[29athrowaway]

This would not only look great, but run incredibly fast:

Low-res bitmap icons, bitmap fonts, no antialiasing, no composition, etc.

On Linux you can still have a pretty old school desktop with some of these elements... but may not run well on HiDPI.

[kalleboo]

MacOS 9 had vector TrueType fonts and text antialiasing. It was still blazing fast on a G4.

[kaba0]

> Low-res bitmap icons, bitmap fonts, no antialiasing, no composition, etc.

I don’t think that high-res icons, vector fonts, aliasing and composition meaningfully effect today’s hardware — we can and do have GPUs barely sweating on even much more demanding functionality and these are mostly parallelisable/easily cacheable things. If anything, they take up some GPU memory.

What makes some of today’s apps resource hogs is the different abstraction level which can be useful (accessibility was absolutely not something important back then and even today it is not without lack), cross-platform, but often much more leaky than it could be.

[zozbot234]

There is a nice Win9x style theme for GTK+3 that works quite well IME. And the look is quite faithful to the original (with some minimal changes for, e.g. modern headerbars).

[petepete]

https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95 - if anyone's wondering