Screenshots
During the nascent era of the Linux desktop it was quite popular to post screenshots of what your desktop looked like. This was a great way to show not only the changes that were happening on the underlying platform, but also discover interesting new apps that you might not have known about.
As you can see below, I took frequent screenshots of my desktop while I was in college. In many cases I would try to make the desktop look busier than it really was. It’s also interesting because it shows that nearly twenty years later, I still use some of these same programs on a daily basis.
November 11, 1997: This is the oldest linux screenshot I have. I ran linux well before this but didn't take any screenshots. Anyway, its a bunch of ApplixWare stuff running. 
March 31, 1998: This prooves that I did at one point in time have Evil Empire on my computer. I was running LiteStep at the time. I had WinAmp running and a session of CuteFTP going. The mail program is Eudora. 
April 19, 1998: The first screenshot I took of KDE Beta 4 to show it to a friend. There is my REALLY old web page showing there, and I am making the graphics in GIMP for version 7.0 of my web page.
May 27, 1998: Just me having a little fun with some of my apps like slickedit and a java program that I never got fully working. It was from before I knew how to use swing. This is my first shot with WindowMaker as my window manager.
July 4, 1998: Just a little something I did to show how I modified my .Xdefaults to make Netscape look a little cooler. The thing at the bottom is an xripple session running. The window manager in this one is WindowMaker 0.16. Also running is a session of BitchX. Oh yeah, and RXVT's with background pixmaps too. 
July 5, 1998: Okay, this is the first real screen shot of my first real theme for window maker. It still needs a bit more work on some parts. Also, you need to add some stuff to rgb.txt so you get the right colors. I'll put it up on my theme page when I deem it good and ready. I want this to be a good theme, not some crappy thing. 
July 6, 1998: This is more or less the final screen shot of the finished version of Esotherix, my WindowMaker theme. It not longer requires you to modify rgb.txt. You can also see my leet-0 color prompts and VIM syntax highlighting. Oh yeah, I also got MESS running a genesis. 
July 26, 1998: Mmm, the more confusing the screenshot the better...I really was just playing around with Wine here. I suppose it would have been cooler if I had turned off the managed option, but then the damn wine windows are always on top, which annoys the hell outta me. 
July 27, 1998: Playing with Enlightenmnet DR0.14. I general a beutiful product but rushed and poorly implemented. Too bad too. 
August 9, 1998: Just thought I would show off some cool stuff going on with my desktop. The dock tile is entirely original and is a resul of me playing around in Gimp for a little while. The background was done by me finding a cool picture on the Hubble Space Telescope's Greatest Hits page. The stuff at the bottom is the result of some blur filters on the black forest postscript font. Also, note the edition of an Emacs icon on my dock. A2000 is trying to convert me. 
October 5, 1998: I stayed up pretty late last night playing with mlvwm and decided, damnit, its pretty cool. I still gotta work on hacking the code a little bit more to make it nicer. The clock up in the corner is a hacked version of mlclock that I worked on. I'm gonna make it read an rc file one of these days for more configurability. 
October 9, 1998: This is me with more fun. I've started to modify mlvwm a little bit in order to make it look a little better. I've finally gotten around to setting up gvim so it works. Also you can see corel word perfect 8 running too....Licq sits down in the bottom corner 
October 18, 1998: All I can say is:WHO'S THE BUBBLE MASTAH?
Absolute Pimp...
October 23, 1998: Mass confusion day...designed to make sure you don't know what the hell I'm really doing. Although I surmise that the xmame should give it away fairly easily...but oh well. 
November 25, 1998: After playing around with MLVWM, I decided it really wasn't worth my effort to hack it all up. So I switched back to good old reliable Window Maker. The background is from Fallout 2 by Black Isle Studios. Although its not Linux, I really like fallout and fallout 2. So Nyah. 
February, 19, 1999: See, I do have to use windows once in a while. Although I don't really like having to. You can see what my desktop looks like. As you may notice, I still use borland c++ 3.1 for do, because vc++ blows. I also have my copy of Max+Plus II open because I was working on lab at the time. (Max+Plus II is a hardware design tool) 
February 22, 1999: Hmm...who says that FreeCIV is ugly? I think it looks pretty damn nice here. This is the GTK interface to it, using the marble3d theme. There are still a few tiny bugs with FreeCiv/GTK, but they are getting fewer I guess. Its prooving to be a really cool game. If only it had some sound effects and music it would almost be commercial quality. If I had the time I would write it in myself... 
March 1, 1999: Okay, I have VI with themes here, and everyone is okay with this? Anyway, this is a shot of Vim 5.4e running on my box with the GTK frontend and the pixmap theme. Normally I use the Marble3d Theme, but this was taken for dramatic effect. 
April 13, 1999: I've been really slacking when it comes to taking new screenshots. I've been running E since right after sprin break. Its groovy now that everythign works. What you see here is the HackerGreen theme. Its small and very functional. Grab it from e.themes.org 
May 14, 1999: This is my desktop at the end of finals week from my sophomore year in College. I was playing with OpenGL during that week out of boredom. 
May 19, 1999: This is a shot of my computer from the CSL when I was going to do research there. It's E with the elfwood theme. I'm also playing around with Java assembly. 
May 28, 2000: A quick shot of my desktop running Helix Gnome 1.2. I just got the new background for Digital Blasphemy and I think it matches well with my usual decor on my desktop. 
June 5, 2000: Just a quick snapshot of my desktop at work. I've spent most of the day trying to make a window manager like interface in Mozilla using the nightly builds so I can get alpha channel transparency support on PNG files. 
June 12, 2000: After too long of a time, I finally went about retheming my desktop at work. The background I took from x.themes.org. I also changed themes and added a mail updater for my home email account in the bottom corner of the screen. 
June 14, 2000: This is an actual screenshot. I took this on pimp, a 1998 Wallstreet Powerbook. You can see MacOnLinux running. I'm still tweaking that some, but it runs all of the mac stuff at normal speed. Also running is Heroes of Might and Magic 3 (the LinuxPPC version). That laptop also has Myth2 and Civ:CTP installed. Overall, it's a sweet setup. The best laptop brand with one of the best OSes. 
June 15, 2000: This is my fun shot...taken on the pimp, running MOL with photoslop inside. Myth 2 on the desktop and vnc connected to dreams' vmware session. Pretty smooth overall eh? 
August 30, 2000: This is my first shot at playing with Xinerama at work. I also had to put some of my productive apps running. This configuration is very unstable and I recommend against xinerama with Dual Voodoo 3 3000's and an AGP Rage 64. It seems to crash randomly. 
September 3, 2000: Behold, the power of Xinerama now at home. This is all done using one video card because I got a Matrox Millenium G400 Max with Dual Head support. The driver doesn't do 3d yet, but I don't use 3d that much. I have a feeling it's going to be very hard to go back to a single desktop. 
August 18, 2001: First screenshot in a long time. You see mozilla 0.9.3 with toy factory running looking at my CVS archive. Some GAIM stuff and also Ximian Gnome 1.4 on RedHat 7.1. 
November 28, 2001: This is just to prove that I was playing Fallout in Linux...cool... 
December 30, 2001: This is just a little shot showing my setup of Emacs 21.1 on my system. I'm back to redhat and it seems to have stabilized now that I've upgraded the libraries for GLIBC that previously crashed my web browser quite often. I'll probably be using Emacs more in the future because it's got some nice features for editing of Lisp. 
July 15, 2002: Just a simple shot showing my desktop using both monitors. I've elected not to use xinerama because I loose acceleration and DGA under xinerama. Using two displays, I can't drag windows back and forth, but I still have accelleration. It also prooves to be much more stable. You can see that I'm running KDE now. Mainly because its support for dual head is so much superior to Gnome. Taken under RedHat 7.3. 
January 20, 2003: It's been a very long time since I had an update to my screenshots page. I'm back at one monitor for the time being because my roommate is using the other one on his computer. I miss dual screens. You can see bits of this new web page, mysql command center, emacs and my desktop icons here. I'm still running KDE and have switched to the liquid theme. No particular reason. Did that a couple of months ago anyway. 
April 13, 2003: I got sick of blue over the weekend. So I first switched my iconset to the most excellent Noia-warm iconset. I also darkened my colors a bit too. I'm using Keramik for my KDE theme and Geramik for my GTK theme here. I think I'll leave my emacs colors as it for a while as they seem to work really well. 
May 21, 2003: Normally I'm a command line guy. However, I discovered something nifty today while mucking around in Konqueror. Apparently, I have a plugin that allows me insert a CD and drag Ogg Vorbis or MP3 files right off the CD. Ripping for brain dead people. Normally I'd just use grip, but this is pretty cool too. 
May 24, 2003: This is the screenshot I took when I first realized that I had become a victim of the slashdot effect. I was slashdotted for posting a weblog on using lpd to spool mp3s. After the fact I did an in depth analysis of what happened. 
March 21, 2004: Time for another screenshot. This one is off my laptop running Fedora Core 1 and Gnome 2.4. Nothing really spectacular to see here, move along now. 
November 21, 2004: Just a little shot of my desktop running Ubuntu (the Warty Warthog). I've got a couple of interesting apps up in the corner. Including RhythmBox, Gaim, and TomBoy. 
June 12, 2008: It's been a really long time since I took a screenshot of my desktop. Oddly enough, you'll notice that it doesn't look that much different than the desktops looked four or five years ago. So much for progress. Of course, I'm also running on about the same machine that I had four years ago too. This is Ubuntu Hardy running GNOME. The apps you see up are Google Reader in Firefox and Twihrl a Twitter client written in Adobe Air.