Windows 9x aesthetic is good, except for non antialiased fonts. The same can be said about CDE. Take a look a modern lookalike with AA fonts: https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE .
Fonts in nscde still look blurry to me, maybe it is missing kerning or hinting... but looks much better to my eyes.
Fonts in NsCDE are system XFT fonts. Whatever you install on your Unix/Linux system, and however you configure your XFT library (usually in /etc/fonts/fonts.conf) you will have it.
Personally, I prefer the middle ground: sligtly antialiased, but high quality sans family fonts like Bitstream Vera and Bitstream Vera Mono, not default classic serif font which is default for historical reasons, just like "Broica" color scheme.
Eh. The beige and green just look ugly to me and the boxiness of the UI isn’t pleasing to the eyes. That’s my opinion, sure, but I’d say there’s a reason why Microsoft and Apple have went with the designs they currently have.
CDE has some pleasing color options to choose from. The blockiness of the UI is really brutalist but maybe it is a matter of what one is used to. When watching Hollywood movies in the 90's it looked modern, almost sci-fi.
Maybe the windows aesthetic was influenced by hardware limitations of the time: smaller screens, lower resolutions and somewhat blurry CRTs. Windows on a modern larger, higher DPI e very sharp LCD will look small and hard to differentiate smaller details; CDE on a large high DPI screen makes it very easy to differ smaller details and the borders "better communicate" limits.
I like KDE 1.0 appearance. It's got a good balance of influences from CDE, OS/2 and Windows.
Why are you judging the whole DE on the basis of default color scheme (replaceable 5 clicks away with 15-20 ready made color schemes after log in)? One can even compose it's own scheme by clicking "modify", name it and save it.
Fonts in nscde still look blurry to me, maybe it is missing kerning or hinting... but looks much better to my eyes.