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Desktop Environments in GNU/Linux and BSDs
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HowTo Geek ☛ 3 design decisions from 1990s Linux that modern desktops still can't improve on
Xerox PARC effectively created the paradigm of the GUI (Graphical User Interface) in the 1970s, with overlapping windows, icons, menus, and everything else a computer user today would easily recognize.
But, it wasn't until the '90s that this design would really be put through the crucible of real-world users. Sure, Windows 1.0 was released at the end of 1985. However, it was in the ’90s that the GUI became truly ubiquitous. Apple may have sold millions of Macs with GUIs by then, but that's just a drop in the bucket compared to the PC explosion of the '90s. One of the earliest installable distros, MCC Interim Linux, was released in 1992. So the Linux community joined the desktop race just as graphical computing was bursting into the mainstream, figuring out what a Unix-style GUI for ordinary PC users should look like.
Some of the design decisions the Unix and Linux desktop communities preserved, refined, and popularized in the '90s were so good that they would eventually show up in mainstream operating systems by Microsoft and Apple, and to this day they haven't fundamentally been improved upon.
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BSD
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NetBSD ☛ Google Summer of Code 2026 Reports: Port the Enlightenment desktop environment to NetBSD, part 2
Enlightenment desktop is a low on resources desktop environment without sacrificing on visuals. NetBSD support for this BSD-licensed desktop has been left a few years behind. The aim of this project is to port the newest version of the desktop to pkgsrc and commit upstream portability fixes when necessary to ease future versions updates for NetBSD.
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