Wow. Who knew?
One of the very first posts of mine online from back in November ’99 was about Litestep, a replacement desktop shell for Windows that basically emulated a Linux desktop of the time. Apparently it’s still around. You can check out screenshots and download it at some of the links below. Talk about nostalgic. I may have to give it a spin.
http://litestep-desktop.deviantart.com/