> To me, the big aesthetic of early Qt/KDE1 is "Obvious Motif ripoff". Aside from the Win95/Warp style titlebars, if you don't have the big thick bevels and the distinct scroll bars, it's not quite right.
This is a KDE1 screenshot: https://diit.cz/sites/default/files/kde1-snapshot01.png
Is this really a Motif ripoff? For me it's much more like Win95 with a better titlebar in the window decoration. To each their own, but it seems quite right to me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_Desktop_Environment_1#/media... Evidently they offered both the Win9x and Motif-like themes back then too, I guess I never bothered with it.
I can recall trying Beta 4 and probably 1.0, but at the time it felt like a weird situation. It wasn't quite everything you needed, and a lot of the apps were still obviously sort of immature. The HTML-driven file manager was interesting (ISTR OS/2 offered a similar way to customize things on a per-directory level) but it seemed like a lot of resources when a 486/80 with an obscene 32Mb of memory was my Linux machine.
Of course you thought that was a Motif ripoff. The screenshot you reference is from an alpha pre-release version. KDE1 had neither the widget style nor the window decorations of that screenshot.