System 7 stuff is going to look very small at 2026 screen resolutions. The widget dimensions on it mostly correspond to the original Mac's dimensions, from 1984.

That being said, it looks like archive.org has archives of kaleidoscope.net's --- the most popular third-party theme engine --- theme archives:

https://web.archive.org/web/20140423004746fw_/http://kaleidoscope.net/schemes/completelisting.shtml

So in theory, somone could make a bulk converter from System 7 themes to GTK or whatever.

checks

https://www.gnome-look.org/browse?cat=135&ord=latest&tag=macos

There's an "Mac OS" category of GTK themes on gnome-look.org, and I imagine that the KDE people probably have something comparable. I haven't used any myself.

Thanks! I’ll try these out tomorrow.

Sidenote: Is there a flying toasters screensaver?

Making KDE look like a Mac is an entire genre of easily downloaded and installed themes:

https://store.kde.org/p/1400409

https://store.kde.org/p/1305006

https://store.kde.org/p/1398837

https://store.kde.org/p/2229017/

It was (and still is) the default input focus to the Search box on the Save dialog. Why? Just.... why? Why would I ever want to start typing in the Search box when I'm saving a file. I have never, ever thought to myself as I saved something that I should search for something to name this thing I'm saving after something else somewhere on this filesystem.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_Dark_(software)

A 3D version of the toasters featuring swarms of toasters with airplane wings, rather than bird wings, is available for XScreenSaver.

That being said, it looks like xscreensaver doesn't presently fully work on Wayland (or didn't as of six months ago):

https://www.jwz.org/blog/2025/07/xscreensaver-6-11/

XScreenSaver 6.11 is out now. This is a Unix-only release -- this version contains preliminary support for Wayland.

This is maybe not entirely ready for prime time, but I figured I'd get it out there so that some people who actually understand Wayland can poke at it.

Why? Just… why?

Any time you ask the Gnome devs this, you can expect the answer to be "elegance". And then they block you.

Ain't no need to preach to your fellow kde gang while I'm here memeing on guhhnome

There are dozens of us!

Glad it works for ya. I know that some bugs seem to be distro-dependent, so i recognize its more stable on some... for me? Nightmare.

"Autohide" n dodge window feature of taskbar broken for several different apps, but not all. Sometimes displaces the border of the windows offscreen trying to hide

Start menu freezes regularly

Dolphin freezes n hangs a lot in general. God it took me all of 3 secs to say " I NEEd to disable that stupid bouncing "LOADING" animation ASAFP"

Sections of taskbar dead/unclickable suddenly... aka bluetooth quick acess or volume controll

Worst is a giant mesh of graphical glitching and artifacts upon waking from sleep, have to close windows, sometimes restart. Seems its a known issue w video caching for nvidia gpus (fucking nvidia, of course)

... Not a complete list. Anyway, I have GNOME installed on exactly the same pc, same distro, none of this bug shit happens.

That's just a good approach to life in general.

I mean, those are nice addons, but the people that ive handed vanilla gnome to whove never used linux before didn't come screaming to me "how fo i dash to dock?!?!"

Like if thats the workflow you want, you just search extensions and customize... but none of these are required to just like sit down and do basic stuff.

Now KDE on the other hand.... Just trying to find out why bluetooth or clock or volume or whatever quick access isnt where i expect on the kde toolbar. or figure out that i right click the correct "separator" to go into a separate like "widget" menu THAT IS TOTALLY SEPARATE FROM THE BASIC SETTINGS APP, or whatever to set those up is just... bizzare.

I tried to use linux on a tablet, I've tried GNOME multiple times since it is apparently the best for touchscreen-only devices.
This was hell.

As much as I'd love to be able to like that thing I just can't.

Zero customisability, everything has to be changed through extensions, but the extension manager isn't even part of GNOME's core and has to be installed separately.

The settings page is severely lacking so I had to configure everything in .conf files or through CLI directly.

And the whole thing is as stable as a one-legged chair on top of a unbalanced washing machine.

KDE extension crashing : "oupsie a part of your desktop crashed and restarted as fast as possible, hope you didn't notice"

GNOME extension crashing : "go fuck yourself, I burned your whole session to the ground, log back in and pray you weren't doing anything worth saving"

In the end I customized KDE to look and behave like GNOME, this way around was surprisingly easier than just making GNOME bearable.

Oh and to the taskbar haters out there : my first computer was running windows 95 so you'll be taking my taskbar from my cold dead hands, only KDE let me fulfill my dream of putting taskbars absolutely everywhere (even got two perpendicular ones on my bottom monitor)

All the JavaScript in gnome make it super icky to me as an ex-webdev, and unusable on hardware that is otherwise perfectly fine with other DEs. From high resource usage, memory leaks, and breaking extensions, I have a hard time believing that their userbase is anyone other than mobile native younger folk who are good at consuming via the iPad launcher paradigm. Just my humble opinion, nothing more.

I like Plasma.

I know, real brave take

Can you elaborate for the curious? I tried searching but couldn't find anything. What's the login to exposé thing?

Fair. It's a personal preference.

KDE does have a default stock experience you know.

Once upon a time, when you logged in you arrived at the desktop. Then typically you'd click a docked application icon or use the hot corner to open the overview (Apple calls it exposé on macOS) and search for an application to start. Some people would just hit the keyboard shortcut and start typing an application name. Very quick.

One day, the gnome team decided that since a lot of people do this, that immediately after logging in you'd arrive directly at this overview/exposé mode ready to type an app name.

Quite a few people didn't like this change, and requested a setting so they could enable/disable it as was their preference. The response from the gnome team was essentially 'get fucked' enshrouded by weak/nonsense justifications for the change and for not making it optional, apparently taking the request as some kind of personal attack.

It was a trivial minor change but the way the team handled it was... lacking.

I love Plasma. It's fast, it's stable, it's beautiful, it's real simple and I intuitive, it's easily customizable via GUI, it's packed with great features (that stay completely out of your way if you don't need them). Even the KDE apps are awesome across the board.

It's all down to preference, yadda yadda, but I honestly don't understand why someone would use something like Cinnamon, XFCE or, god forbid, GN*ME instead of KDE Plasma.

That being said, just use what you wanna use.

I don't care much about whether gnome is customizable, if people like it then great, but I hate how they're forcong terrible patterns that often break other DEs (window decorations)

So... Why is that pronounced "Guhnoo"?

I'm pretty sure you can live without the minimize button.

I know it's not a big deal, but this approach is absolutely insane to me.

"Sure there's a normal feature that a large portion of PC users use semi-regularly - but the GNOME devs don't like it, so why don't you just learn to live without it!"

Yeah, that sounds exactly like the GNOME3 team.

For years, they fought back against giving users the option to change where their dock is, forcing them to be stuck with an asinine vertical dock because "vertical space is at a premium."

They do this because they're lazy and incompetent. They simply do not want more work for themselves and will browbeat any of their users into doing things the "stupid gnome3 way."

Their designers are some of the dumbest people in the industry. Since they have a yes-man/echo chamber culture, they don't ever get to learn from their mistakes because nobody holds them accountable for failure.

just used the salad fork for seafood.

What's wrong with using the same fork for salad and seafood?

Customization is necessary especially in the free software space because designers aren't good enough to make acceptable defaults.

I love KDE, but each new install takes a bit of fiddling to get it just the way I want.

I wouldn't have as much of an issue with GNOME's lack of customization if they didn't make stupid-ass decisions.

I don't think KDE sucks.

I'm very glad to have it. It's the closest thing I can get to Windows 7.

Fair point

I like MATE. It's Gnome with the bugs ironed out. It's very nice.

In principal, Gnome is the archetype that we all seek in a desktop.

I honestly don't understand why someone would use something like Cinnamon, XFCE or, god forbid, GN*ME instead of KDE Plasma.

RAM usage.
I sometime restore machines that just wouldn't handle KDE.
While GNOME is as heavy as KDE, cinnamon is lighter and xfce even more.
An average finished KDE setup eats 4GB for me while a cinnamon one uses 1,5GB and an XFCE one 0,5GB.
This makes KDE close to unusable on older 2 or 4GB systems.

Yeah I don't bother trying to customize any of them

That's the right take. Every couple years I've given KDE a shot for a month and it just won't click no matter how much I configure it, this goes back pre plasma. I dislike gnome but it's closer to what I want out of the box, then popos came along and I realized I just wanted a tiling wm all along but needed the hybrid approach to enjoy adjusting.

Great point!

Might be especially important going forward unfortunately

They're all fine. You get used to one or another and that's what you want. They all have issues and they all have boons. More often or not, it came down to either what your distro defaulted to, or whatever had that one feature you needed when you first installed (factional scaling) and you just stuck there

Could you please not excite cancel culture against a great DE?

Ubuntu Mate sounds like what they call regular Ubuntu in Australia.

Which one? The only thing mentioned by name here is gnome.

They thought they were doing opinionated design while all they really did was ignore valid user concerns

I'll make a deal:

You stop including Gnome as the default DE on mainstream, newbie-friendly distros, and I'll stop talking shit about it.

I think as a GNU project, Gnome is an exception.

Gnome isn't a GNU project any longer. They removed references to GNU from their website when Stallman was brought back as GNU leader after speaking in favor of pedophilia.

In typical Gnome fashion they didn't merely renounce GNU and Stallman, they lied and claimed that Gnome has never ever been a GNU project.

It is included because it is innovative, newby friendly (Windows and Mac are both more complex), It has efficient keyboard navigation by default. And it has pleasant, modern UI by default.

These two statements do not contradict themselves.

I used a few different OSs before Windows 95 and I have also used a taskbar for the past 30 years. It's just a design that I like. It's like I feel grounded or something.

I just use a single taskbar at the bottom of my left-most monitor though. I ain't all fancy like you!

Don't you take this nice flame war away from us!

I am not a bigot. I hate ALL people!

it is innovative

Nah, it's just weird. And doing a lot of things to be different for the sake of being different. Which steepens the learning curve for newbies. (And, worse, may make newbies think all Linux is weird and difficult to learn.)

Just because it's different doesn't mean it's better.

newby friendly (Windows and Mac are both more complex)

'Simplicity' does not necessarily mean it's user friendly. Especially when you're telling them to go download and install more things just so their desktop can do things that EVERY other desktop in the entire world does. I really really wish this paradigm of "removing options = user friendly" would just die already.

(It's not really user friendly, it's developer-friendly. Because there's less for them to build and maintain.)

It has efficient keyboard navigation by default

Every DE does this. Name a single Linux DE that doesn't have efficient keyboard navigation.

And it has pleasant, modern UI by default.

It has a blobby, plastic-looking, overstyled UI by default. But that's just a matter of taste.

(And if you don't like their default UI ... well, you're screwed, because they really don't want you to change it.)

Sounds kinda nice, I mist admit.

If somebody is coming from a different DE he wants the same interactions that they used to do. It's easy to hate Gnome because people see that first. And they find:

• there's no tray
• what's that line at the top
• where's the start menu
• where are the opened apps
• is the app drawer really that ugly

And these are only expectations and you just learn to do things differently.

Just because it has a different workflow that big players implanted in people, Linux needs to match that?

The worst thing you can do is to install a dock extension to make it feel like you are in your previous DE. If you want to get the real Gnome experience, you need to let it be Gnome.

As for the design, it's indeed subjective, but we can agree that it is modern with balanced spacing. You can feel that a graphic designer worked on it. And if you don't like it, that's the same as with other DEs, install a theme. As you can't change QT apps to use titlebar you can't change GTK apps to use app menu instead.

And finally the keyboard efficiency: Indeed every major DE is keyboard efficient, but I wasn't expecting it for Gnome when I was learning it, because I'm videos, you always see clicks, so I mentioned it.

People did. That's how we got MATE and Cinnamon; much better desktop environments.

I'll give KDE a try again when they provide a way to track all of my settings via dotfiles. I tinker with shit a lot and I need the ability to track it all with a VCS. I've always kept KDE as a backup but its accrued so much config junk over a decade that its actually a pretty janky experience, and I'm not comfortable just nuking all my dotfules.

Something's not right here. You must be using more features with kde than the other desktops. Agreed the xfce is lighter, but the comparison isn't that drastic. Kde will easily run on 4th ram systems. Configure it the same as xfce and you are at about 2GB ram.