https://postimg.cc/gallery/fY4SYgC
Just some screencaps I took.
Pic1: Gnome 1.4 on Debian 3
Pics 2-3: KDE 2.2 (I think) on Debian 3
Pics 4-5: Gnome2 on Debian 3.1
It was a fun experience. I was inspired to look into this after starting an LGR video where he upgrades one of his old computers from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95. There's a lot of YouTube content like that (old Windows, old Macintosh) but there is not so much love for old Linux. For people trying to make money on YouTube it probably also wouldn't get as many nostalgia clicks as Windows or Macintosh would. And I guess there aren't as many fun games to run and show off, either, and the working with old Linux is more tedious (the Linuxes I installed were from the 2000s, even, not the 90s). Microsoft and Apple had the capability and resources to publish their operating systems with polish. Linux didn't really have that kind of effort for a long time, and work from companies like Red Hat and SUSE didn't pan out for a long while. Canonical didn't even exist until the mid-2000s.
The installer improved substantially for Debian 3.1 over 3.0, and it feels a bit more like installing Debian today. In either case, the performance is a bit low within the emulator and setting up xfree86 reliably is still more effort than no effort, even without real hardware to worry about. I installed Debian from later revision CD/DVDs with updated packages, so there wasn't a great need to use apt-get with http sources to get (old) updates, but that's still an option if you correctly point your /etc/apt/sources.list to archive.debian.org.
I initially tried this with KVM/QEMU but I was having a poor time getting proper CD-ROM support that way, and an awful time getting X to work. I think the kernel is just too old and some expected module just doesn't exist to interact correctly. Or, more likely, I just didn't know how to configure the VM correctly.
My brief experiences here inform me that I prefer KDE 2 to Gnome 1, but I prefer Gnome 2 to KDE 3. But no matter what I prefer Linux to other operating systems.