FVWM-95 (2001)

I have fond memories of FVWM. I don't know where this was (Slashdot?), but back in the mid 2000's, someone posted a "Why are people not using FVWM? It's one of the most flexible window managers?", and linked to various people's FVWM setup. This led to a lot of folks (including me) switching to FVWM. I used it until switching to AwesomeWM around 2011.

You can see some (fairly old!) screenshots here: https://fvwm-themes.sourceforge.net/screenshots/

Glad to see it's still around.

Edit: Here's the thread (Gentoo Forums): https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=80517

The thread ran a total of 121 pages over 7 years.

There's a nice theme for XFCE, Chicago95, that looks a lot like this as well and is quite good!

https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95

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:

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.

Beautiful. I miss the late 90s aesthetic of these window managers. KDE 2 was particularly nice. Motif was ugly, but I look at it fondly now.

This looks a little too Windows 95, but the dock is a nice reminder that it’s X Windows.

I'm still using fvwm2

    $ pkg info fvwm
    fvwm-2.6.9_4
    Name           : fvwm
    Version        : 2.6.9_4
    Installed on   : Mon Dec  8 02:01:51 2025 GMT
    Origin         : x11-wm/fvwm2
    Architecture   : FreeBSD:15:amd64

The original fvwm was my first window manager in Linux back in 1995, I was not a fan of the evolution into fvwm-95, though.

By then I was already into other window managers.

I still use it (shout out taviso iykyk).

https://github.com/zy/zy-fvwm/blob/master/fvwmrc/taviso.fvwm...

Someone made a full cde style desktop with fvwm: https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE

It’s too bad tech seems so much to take away this kind of configurability in the name of “we know better”. There’s so much to be said for software that can last so long, as opposed to the constant treadmill of forced updates.

Fuck gnome eternally for destroying gtk and fuck Wayland.

This was a good one, but icewm was one better. FVWM2 went on to FVWM3, and FVWM95 was encouraged by power users and developers to stop being used in favor of FVWM3

https://ice-wm.org/

"Page last updated: Nov 26, 2001."

That page even looks a tad dated for 2001!

I ran this at one time but it was a bit unstable. I remember corresponding with one of the authors who remarked that it was also attempting to emulate the stability of Windows 95. This was ... oh gawd ... back in 1997 or 1998 I think.

I have used a version of this called Qvwm, and even had branched it off at some point to fix some bugs... https://ahinea.com/en/tech/qvwm/ (I don't think github existed at the time or maybe I didn't know about it.)

P.S. Oh, there is the official Qvwm page: https://sourceforge.net/projects/qvwm/files/qvwm/

I'm on JWM since Ubuntu switched away from gnome 2x in 2012 (13 years) and my desktop is unchanged every since.

I don't update OS to relearn basic controls every 2 years, I update OS to get latest versions of apps.

Related: https://xclass.sourceforge.net/index.html

A C++ GUI toolkit with the Windows 95 look and feel.

“ The main distribution site has moved from mitac11.uia.ac.be to sourceforge.”

The last time I revisited one of these old X projects, I wound up wasting time with libraries that have been deprecated for a decade or more.

Insane homepage pull vro

It's incredible how much charm there was in these interfaces, specifically in the bitmap fonts. Were GUI applications more or less graphically diverse than now ?

I remember this being installed on the unix workstations in the undergraduate engineering computer labs. The default option was CDE, but CDE was slow. You could pick fvwm2 or fvwm95. I liked fvwm2 better and theme it however you liked. I remember people running xsnow this time of year.

That type of webpage style was quite common in the late 90s. Compare it to

https://www.circlemud.org/

I think the html editors of the time defaulted to some of style we now find quaint/quirky.

It's pretty visually accurate, fonts notwithstanding. It even reproduces the slight gap between maximize and close that existed all the way back to the earliest Win95 builds with the "new" window style

Does anyone remember MPX? It was a set of patches on top of X11 that let two people use one computer at the same time. Two mouse pointers for two mice, and two keyboards for input. It was super fun in a dorm environment (I was at Random hall at the time) to browse the Internet with friends. I wonder what it works take to revive it for Wayland.

This and some of the other links on this topic are absolutely painful and a strain to read... DarkReader is borked and turning it off on the pages isn't much better.

This was the default window manager on Red Hat Linux (not RHEL) 5.0, if I recall correctly.

I've realized I am more fond of WinXP rather than Win95.

I really really miss the internet of the 90s/early 00s. So much wonder that is missing today.

I love lightweight desktops, like this one. I just wish we could have a lightweight browser. Seems like you spin up a chrome browser and all that saving goes out the window

Xaw95 https://sourceforge.net/projects/sf-xpaint/files/sf-xpaint/x... You don't need to install it globally, an LD_PRELOAD env var pointing to ./libXaw95.so.8.0 will do the trick.

Usage:

        xmkmf -a 
        make 
        

       export LD_PRELOAD=./libXaw95.so.8.0
       xcalc

This was a kludgey hack that never managed to land upstream, yet utterly dominated (for a brief moment) the headspace of the early linux desktop.

It's funny how quickly things were moving at the time. In the mid 90's, GUI design elements were still in their infancy. Even basic stuff like "what do windows do?" was in flux. Traditional X window managers hadn't settled on anything like a regular usage model: twm was still in regular use, fvwm mostly cloned its UI, Sun was still defaulting to OpenWindows which was pretty and clever but sort of an evolutionary dead end, and other commercial unixes were running Motif which was a lot like a monochrome Windows 3.1 that used too many pixels. Macs were still stuck in the only-one-foreground-app-is-enough model with System 7 and had nothing to offer.

Then Windows 95 landed like a bomb: there was a CLOSE button in the corner of the window finally! And there was a start menu and a little status bar! And that's what we all decided we wanted, really badly. So it got cloned and picked up pervasively. Basically everyone not already part of one of the X11 camps was running this.

But the window was small. KDE kicked off mere months later, Gnome followed quickly after that, and we all forgot about fvwm95. But we for sure all remember it.