Comment by walrus01

I think in some regards, classic GUI interfaces peaked in about 2002/2003 with KDE2. The influence of Win95/98/NT4 on KDE was definitely there, but they took it in its own unique direction. Definitely some inspirations from NeXT as well.

I had a really nice FreeBSD+xfree86+KDE setup at that time. The closest I can come now is something based on XFCE4.