Customization

The real mines: actual icons from the 90s and early 2000s, free and downloadable. Mix them with the house palette and pick few — the golden rule at the end applies here too.

• Alex Meub — Old Windows Icons — the complete collection of Windows 98 icons as multi-size .ico (16/32/48, 256 colours), pixel-perfect and downloadable in one go. Comes with a viewer to browse it at win98icons.alexmeub.com. house favourite
• Over 2000 Retro Windows Icons (archive.org) — more than two thousand icons from Windows 3.1, 95, 98, 2000, ME and XP in PNG and .ico, as zips or torrent. The big dig.
• IconArchive — Windows 98 (and the retro-computer tag, ~900 more) — clean search, download icon by icon in PNG and .ico for Windows, Mac and Linux.
• IconArchive — Mac OS 9 — 542 classic Mac icons; pair them with macOSicons to dress a turn-of-the-century Mac desktop.
• MacOS9-icons (GitHub) — the whole classic Mac OS 9 set, for anyone who wants the full beige and Platinum.
• Icon packs on itch.io — new pixel-art made by hand by artists; many free or "pay what you want." Check each pack's licence before using it on anything public.

Eight pixel-art icons with the house palette, drawn pixel by chunky pixel. Public domain: they were yours before you downloaded them.

carpeta-campo

carpeta-noche

monolito

ojo-iris

nube-rosa

casa-horizonte

globo-rojo

puerta-cielo

workshop transparency: they're built by hacer_iconos.py (Python + PIL, included). each icon is ~10 lines of rectangles. edit it and make your own.

• RetroBar — the Windows 95/98/Me/XP taskbar recreated with religious fidelity, free and maintained. The crown jewel of the dreamcore desktop. house favourite
• Open-Shell — classic start menu (98/XP/7 style) for Windows 10/11. Free, open source, the successor to the legendary Classic Shell.
• Windhawk — "the Windows mod store": loose community patches (classic clocks, borders, old behaviours) you enable à la carte.
• StartAllBack — Windows 7 start menu, taskbar and explorer on Windows 11. Paid (a little, but paid).
• StartIsBack — the same for Windows 10. Paid.
• ExplorerPatcher — brings classic behaviours back to Windows 11, free. WARNING: big Windows updates sometimes break it; keep handy how to uninstall it.
• Winaero Tweaker — hundreds of fine system tweaks in a single free tool. For what the control panel no longer lets you touch.

• Rainmeter — programmable desktop widgets. In moderation: a small digital clock and a meter of nothing, max. Remember the golden rule at the end of the page.
• 8GadgetPack — the Windows 7 desktop gadgets (clock, calendar, CPU) revived for 10/11.
• Open Cursor Library — thousands of cursors made by ordinary people since 2008, with their grain and amateur charm. The "oldschool" packs are the mine.
• Windows 98 sounds (archive.org) — TADA.WAV, DING.WAV and the startup chime that's public emotional domain. Control panel → Sounds → Scheme. Low volume: the dream's sounds arrive from another room.
• ScreensaversPlanet — classic screensavers (3D pipes, maze, starfield) packaged for modern Windows. The maze IS a liminal space.
• Oldschool PC Font Pack — BIOS and MS-DOS fonts digitized (also in resources).

• macOSicons — a huge, free library of community .icns icons; install by copy-paste from "Get Info" (the same method as our pack above).
• Übersicht — desktop widgets written in HTML/CSS/JS. If you can build a website (and if you're here, you can), you can build a widget.
• Ice — tidies and hides the menu-bar icons. Minimalism is half the look.
• The cursor can't be changed without dubious tools. Accept it as part of the dream.
• Free trick: Settings → Desktop wallpaper → solid colour #a8d8f0, and our wallpaper centred without stretching on top. The empty frame is half the aesthetic.

• Chicago95 — the definitive theme: XFCE turned into a complete Windows 95 (GTK, icons, cursors, sounds, even the boot screen). The genre's cult project. house favourite
• B00merang Project — Windows XP GTK themes (and almost any system you've missed: Vista, 7, Aero…). Green Luna included.
• gnome-look.org — the general bazaar: themes, icons, cursors and screensavers for GNOME/KDE/XFCE. Search "win98", "XP" or "retro" and get lost.
• cool-retro-term — a terminal with real CRT phosphor, curvature and scanlines (also runs on Mac). With the house palette (#0c141f / #cfe0d8 / #33ff66, full hex in resources) it nails this site's counter.
• Conky — the classic desktop system monitor. A clock and the RAM, in Courier, bottom-right corner. That's it.
• picom — compositor: subtle transparency and shadows for X11. Resist the blur temptation: this isn't an r/unixporn setup.

• Webamp — full Winamp in the browser, with its skins and equalizer. Put on an archive mixtape and close your eyes.
• Winamp Skin Museum — 100,000 browsable Winamp skins. World heritage, no exaggeration (much).
• ntsc-rs — an NTSC/VHS signal emulator for your videos and images: the real worn-tape filter, not the Instagram one. Pairs with the creation guide.
• RetroArch — its CRT shaders (CRT-Royale and family) are the reference for playing the genre's classics as they looked back then.
• Electric Sheep — the collective screensaver that's dreamed fractals since 2001. Named after Philip K. Dick and exactly what it sounds like.

Less is more. The goal isn't a "decorated" desktop: it's a desktop that looks found — the computer of a school IT room in August, with the session of someone who didn't come back from the holidays. If it looks like an r/unixporn setup, you've missed the stop.