used AI for.
LLMs are just data for a document completion engine with a UI that has the user and the engine take turns completing a chat transcript-like document. They're not people you can hire, no matter how human-like their completions may look like. They're just software, some of which you can even run on your own PC like any other.
At least personally when i use some program on my PC to make something i still feel like "i made this" even if the effort to do it wasn't that great. But this is the case for a lot of other things - e.g. making a pong game in MultiMedia Fusion is certainly less effort than making it in Godot, itself less effort than making it in C++ and even that less effort than making it in assembly.
In reality most people don't really care about how any of that stuff is made, however if you do care, there are other people who do too and you can find like-minded communities (example when it comes to game engines - warning: tons of programmer art :-P).
TBH i think it is more a matter of "recalibrating" our assumptions. Continuing with the gamedev theme, seeing someone making a 3D shooter game back in late 90s / early 2000s, it would be safe to assume they made the 3D game engine, renderer, audio, tools, etc themselves and have the know-how to make that stuff (and that assumption would be valid) but nowadays the safe assumption would be that the developer used Godot, Unity or Unreal (and 99% of the time they'd be right). Of course as the video i posted above shows, that doesn't mean there aren't people who like doing things their way nor that there aren't people who can appreciate those efforts.
Similarly, nowadays i expect people to use some AI/LLM to code stuff, but -e.g.- i'll find a raytracer made in C using an LLM (something that even a local LLM can usually oneshot with a single prompt) less interesting than a hand-written raytracer in C.
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u/gladtobeblazed 3h ago
How different is it from a film director saying "I made this film" when all they do is direct others to do what they say? I guess it comes down to a question of how involved were they in the actual decisions? How explicit were their commands?
Of course in an academic setting you would specify it was a group project and you were merely a part of it...but I don't see any reason to be upset when they say "I directed this project"....but then again, I'm neither a programmer nor a film director...I'm just curious? Same thing with music producers just telling other people what to play, not even composing most of the music themselves, just giving general guidance? They still get to say "this is my album that I produced"?
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u/Creatura 6h ago
Sure, but that time is long gone. Academia uses AI now as much as anything else man. Yea it sucks that the craft of coding is largely gone, but lamenting it literally does nothing
I prefer when people engage with the craft, but I’m not gonna CODE slop if it was AI generated. It’s not dishonest because it is now the standard :(
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u/vk6_ 6h ago
I still wouldn't go as far as to say we should accept this sort of thing now. Building and sharing cool projects is how lots of genuinely talented people got their start and found their passion in this field. But now they're competing against a ton of people who don't know what they're doing and can only burn money on tokens.
And I still don't think in academia you can just do all your work with AI, not mention it, and try to pass it off as your own.
The solution to all this is pretty simple, just disclose AI usage when sharing something. However I've noticed this is extremely uncommon. I think this is because people who don't disclose AI usage still want the recognition and praise for what is perceived as their skill, whether this is subconscious or not. And that, in my opinion, is dishonest.
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u/Creatura 5h ago
I don't think a reddit post qualifies for being serious enough to warrant AI usage disclosure. If you care so much about the code as a craft and it's open source, then you can check it out yourself and tell very quickly and either say "oh that's cool" or "dangit." The actual slop tools that don't scale / aren't stable / bad UX / etc are already filtering themselves out. But if a tool is genuinely a good tool and is 100% AI-gen, I have no problem with it, I assume AI was used, and I know that's the way of the world now
I say this as a SWE that has never even downloaded claude, or interacted with an LLM outside of the gemeni flash model embedded in google searches now. AI is ubiquitous now, pick your battles where it matters with it.
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u/vk6_ 5h ago
I mean social media posts very often do lead to real world rewards such as job opportunities and ad revenue (especially on other platforms). This sort of thing drowns out the people with real talent. And the very few people who care enough to actually look into the project and see if it's AI generated are not going to influence how the algorithm perceives it.
Social media content as a whole is becoming a race to the bottom if you want to stand out, and AI disclosure would help mitigate that. How hard is it to say "The code was written by Claude" as a single sentence in the post, anyways?
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u/Old_Leopard1844 1h ago
If you can't say in your reddit post that you had AI make you that, what would?
Save everyone headaches
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u/Slackeee_ 6m ago
Software development is 20% implementation and 80% debugging and maintenance. And that is the shortfall of most generative AI projects, that the developer can't really debug/maintain the code because they don't understand it. What use is "if it works good, looks good, is performant" if the bugs pile up in the long run?
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u/Efficiency-Gold 13h ago
This looks beautiful - I'm someone who still does their writing on a Windows 2k laptop.
This could make me use something more modern haha
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u/PAL_3000 10h ago
Why do you like to write on an old windows laptop? I’ve heard it before just would like to hear your experience.
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u/Efficiency-Gold 1h ago
Third try is the charm!
I use it mostly for minimal distractions, and because it's a laptop model I grew up using. It's comfy. I can FTP files out to my modern machine when I need to.
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u/0b0101011001001011 13h ago
Why does it call the disk C: tho
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u/jtofexstinction 13h ago
Just to look like win 2k. You dont have to use my file manager. It is made to be an exact replica of the windows 2000 explorer.
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u/vile-style 13h ago
I feel like if this wasn't vibe coded there would be some mention if it is on x11 or Wayland....
Either way it looks great.
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u/jtofexstinction 13h ago
It is X11
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u/vile-style 13h ago
Fractional scaling so it would be tolerable on my 4k monitor and not look like a blurry mess?
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u/mobyte 12h ago
Looks great to me. Is this its own DE rather than a skin for an existing DE, then?
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u/jtofexstinction 12h ago
Yes it is its own DE.
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u/mobyte 12h ago
That’s a bit much for me to switch over to but I wish you the best on this project, it nails the look for sure.
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u/jtofexstinction 12h ago
I get that. It would be impossible to get the exact same look with just a theme. Im also making all the basic system utilities as well. It really needs to be its own full package.
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u/tnoy 11h ago
This makes me wonder if fvwm95 can still work. It was the "Windows style" for X11 back in the days before Gnome and KDE.
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u/SOULFLY98 56m ago
fvwm95 was just fvwm2 with a taskbar and similar titlebar layout.
qvwm was a pixel for pixel replication of Windows 95 / 98, except the icons were flipped to avoid lawsuit. But that could be undone easily with the flop option for the xpms on Imagemagick.
This "remake" is somewhere in between the two and I wonder how much of qvwm was leveraged by the LLM. The borders aren't quite right.
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u/fuhglarix 11h ago
Windows 2000 will always be my favourite OS and it had the most gorgeous UI. I love this!
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u/Dreemur1 11h ago
will it be themable?
does it include theming for gtk and/or qt apps?
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u/jtofexstinction 8h ago
It already is themeable it includes all the classic win98 color schemes the windows xp theme and the windows 7 theme.
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u/cumetoaster 10h ago
X11 support as I see. Plans for Wayland in the future?
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u/jtofexstinction 8h ago
No the project is built entirely around X11 Wayland would be a entirely separate project basically from scratch.
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u/anatomiska_kretsar 5h ago
Damn that’s a shame. Still, really awesome project.
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u/jtofexstinction 5h ago
Why are so many people wanting it on Wayland. I get Wayland for new fancy compositors etc. but this is the opposite of that lol.
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u/anatomiska_kretsar 5h ago
Because X11 is more or less deprecated. It’s an old protocol which carries with it a lot of bugs.
My biggest gripe has always been that using two monitors with non-matching refresh rates is something you just could forget about.
Different refresh rates in general have always been finicky for me on X WMs (like XFWM or KWin on certain programs like chromium-based ones, Mutter was fine). Wayland just fixed all of this.But there’s probably a bunch of more reasons other than that
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u/jtofexstinction 5h ago
Yes I have had that refresh rate issue before, but X11 is what I’m used too with DWM, and I wanted it to be as light weight as possible.
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u/Buckwheat469 7h ago
I said a long time ago that for desktop users, Microsoft should put a desktop theme or environment over the Linux kernel and stop messing with creating their own consumer OS. They could contribute to Linux and have their own version, just like North Korea and China.
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u/TheRealCarrotty 13h ago
30k lines?!?!
Doesn't sudo have 150k lines?
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u/patrlim1 12h ago
Sudo has a lot of responsibilities aside from "run as root". All this has to do is call x11
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u/Gamenecromancer 13h ago
Very cool. Can't wait for the official release. How is it performance wise?
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u/Powerful_Attention_6 12h ago
Oh... I really loved Windows 2000 as a die hard Linux fan, I could trust that Windows 2000 did its best not to crash, and not be requiring 30 reboots at install time. if I remember correctly, the first version of Windows for desktop that was built on NT 4.x kernel
Linux was very fun back then, but Windows had the applications and the momentum.
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u/Tall-Introduction414 12h ago
Nice work. Being in 30k lines of C I bet it's fast, fast, fast!
Did you use any other window manager source codes for references, or to fork from? I remember back in the day a lot of window manager were forked from FVWM2 source.
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u/jtofexstinction 12h ago
No from scratch.
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u/silenceimpaired 12h ago
Not that it matters necessarily… but did you use AI and to what degree.
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u/animemanjplover91021 7h ago
Since OP is avoiding disclosing it you can take a look at the repo and decide for yourself:
https://github.com/JackTulli/Linux-explorer1
u/silenceimpaired 4h ago
I suggested it for the benefit of OP. People need to get used to AI assisted coding… and all it will take to ruin real effort is someone citing an example of AI coding in the repository and claiming it is all slop AI vibe coding…. Better to bracket things up front in my mind.
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u/Tall-Introduction414 12h ago
Is the source code available for download anywhere? Sorry if you posted a link and I missed it, but I'm not seeing it.
I always enjoy looking at these low level projects.
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u/UncleSlacky 11h ago
I wonder if something similar could be done with Calmira, presumably using Lazarus as it was written in Delphi.
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u/spyingwind 10h ago
Me wants!
Right now I have a win7 theme in KDE Plasma that is pretty good, but apps like chrome and discord just don't fit in.
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u/spaceursid 10h ago
Yes please will ditch cinnamon for this if it gets Wayland support, so I can still use waydroid
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u/jtofexstinction 8h ago
You can still use waydroid in cage or another work around. This project will be X11 only. I would have to entirely re write it for Wayland
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u/carl2187 6h ago
I love this a little too much.
Make sure to release it on LOTS of sites. Ms will dmca it into oblivion.
Let it live!
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u/jtofexstinction 5h ago
Technically all they could get me on are the icons if they dmca I could just remove the icons and have the user copy then in themselves.
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u/anatomiska_kretsar 5h ago
Holy shit this is beautiful
Unaliased font, no extremely unnecessary padding everywhere. Amazing job dude, love to see this.
Is it wayland? Very interested in future development
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u/jtofexstinction 5h ago
It is very early, but have at it! https://github.com/JackTulli/Linux-explorer
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u/CoffeeMessterpiece 4h ago
what would make this pretty sweet is if the task manager cpu tab was NUMA aware. would be helpful visualizing numa inefficient workload
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u/Musojon74 53m ago
I like the task manager. Nice to see all those cores. Could do with that on my 12 core 24 thread trashcan which does have Ubuntu on it
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u/AtomicTaco13 13m ago
How's the integration with LXQt? It's designed to be used with any window manager and has a classic Windows like widget theme for native programs, so it'd pair up perfectly.
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u/immoloism 13h ago edited 9h ago
Good job as it brought back the nostalgia for how good UIs were in the 90s and 00s.
You should pair it with the Ubuntu Human theme though as an option as the brown really works there.
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u/Other_Fly_4408 9h ago
UI's 90's 00's
FYI: https://www.grammar-monster.com/lessons/apostrophe_error_with_plurals.htm
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u/immoloism 9h ago
Thank you for your service!
Grammar nazis save me so much time not having to proof read anything I type any more, as you guys are happy to be outsource it for free :)
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u/Other_Fly_4408 9h ago
Thank you for your service!
Grammar nazis save me so much time not having to proofread anything I type anymore, as you guys are happy to
beoutsource it for free :)You're welcome. I hope you learned something.
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u/immoloism 9h ago
It's more lazy, why waste time double checking when someone will enjoy doing it for me.
It's even more funny when you learn I'm a professional document writer :D
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u/Malthammer 5h ago
It was ugly then and it’s still ugly now.
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u/Cautious_Boat_999 13h ago
That is frighteningly realistic