found out about NsCDE last night
https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE
I'm not sure I understand the elements of social realism the developer perceives in the CDE aesthetic, but I do appreciate that someone is dusting off late-'90s workstation look & feel and applying it to a modern window manager, because now I can make a computer look The Way A Computer Is Supposed To Look, without having to suffer through quite so many bad habits of software of the late '90s