Debian goes retro with a spatial desktop that time forgot

The Desktop Classic System is a rather unusual hand-built flavor of Debian featuring a meticulously configured spatial desktop layout and a pleasingly 20th-century look and feel.

DCS, as project creator "Mycophobia" calls it, has been around in one form or another since 2023, but it came to the attention of The Reg FOSS desk thanks to mentions on the Lobste.rs community and a few days later on OSnews.

It's a minimalist, opinionated setup of Debian 13 "Trixie" with the MATE desktop, specially configured for spatial operation. That itself is a rare thing in the 21st century, but it's not the only unusual thing about this distro. There's no ISO image available, just a ZIP file containing the files needed to put on a blank FAT32 USB key to make it bootable.

Incidentally, merely copying some files onto a FAT32 volume isn't enough to make it ...