[wkat4242]

It's not really windows 9x style? It's highly configurable so you can make it look like that but you don't have to. Even without theming it.

I find it a lot more sensible than windows especially because the latter started embedding ads and "helpful suggestions" everywhere in the UI.

[DocTomoe]

I'm not talking about theming, but the general feel of the UI. It did not try and win innovation trophies back in the day, it was a platform that gave you the feeling it was ready for serious work to be done on, relatively stable, similar UI language over several programs, that kind of thing. Konqueror as the dual file manager / web browser was great, but it was "something on top", not "something radically different from proprietary UIs" like Gnome kept doing in that timeframe.

I think it was the closest we ever came to a 'Linux on the Desktop' year for a mass market.