Comment by yankcrime
9 days ago
A modern reimagining of Windows 2000's UI - professional, simple, uncluttered, focused, no cheapening of the whole experience with adverts in a thinly-veiled attempt to funnel you into Bing - with modern underpinnings and features such as WSL2 would have me running back towards Microsoft with open arms and cheque book in hand.
Not an obligation, but ReactOS exists and needs help:
https://reactos.org/donate/
Surprisingly close. I recently tried its package manager and installed a recent Python! So better than the original XP-era Windows in some respects.
I’ve been watching ReactOS development for years and and progress is slow but steady. I’m excited for the point where it will be fully usable as a drop in replacement for old Windows software.
There are Linux distros that meet your description (no need for WSL2 either!). I am guessing you're not running towards them with open arms and cheque book in hand ... or maybe you already ran to Linux and are just nostalgic about going back to Microsoft ... ?
Linux UIs can’t even align fonts correctly within the elements.
It is miles away from the original and you can immediately see its Linux because things don’t quite line up. Huge difference in quality, attention to detail, and the entire interface becomes unpleasant to look at.
Also, Linux power management and lack of hibernation means its useless on laptops
I do not know what kind of Linux UI you have seen, but the problem mentioned by you is certainly not universal.
I have never seen it, but it may exist, because there are many kinds of Linux UI that I do not use, e.g. Gnome.
That said, I have seen many Linux GUI applications that are ugly, at least by default, but many of them can be reconfigured to be beautiful enough.
I have never been content with the default appearance of any Linux distribution, but the good ones can be customized to look completely different and better than Windows, especially if you replace all default fonts with some high-quality fonts.
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Out of curiosity, when was the last time you used Linux on a laptop platform? Anecdotally, it's come a long way since 5 years ago - daily driving Ubuntu 24.04 on my Thinkpad, and I can get 8 hours of use (engineering workload) in a day. It's not ARM level of performance, but far from "useless".
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> Also, Linux power management and lack of hibernation means its useless on laptops
I gotten better battery life under Linux than on Windows on every Thinkpad I've owned in the last 15 years or so.
That's not to say everything is smooth sailing. Audio is a battle I'll still be fighting on my deathbed in ~40 years.
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Plenty of distros/skins get it 99% of the way there for a similar looking screenshot but only 25% of the way there for the actual user interface experience. ReactOS is probably the closest (in terms of going down a holistic user interface approach) but saying it's 25% the way there to being a finished solution would be generous.
While DEs often emulate the look of macOS or Windows, they always get the feel wrong. You can put a global menu bar, Dock, etc into KDE, but ultimately it still acts like KDE and nothing like macOS.
It's not like macOS or Windows is the pinnacle of UI. I'm on Fedora Silverblue, and it's so relaxing to not deal with the usual ['Yes', 'Not Now'] prompt on notifications. Or have your computer became suddenly unresponsive because of random scans you can't disable.
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Sounds like you are describing XFCE.
I made the switch to a *nix OS with XFCE 20 years ago. Couldn’t be happier.
Windows Whistler (XP Beta) had an interesting theme that was like a bit modernized Windows 2000. Small non-rounded title bars, non-obnoxious taskbar, etc. Too bad they never finished it and offered a stable version for Windows XP users.