Redmond97 SE

Windows 95 OSR2 UI for Xfce4 4.20

v2.05 / 2025 Sliver X

Image Screenshot

These themes are recreations of the Windows 95 (OSR 2.x-era, "Detroit") GUI controls for GTK2, GTK3, GTK4, Xfwm4, Metacity and Wine.

It is a fork of the Redmond97 project. The main additions are GTK4 support, HiDPI themes, companion Wine color themes and an extended builder script. It also has much deeper integration into Xfce4 and its plugins and full Deskbar panel support.

It does not focus on recreating a clone of the Windows 9x desktop like its parent project, (Though this can be done!), rather, using its visual language with a modern desktop environment.

Included is variant of madmaxms' Obsidian icon theme (Based on Faenza) with slight modifications to work better with the HiDPI themes.

It was developed for Xfce4 v4.20: The ability to set a panel border is a fairly recent feature of Xfce so it will not work on much older versions than this.

Included Themes:

[New Themes]

Redmond97 SE Ouroboros

Redmond97 SE Numidium

Redmond97 SE In Tenebris

Redmond97 SE Dusk (Blue/Red/Purple)

Redmond97 SE Jet (Blue/Red/Purple)

[Microsoft Themes]

Windows 95 (All)

Windows 95 Plus! (All)

Windows 98 Plus! (Baseball, Jungle, Space and Underwater)

Windows XP (Classic Theme)

All themes also have HiDPI variants for 2K and 4K displays.

An included script can be used to create new themes from templates as well.

Usage

Place desired theme's folder under ~/.themes or under /usr/share/themes.

GTK2/3/4: Select a theme/fonts/etc with xfce4-appearance-settings

Qt5/Qt6: There are two ways to handle this, both with pros and cons amounting to if you want GTK2 or Qt apps to look better at 2K/4K resolutions.

1) Match GTK theme at normal resolutions but with some imperfections and issues with scaling at HiDPI modes:
 
 qt5ct qt5-styleplugins, qt6ct and qt6gtk2 (Or whatever packages the QT5/QT6 GTK theme resides in for your distro) need 
 installed and GTK/fonts/etc set under qt5ct and qt6ct.
 
 The following must be set in /etc/environment for both to work:
 export QT_QPA_PLATFORMTHEME="qt5ct"
2) Minimally match GTK theme (Colors and Font match but controls look like Adwaita) but with simpler setup and consistent behavior at all resolutions.
 This allows running GTK2 applications with 2x scaled assets without issue for HiDPI at the expense of Qt applications standing out more.
 
 Set the following in /etc/environment:
 export QT_QPA_PLATFORMTHEME=gtk3

Wine: Import the theme's .reg file into a prefix with Wine's regedit.exe

Included are profiles for the excellent xfce4-panel-profiles addon that replicate a Win9x or Win7 style taskbar along with a basic Deskbar setup: They should be placed in either /.local/share/xfce4-panel-profiles/ or /usr/local/share/xfce4-panel-profiles/layouts/ to show up in its Backup/Restore menu. xfce4-panel-profiles is provided in most major distro's repositories or can be compiled and installed manually.

If not using a profile, border size needs set to at least 1px in all panel's settings for things to look right.

Taskbar: A replica of the Windows Explorer System Tray can be made by putting the Tray and Clock applets (in that order) together on the taskbar. The pulseaudio-button plugin is also themed to fit between these visually. Panel icons should be set to a fixed "16x16" size to keep them consistent across things.

Etc:

1) Panels and plugins heavily depend on setting fixed icon sizes to look right. Roughly:
 Panel Size Panel Icons Size Systray Icon Size
 ---------- ---------------- -----------------
 32px 16px 16px
 48px 32px 24px
 64px 48px 32px
 96px 64px 48px
2) The CSD has a standard Windows button order defined in GTK3/4's settings.ini but Xfce4's xfsettingsd overrides this. 
 Debian 13 also has GTK button images enabled in its Xfce4 defaults and buttons sizes can't be set from the defined
 data in the theme. Under the "extras" folder is a script named "r97se-fixes.sh" that can be placed in your home
 directory/etc and set to run at logon to fix this via xfce4-session-settings > Application Autostart. Or execute the
 following somewhere:
 gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.wm.preferences button-layout menu:minimize,maximize,close
 xfconf-query -c xsettings -p /Gtk/IconSizes -s gtk-menu=32,32:gtk-button=40,40:gtk-small-toolbar=24,24:gtk-large-toolbar=32,32:gtk-dnd=32,32:gtk-dialog=32,32
 xfconf-query -c xsettings -p /Gtk/ButtonImages -t 'bool' -s 'false'
3) If you're running nm-applet, it won't center correctly on a Deskbar system tray. You can edit /etc/xdg/autostart/nm-applet.desktop
 to exec nm-applet --indicator instead of just nm-applet to fix this.
4) The themes are designed around the fonts Lucida Sans and Lucida Console, though they are not required.
 7pt font works best for the clock applets.
5) Many plugins work fine in Deskbar mode if you disable their text, like Window Buttons, Application Menu, etc.
6) Mate Desktop support is inherited from the original Redmond97 project, and has been minimally verified to work as expected (On Debian 13), but is unsupported.

[HiDPI Themes]

In addition to the above, for HiDPI themes (as an Xfce4 user who uses a mixture of GTK2/3/4/Qt5/Qt6 and Wine applications), this is where it got a bit complicated for me. After a lot of testing, I ultimately am doing this:

Xfce4

1. Enable HiDPI variant of theme under Appearance > Style

2. Set mouse Cursor Size to 32 or 34 under Mouse and Touchpad > Theme

3. Enable 2x Window Scaling under Appearance > Settings

4. Add the following to /etc/environment to make it global, or to something that runs when you login for your account (Like ~/.profile):

   QT_QPA_PLATFORMTHEME=qt5ct

   QT_SCALE_FACTOR=2

GTK2 Specific

By default, GTK2 assets are unscaled to prevent breaking Qt5/Qt6's GTK engines. The included script "gtk2-scale" can be put under somewhere like /usr/local/bin and invoked as such:

gtk2-scale <GTK2 APPLICATION>

This will load the scaled GTK2 theme for the currently selected Redmond97 SE theme, but will only work in setups that don't have an xsettings daemon running.

GTK4 Specific

Installing libadwaita-without-adwaita can make most Adwaita applications mostly match the themes.

Theme generator script

(Requires imagemagick, bc, sed, grep, tee and tar to function)

To use the script:

Run gen_theme.sh ./presets/theme_XXX.conf to build/install a theme.

-OR-

-Edit copy/edit a theme to set the desired colors and/or the text shown on Xfce4's Whisker Menu. 6 digit and 3 digit hex codes or RGB color codes must be used. -Run ./gen_theme.sh with the .conf file as an argument to compile and install it to ~/.themes

Alternatively, make-install-all-presets.sh will build everything under the presets directory.

Files are installed to ~/.themes/"$THEME_NAME" and ~/.themes/"$THEME_NAME"-HiDPI if enabled in the configuraton file.

The flag --systeminstall when ran as sudo/su will install to /usr/share/themes instead for either script.

Why

This initially started because I wanted a dark theme with non-flat controls and colors. Windows 95's UI glyphs are very clean and visually clear, so I developed several based on the excellent Redmond97 theme.

However, GTK4 was not supported in it, and I wanted an easy way to get the themes working for Wine as well. I also got my first 4K monitor recently and needed to make all this scale up for it.

As of v1.80, it has finally reached a state where it is not just a replica of the Windows 9x Explorer Shell, but a general UI set that can be used with shell designs of all sorts in Xfce4.

Known Issues

[Metacity+HiDPI] Title fonts in headerbars are tiny . I can't seem to get it to respect any "title_scale" changes in its xml schema.

[Wine+HiDPI] Wine applications' text will be too small at 4K, and if its DPI is manually increased in Winecfg everything will be scaled by that amount, not just text.. It appears to be a conflict with using GDK_SCALE/Xfce4's Windows Scale 2x function.

[Xfce] The PulseAudioPlugin button on Deskbars is one pixel slightly bigger than any other button: This is a technical issue with also making it blend into the Win9x style system tray for horizontal panels.

[Button Shift Effect] Some slight imperfections exist in GTK3/4 and GTK2 support also needs added at some point.

Credits

Sliver X | Redmond 97 SE

https://codeberg.org/Sliver_X/Redmond97-SE

matthewmx86 | Redmond97 (Original GTK2/3/Xf4wm theme):

https://github.com/matthewmx86/Redmond97.git

parhelion22 | Greymond (Bits of GTK4 CSS/reference):

https://github.com/parhelion22/xfce-theme-greymond

Matthieu James & madmaxms | Faenza / Obsidian Icon Themes:

https://github.com/shlinux/faenza-icon-theme

https://github.com/madmaxms/iconpack-obsidian

Gymnasiast | Bug Fixes for Original Redmond97 Theme

bbitmaster | 2x XPM Scaler Utility

Additional Screenshots

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