Reliving the glory days of the GNOME 2 desktop is but a browser tab away – well, kinda.
The personal website of Benny Powers, a software developer at Red Hat, is not a traditional vertical column of text. Nor is it a slop-soup of purple gradients, rounded glassy cards and monospaced datapoints (a ‘vibe-coded’ aesthetic everywhere right now).
No, it’s an interactive GNOME 2 ‘desktop’. He built it after digesting an essay on how websites used to be weird and playful and unique. Looking at his own site, he decided it wasn’t nearly wacky enough, so restyled it to resemble a working GNOME 2 desktop.
And resemble the classic Linux desktop of yore it sure does!
Only, it isn’t actually a desktop; it’s not a web VM or an emulator running literal GNOME 2 code. It just a a functioning blog/website that was designed to looks like GNOME 2, built using web pieces like Lit framework, View Transitions API and WebMention spec.
Open the Latest Posts folder and (you guessed it) there are ‘documents’ for the latest posts, which you double-click on to open and read. Back out and there’s a grid of folder icons organised by date; those are the post archives.
A quirky, nostalgia-driven website
There’s GNOME 2’s classic dual-panel desktop setup and menus. Windows are draggable and resizable. You can minimise or maximise or close them. The Places menu acts as site navigation and offers links to the developer’s Github and social profiles.
You can change the desktop wallpaper and switch to a dark version of the classic Clearlooks GTK theme1.
On the desktop (by default) a chat window modelled after Pidgin (the interoperable chat client) shows Powers’ social media feeds, terrifically rendered as a conversation. Era-nods extend to the slide decks page which is made to look like OpenOffice’s Impress2.
If you get bored, there’s a working versions of GNOME games like Gnometris and Mines to play with, functional rendition of GNOME’s desktop Calculator and Terminal apps.
In all, plenty of period-accurate detail to trigger pangs of nostalgia in those of us who spent time using Ubuntu (or other Linux desktops) in the late 2000s. This isn’t a historical record or digital museum piece, but it is a creative way to (re)imagine a website.
Less GNOME Web and more GNOME …but web.
You can check it out over at bennypowers.dev.
Next: someone reimagine’s their personal website as Unity 2D (the lighter, flatter Qt/Qml variant used in Netbook Edition). It even recreate every single era-specific bug and glitch. Ubuntu Geeks rejoice (or perhaps just me).
H/t Johndawg.
- This isn’t actually GTK. ↩︎
- For newer Linux users, OpenOffice.org was the forerunner to LibreOffice, the latter being forked from the former because… Well, we don’t have time to go in to to all of that! ↩︎
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