r/linux • u/jtofexstinction • 15h 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 15h ago
A GUI from a more civilized time.
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u/Rattlecruiser 15h ago
You fought in the click wars?
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u/p47guitars 15h 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 15h ago
oh my father didn't fight in the war, he was an Apple junkie on an iFreighter
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u/agumonkey 14h ago
lord of the sata
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u/bullwinkle8088 6h 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 10h 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/bullwinkle8088 6h 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/p47guitars 9h 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 4h 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/badsectoracula 6h 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 6h 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 4h 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 15h ago
And do you plan to release the project or what's the goal?
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u/jtofexstinction 15h 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/Primary-Strike5187 12h ago
Hit up the ReactOS team as well
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u/Brillegeit 56m ago
ReactOS strictly forbids using AI-generated code in its project due to strict copyright and legal risks.
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u/omginput 15h ago
Free as in freedom?
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u/jtofexstinction 15h ago
full free and open source.
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u/flunky_liversniffer 12h 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 14h ago
How "little" is it? No need for exact numbers, but how less than XFCE are we talking?
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u/jtofexstinction 14h 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 12h ago
no wayland? 😭
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u/NotQuiteLoona 2h 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 15h 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 15h 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 15h ago
what graphical server are you targeting?
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u/jtofexstinction 15h ago
X11
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u/PhotographFickle1907 14h ago
Do you think you would ever make a wayland version of this?
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u/jtofexstinction 14h ago
No.
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u/nevadita 14h ago
kinda dealbreaker for me but i can adapt.
nostalgia is a hell of a drug.
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u/jtofexstinction 14h 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 14h 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_ 14h 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 13h 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 10h ago
Ah, damn. I'm disappointed. "I made" these days means "Claude made for me", really.
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u/eggwitch17 6h 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/Old_Leopard1844 5h ago
There is a reason people laugh at idea guys
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u/AmarildoJr 1h ago
Writers know this first hand, there's always someone who will come and say "hey man, I have this great idea for a book, I'm willing to split the profits 50/50 if I give you this idea, all you have to do is develop it completely and write it all down" 😂
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u/es20490446e 11h ago
Which repo?
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u/animemanjplover91021 10h 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.9
u/es20490446e 10h 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 5h 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 10h 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_ 9h ago edited 9h 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 4h ago edited 4h 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/vk6_ 1h ago edited 1h ago
I don't think your analogy really holds for the present situation. Software libraries like game engines did indeed lower the skill floor for building projects over time, but there was always room left for people to develop and demonstrate actual skill beyond just delegating everything to a different entity. AI and vibe coding has brought it down to that level.
Now, tons of people on social media are using AI, then claiming "I made this" despite not putting any skill or effort in beyond delegating work. That makes it harder for genuinely talented people to stand out or compete. And keep in mind, social media posts can lead to real world rewards like job opportunities and ad revenue, because sharing your projects is seen as a representation of your skills. You lose these rewards when you retreat to a small and niche community.
So if we assume everything online is vibe coded, then you'd be immediately put at a disadvantage if you put actual skill and effort into your projects, because they'd look similar and appear right next to the ones made with AI. It's a net negative outcome.
Therefore, the solution is to try to break the assumption of "my project = my skills" on AI generated projects, rather than expecting everyone to vibe code as a new norm. Thus people should simply disclose AI usage when sharing something. It's not hard to say "the code was written with Claude" when posting something.
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u/badsectoracula 19m ago
I don't think your analogy really holds for the present situation [...] beyond just delegating everything to a different entity.
AI is not a different entity, as i already wrote it is computer software, no more special than a compiler, a web browser, a text editor, a music player or whatever else you run on your computer (and actually an LLM inference engine is on the simpler side of the complexity scale).
TBH i do not think it is any different than the rest i wrote about. Hell, even the "real world rewards like job opportunities" you mention are the same and i know it from personal experience: my job for the last ~20 years has been working on game engines and tools and off-the-shelf engines like Unity and -especially- Unreal pretty much killed what i liked working on professionally with everyone using these instead of bespoke engines.
But that doesn't stop people from working on such projects and sharing about them (i.e. the video i linked earlier).
Though...
then you'd be immediately put at a disadvantage if you put actual skill and effort into your projects
...from this i do wonder what exactly is your concern? In the original message i responded to, you just wrote that "cool personal projects people made were actually reflective of their skills" so my assumption was that you were just interested about people sharing cool projects that showed their skills - hence why i responded saying that there are - and possibly always be - communities with like-minded people to share stuff they make.
But if the concern is economic in nature - i.e. "it used to be that if i made XYZ it showed that i had the skill of making the XYZ tech myself, so i could be hired and/or get paid for doing XYZ" then that is a slightly different manner and yeah if what you expect out of showing a cool project is to be hired/make money then LLMs make that harder.
But again, i do not see it that much different than what i wrote in my original post about seeing a 3D game in the late 90s/early 2000s and thinking that the author knows how to make a 3D game engine, tools, etc while nowadays these expectations wouldn't hold.
FWIW i do not have any strong opinions when it comes to AI disclosure (i do have a small bias against, but that is mainly because i do not see it any different than all the tech making things easier for people over the years - i remember people using Visual Basic being made fun of because they were not "real programmers", as i remember people using Game Maker being made fun of because they weren't doing real "game development" for example - but ultimately it is not something i care much about). My response to your original comment was mainly about seeing the tech as anything more than it actually is: some piece of software running in your (or someone else's) computer that produces output based on your input.
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u/DonaldLucas 1h ago
If only AI could make more memory efficient programs...
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u/badsectoracula 58m ago
Well, i did post in another reply a graphical operating system for the original IBM PC made with Claude. Apparently it only needs 256KB to run. Here is a screenshot of an older version i tried some time ago with its solitaire using 7KB of RAM :-P.
TBH i don't think there is anything special in how AI-produced software uses RAM, it basically does whatever you tell it (well, more or less) and if you don't tell it anything it'll probably do whatever is commonly done. If the common practice involves using a bunch of libraries and frameworks that gobble up RAM like they're the only program running in the computer, then that's what you're going to get.
But at least from my -admittedly limited- experience using a local LLM (Qwen 3.8 27B) with an "AI agent harness" (pi.dev), if you give the LLM some way to measure memory usage and tell it to keep it low, it'll keep checking it. Though you may need to tweak the wording, because sometimes LLMs can be overeager and you may end up with weird code just for saving a few bytes :-P.
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u/gladtobeblazed 6h 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/Slackeee_ 2h 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 15h 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 12h 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 3h 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 15h ago
Why does it call the disk C: tho
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u/jtofexstinction 15h 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/mobyte 15h 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 15h ago
Yes it is its own DE.
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u/mobyte 15h 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 15h 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/vile-style 15h 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 15h ago
It is X11
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u/vile-style 15h ago
Fractional scaling so it would be tolerable on my 4k monitor and not look like a blurry mess?
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u/Powerful_Attention_6 15h 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/tnoy 14h 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 3h 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 14h 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 14h ago
will it be themable?
does it include theming for gtk and/or qt apps?
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u/jtofexstinction 11h 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 13h ago
X11 support as I see. Plans for Wayland in the future?
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u/jtofexstinction 11h 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 8h ago
Damn that’s a shame. Still, really awesome project.
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u/jtofexstinction 8h 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/Buckwheat469 9h 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/carl2187 9h 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 8h 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/TheRealCarrotty 15h ago
30k lines?!?!
Doesn't sudo have 150k lines?
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u/patrlim1 15h 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 15h ago
Very cool. Can't wait for the official release. How is it performance wise?
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u/Tall-Introduction414 15h 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 15h ago
No from scratch.
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u/silenceimpaired 14h ago
Not that it matters necessarily… but did you use AI and to what degree.
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u/animemanjplover91021 10h ago
Since OP is avoiding disclosing it you can take a look at the repo and decide for yourself:
https://github.com/JackTulli/Linux-explorer2
u/silenceimpaired 7h 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 15h 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 13h 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 13h 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 12h 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 11h 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/MeisterDejv 1h ago
Tell Claude to rewrite it.
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u/curious_but_dumb 50m ago
I also find AI development sketchy, but you don't have to be an ass about someone's project.
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u/anatomiska_kretsar 8h 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 8h ago
It is very early, but have at it! https://github.com/JackTulli/Linux-explorer
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u/CoffeeMessterpiece 7h 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 3h 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 2h 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/ElectronicFlamingo36 1h ago
Uh a task manager of 2000/XP on Linux.... Killer !!
I hope it will land in the Debian repos soon, too.
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u/Zuideind 1h ago
Why should Linux look like Windows?
I was happy when I got rid of that scrap. Nice but for me it’s useless.
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u/kot-sie-stresuje 1h ago
I like it, clean and simple. Regular themes are not so good, as you always fight with details that somehow will not apply with the package, like fonts.
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u/Higgs_Particle 46m ago
I love it. I stuck with windows2000 until I absolutely had to switch.
Not sure I could bear it to stare at any windows type desktop, but there is no registry or dos to battle, so…
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u/immoloism 15h ago edited 12h 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 12h 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 12h 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 12h 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 11h 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/Cautious_Boat_999 15h ago
That is frighteningly realistic