qvwm

Kenichi Kourai wrote qvwm in 1996, a year after Windows 95 had made a brand-new look the norm. The name is a pun on ninety-five: Q sounds like the Japanese word for nine, and V is the Roman five. Unlike fvwm95, which was fvwm in a costume, qvwm was built from scratch around Microsoft's interface. The taskbar with its clock, the Start menu, Alt+Tab, the window buttons and even the placement of dialog boxes sat where they sat in Windows, and on top of that came virtual desktops, which Windows itself lacked.

The point was a low threshold: someone switching to Linux at work should not have to relearn anything. Development stopped in the early 2000s, as desktop environments took over the role of complete package. IceWM, which borrowed the same visual language but made it its own, lives on; qvwm is a period piece from an era when the Unix desktop's ambition was to look like something else.