There is a nice fork of xfwm4. This uses GTK 2 and this would allow a retro-styled Linux desktop and not require GTK 3. Much more fitting if the user does not want a newer GTK installation. And the older Linux desktops seemed to be more sleek and fast compared to modern versions anyway. I loved the look of the older GTK themes like Simple, and it would be great to be able to use those today. There is a fork of xfwm4 on this repository and also a nice theme that will suit this very well. If a classic icon theme was used as well, it would complete the look. I do not like the direction the Linux desktop is heading in. It really needs one unified desktop environment that would be familiar to Windows users, and icons in the file picker for users of Firefox and image manipulation programs when picking a file to open. Apparently, it is too complicated to implement icons in the file picker, but it shows a list view, why not add an icon view? Macintosh has this and has had it for ages. This is a screenshot.
https://github.com/zephyyy/xfwm4. A fork of xfwm4 repo with gtk2.
https://github.com/zephyyy/Tgc-fork. A lovely GTK theme that will suit a retro styled desktop.
There is a request on Github dating back to 2004 asking for icons in the file picker, but the useless Gnome developers have not implemented this as of Jul 2022.
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/233.
This really needs to be fixed.