December 6, 2025
Thirteen years, zero glow-ups
Screenshots from developers: 2002 vs. 2015 (2015)
Geek desktops 13 years later: still all text, no sparkle
TLDR: A 2015 revisit of 2002 developer desktops shows little change: mostly text windows and minimal setups. Comments erupt into a minimalist-vs-modern skirmish, ribbing Richard Stallman’s text-only life and noting Linus Torvalds’ GNOME choice, while jokes about ASCII screenshots and time-traveling Macs fly.
The internet dug up old developer desktop screenshots from 2002 and asked the same legends to show their 2015 setups—and the community is howling because almost nothing changed. Brian Kernighan? Rows of terminal windows. Richard Stallman? Still living in text mode with Emacs (a power-user text editor). Bram Moolenaar (made Vim) and Rasmus Lerdorf (made PHP) are rocking the same terminal chic, with only a browser peeking out. Warren Toomey hopped to Lubuntu but stayed command-line-first.
Commenters quickly crowned the theme: minimalism forever. “Tiled layout, terminals, minimum decorations,” cheered one user, while another roasted Stallman for not submitting a screenshot in 2002—“he could’ve just dumped the screen to ASCII”—turning the idea of an ASCII screenshot into a meme. Meanwhile, someone dropped that Linus Torvalds uses Fedora with GNOME—aka a more polished, clicky desktop (video)—and the thread split into camp “real work happens in terminals” vs “give me a clean, modern desktop”.
The funniest twist: one reader misread “2015” as “2025” and thought people were still using early-2000s Mac visuals, sparking jokes about time-traveling laptops. Verdict: these devs didn’t glow up—they doubled down on speed, simplicity, and tabs on tabs on tabs.
Key Points
- •The author revisited a 2002 developer/Unix desktop screenshot project in 2015, reconnecting with many of the same participants.
- •Brian Kernighan’s setup remained focused on xterm windows to Unix systems, often via an X server like Exceed on Windows.
- •Richard Stallman continued to favor text-mode, using Trisquel under X but primarily working in Emacs within a console.
- •Bram Moolenaar and Rasmus Lerdorf maintained terminal-heavy workflows, with Moolenaar moving from Netscape/KDE to Chrome, and Lerdorf switching from Pine to Thunderbird and using Ubuntu with Unity.
- •Warren Toomey shifted from FreeBSD with fvwm to Linux (Lubuntu) with LXDE, still command-line centric but now using a broad set of GUI tools.