The smooth, tile-based interface of Metro/Modern UI of Windows 8 and the Windows Phone are underrated in my opinion. It was simple, fast, and focused on touch. While I didn't have a touch-based Windows 8 laptop or tablet at the time, I had a Windows Phone, and I enjoyed using it more than any other device I've had since.
> The ... UI of Windows 8 and the Windows Phone... underrated in my opinion. It was ... focused on touch.
That's why it was rated low. Most people were using this interface on PC's and laptops, without a touchscreen, where a touch-focused interface does not make sense. Maybe it was good choice for Windows Phone or Windows Tablet, but people were not rating it based on that experience. The very idea of using a single UI for both a touchscreen-oriented and no-touchscreen, kbd-and-mouse computers is the most problematic aspect of it.
> It was simple
No, it wasn't simple. There was the simple part, but things not integrated into the simple part were a hodge-podge of previous Windows versions' UI. Now, I like some of the previous Windows versions' UI, but putting a simple veneer on something does not make it simple; if anything, a little more complex.
> It was fast
The fact that an OS UI in the 2010s or 2020s need to be commended for being fast is kind of sad. Plus - I don't believe it was that fast. Did you try running it on, say, a 15yro machine relative to the Win8 launch time? i.e. 1998? Even with a 10yro machine I believe it was kind of sluggish.
It was amazing. Ran circles around Android on weaker hardware, but because duopoly duo didn’t want to accept competitor it was artificially hamstrung and subsequently killed.
I liked it too. But it never was great. E.g., I remember that the calculator had date computations, but the year input was a dropdown going from 1900 to 2100 or something like that.
The Lumia Icon/930 I had was genuinely the best phone I have ever used, from both a hardware quality and software perspective. It made the competing iPhone 5 look like garbage.
Spont on, I always considered WinRT, .NET Native, C++/CX is what COM evolution should have been back in 2001, instead of the J++ reboot.
However the way Microsoft has messed it all up, no one is left besides Windows team and some hardcode believers, to care about WinRT/WinUI any longer than what is only available via WinAppSDK.
How many abandoned attempts do you feel the Microsoft mobile developer ecosytem could take before losing all faith in yet another MS mobile strategy?
In the mobile space, there was no market for just Windows Phone apps. You needed to support native Android and iOS already. WP was just another burden without a clear return.
In their desperation they started paying college students for developing apps for the platform, leading to low quality experiences.
They pushed WP hard to their channel. Many employees in MS system integrators and managed services got very cheap phones, but outside that group, just nobody bought them before in the end they started dumping them to the masses as cheapest phone in the store, but there ain't no serious market there either.
I honestly think that the windows phone development experience is where Microsoft majorly shit the bed. The sheer volume of breaking changes (and the severity of those breaks) meant rewriting a non-trivial amount of your app from version to version. I know multiple developers that just dropped support for windows phone as a result.
If it wasn't for the T-Mobile Sidekick, Microsoft probably wouldn't have had to buy Nokia.
Here's the story:
I worked on the infrastructre for the predecessor to Android, the Danger Hiptop, AKA "The T-Mobile Sidekick." (This is my real name, you can see when I worked on it on LinkedIn.)
The "Danger Device" as everyone called it, had cloud storage and a full web browser before Android and before iPhone.
In fact, the first Android basically looks like the successor to the T-Mobile sidekick, because many of the people that worked on Android, including the founder, were from Danger.
*Here's the funny part:*
This is hearsay, so please do not sue me Microsoft. I once saw an article online that confirmed the following story, but the article is long gone (this was more than 20 years ago.)
Again: Don't sue me Microsoft. I am telling a story here, that I heard through the grapevine:
*Microsoft blew up the entire "Sidekick" project.*
But they didn't blow it up intentionally. Basically, Danger ran on Sun Solaris, and when Microsoft bought them, a great deal of the infrastructure was trucked over to Microsoft. As I understand it, nothing was ported, they basically just plugged the gear in.
At some point, the backups failed.
Keep in mind: ALL THE USERS DATA WAS IN THE CLOUD. Nobody was doing this at the time, not Android, not Apple. Just Danger - and then Microsoft.
While restoring from backups, someone was feeling the heat for the mobile devices being down for so long. It takes a long time to do a restore.
One thing led to another, a decision was made... and they lost all the data.
*poof*
Gone forever.
The death of the Sidekick has been documented in various articles, but there was only ONE that got the story correct, and it was nuked over a decade ago. Here's one of the (partially correct) details: https://abcnews.go.com/Business/sidekick-disaster-shows-data...
I've got a story about the first big celebrity hack too, that was the Sidekick also. (And likely was possible because of the Sidekick's cloud storage.)
* The Sidekick servers were moved to Microsoft, and I believe they were moved from where I last saw them, which was at T-Mobile's data center in Washington.
* There weren't a heck of a lot of Solaris experts at Microsoft at that time.
* According to the PDF above, someone had posted a job ad for a database administrator for the project, two months before the database blew up.
So if we connect the dots (this is speculation Microsoft, don't sue me):
It seems possible that the database for the Sidekick service was the responsibility of someone at T-Mobile or Danger, until Microsoft acquired Danger. My hunch is that it was probably TMo, because the founder of Danger left to go start Android in 2003. By the time Microsoft bought Danger in 2008, a lot of the original Danger folks were working on Android.
It sure seems like the outage was most likely caused by an inexperienced DBA taking responsibility for a database that had been the responsibility of the same DBA (at Danger, or more likely, TMo) for over half a decade.
And that ONE database outage probably changed the entire course of mobile phone history. IMHO, Microsoft wouldn't have purchased Nokia in 2014 if Danger hadn't blown up in 2008. And Danger was way ahead of the iPhone and Android in 2005.
In some alternate universe, there is no Android, there is just Microsoft Sidekick and Apple iPhone.
Live tiles are nearly universally praised in retrospect, but it might be a case of hindsight bias [1]. The video [2] brings up some problems of the concept and why no other company copied the concept.
I think if Microsoft had made an easier bridge, faster from Win32 to things like Live Tiles (and the Charms, too) there would have been a lot more people praising the Live Tiles today (and maybe even the Charms). Live Tiles really made their case on Windows Phone 8 where nearly every app supported them (relatively well), that was the only "Notification Center" for missed notifications, and its glanceability became very obvious.
Charms are somewhat similar, too. On iPhone almost every app needs a Share button somewhere and almost every app still has it in a different place today. On Windows Phone 8 it was much more obvious why a dedicated OS-level Share button accessible just about anywhere in any app was pretty great. On Desktop it wasn't seen as helpful as almost no apps supported it (either as shareable things or as apps that could be shared to) because there was no easy Win32 bridge and Microsoft also didn't think to try to integrate with clipboard operations until too late in Windows 8.1 (and then never quite delivered it because most everyone had already written off the Charms by then), as what could have been a potentially easy path to use the existing Windows "share paradigm" to bootstrap.
(You can make cases for the other 4 Charms as well beyond the Share charm, but the Share charm is the most obvious where Windows Phone proved it was a good idea but the Desktop didn't have enough supporting apps to also prove it there.)
Are live tiles universally praised? I see them mentioned positively occasionally, but I suspect they are getting some benefit… like, they are the Windows 8 feature that isn’t immediately obnoxious. Windows 8’s UI just didn’t have any redeeming features, so the element that is merely bad gets brought up as a sort of “see I’m not a relentlessly negative hater, I’m objective” thing, I bet. Is there a name for this trope?
The problem MS created was WP7 was a technical dead end: a feature phone OS with a Silverlight UI, which was almost impossible to bypass, hurting third party support a lot.
WP8 was a far "better" OS, but it came with higher system requirements more comparable with Android.
Google never got enough crap on for their stunts with youtube in that era though.
Yeah I agree. It was a little weird without a touch screen, but at that point I was not navigating the start menu visually with a mouse anymore anyway.
Windows phone was great. I think I got it when Android was still growing up. I liked the focus and the speed for sure.
Microsoft's bread and butter is no longer OSes, I think, and it's unfortunately starting to show.
I really liked the idea of what they did with the start menu of win8. Whenever I opened the start menu, my intent was to focus on look for something in the start menu, not multitask, so live tiles were perfect. IIRC I even wrote a couple of toy apps with those tiles. Win8.1(blue?) was much more polished experience though, original 8 had a lot of rough edges.
I had an original Lenovo yoga and boy the desktop touch experience was bad. Hardware wise it wasn't winning any prizes either. The cooler died a couple of times and replacements were a pain to procure.
This. The “mobile-ization” of desktop interfaces is a bane on current computing. The metaphors of work between desktop and mobile devices are wildly different.
Obligatory car analogy: a mechanic working in his shop has a completely different set of tools available than if he was going into the field to fix a car.
I had an Android phone and my friend had a Windows Phone. I wanted to get a Windows phone but by the time I came around to needing a new device it was already killed off. Too bad.
Boy I could not stand Windows 8. Unfortunately, many of their techniques were copied into Linux distribution views and it made my life worse. The new start menu was perhaps the worst.
It created this massive doorway effect where I'd hit Start and the whole screen would whiz and spin and then there'd be all these moving tiles and I'll forget what I hit Start for. Frequently I'd then hit Esc, remember, and Start again. This was compounded by the fact that if you started typing after hitting start it wouldn't just filter to the applications. God knows what it would actually do but not that.
I was one of the people who enjoyed Windows Vista (which introduced sudo to Windows users) and Windows 7 and even Windows 10 after which the i7-4790k machine I had to do the Windows was no longer eligible for Windows 11 so I have no idea what that looks like.
Yes you are correct that after Windows 8 we had this obsession in Linux-land with making applications more "full-screen" and less "distracting", at a time when screen resolutions were increasing significantly and you could actually make use of the increased screen resolution for multiple side-by-side windows. It seemed to be a backwards move, and I never went to GNOME 3 from GNOME 2. macOS was also guilty of this, where the "maximise" equivalent button became a daft "full screen" button (why would I need a fullscreen calculator on a 24" screen?).
The obnoxious Windows start menu was on Windows Server for a while, and it was unbearable. Sadly the Start menu in Windows 11 is just as useless, and I miss the performance of the Windows 98 / NT / 2000 / XP (in simple mode) menu where you could press Start > P > A > N (or Start > P > across right > N) and know it would go Start > Programs > Accessories > Notepad in 4 keypresses in lightning time.
We have never returned to this speed or efficiency.
"We" have on Linux. On KDE, that't Alt-Space, kw (it probably shows KWrite now), Enter. That is KRunner, but the start menu thing has a similar feature, too.
I maybe get hate here, but i like the start menu of win11(without counting the AI/Ads part) more than winXP.
The search in Win 11 is better. For ex: I need to change display timeout setting. I vastly remember it's in "power option" menu, and power option is in control panel. But i cant remember exactly how to reach "power option" from "control panel". In windows 11, i can just type "power option" and it would direct me to the power option screen, meanwhile in XP, i had to explore around before reaching it.
I think "Search" in Start menu is kind of heading in right direction(imo they should remove the search-on-internet), just need to improve performance.
In that case, may I suggest macOS Tahoe and i(Pad)OS 26?
I hated that UI so much, I'm glad I barely had to use it (that it was slow was due to underperforming hardware, esp. laptops, for which it arguably wasn't meant to run on).
In the meantime, I'll migrate away from anything Apple, for two reasons: 1) I don't want to be dependent on a US company for my OSes, and 2) thank you very much Apple for this design choice making #1 a lot easier. But what I cannot say is 3) it is slow and buggy. I mean, the design itself is bad if you ask me, but the OSes aren't slow. The hardware can deal with it.
Talking about the design, the further we get from 2012, the more obvious it becomes that windows 8 was kinda like the bauhaus movement for an operating system that wanted to be on touch screens but was made to work on traditional mouse-keyboard interface. It was technically correct, aesthetically pure but socially rejected because it was too stark for the general public (my opinion).
This implementation gets one thing most Metro clones miss, i.e the typography as structure paradigm. In Win8, there were no divider lines or heavy drop shadows to denote hierarchy. The hierarchy was defined strictly by the weight and size of the font.
We spent the last decade drifting back into glassmorphism and mica materials (win11) because people missed the comfort of texture but from a pure information density and rendering performance perspective - the flat, monochromatic 2D plane of windows 8 is a nice tangent. It removed the cognitive load of decoding the UI chrome for touch users.
ps: I'm impressed by the constraint of using native Qt/C++ here instead of taking the easy route with electron or QML/javascript bindings for everything.
The cognitive load it's trying to guess where the button lies in the interface for flat screens.
Not an issue under GTK2/3/4 with Zukitre (and QT5/6 reusing it with qt5ct/qt6ct or with an
environment variable setting QT_STYLE_OVERRIDE to "gtk2" or similar.
I didn't remember having issues finding buttons on windows 8.
While they were certainly flat, they were always clearly signaled from my memory - did other people have this issue?
To be clear, when it was released I was one of the people hating on it, but it grew on me over time - and after I installed startisback, which essentially just scaled down the start screen/Metro ui to a slightly larger start menu ... It was a decent UX again, to me.
The only thing worth saving from windows8-10 is the windows border. it is a huge usability win. Clear borders. square (so it's also fast). clear colors showing which window has focus. It's also funny this show up now a day after the top post was the osx windows border radius fiasco.
yet no linux WM has a decent windows8-10 window border clone.
KDE used to but since the rewrite of the theme from kde5+ they not only killed it, but also removed the option to have sane window border color to show focus. Now it's "accent color" which should be non contrast because they will force that same color on toolbars and such, just like all the bad ideas from office-ribbon era.
well there is the default style for openbsd's fvwm. clear borders, grab handles, contrasting fg/bg colors. But I won't go so far as to say it is decent.
Anyhow it's bold to claim that there are no linux window managers to rival win8, linux is like the paleozoic of desktop interfaces. It has the opposite problem there are too many of the infernal things.
I call that comment a bit of bullshit. XFWM from XFCE, Fluxbox/OpenBox have nearly every titlebar theme in existence, with even better borders than Windows 8 ones.
I am not exaggerating when I say they could be over 1000 themes for Fluxbox/Blackbox.
The default XFWM themes (coming from XFCE 4.10) include several ones with a even a clear grabbable border, if not all of them.
We had the Bluecurve theme from Red Hat when some HN users
didn't even start Elementary school.
And with FVWM literally you could mimick any interface ever.
on KDE5-6, ironically, to have high-contrast windows and square borders, one must use something written because the author wanted round corners on older versions of kde :)
> Wow they ported Windows Millennium Edition to Linux??
Aw, come on.
WinME had the exact same UI as Win2000, and for a lot of us, that was the peak of Windows' design.
Secondly, Win11 is worse than ME in every important way. ME was all right once it got a few fixes, and worked great on very low-end kit that NT wouldn't look at.
As much as the UI was fluid, smooth and probably best for a touch interface, I distinctly remember I hated it and frantically wanted my Start button back on my PC. It is kinda funny reading all the comments about its nostalgia, when all I could think was how annoying it was. I guess to each their own :-).
I always use the Windows key instead of pressing the start menu button, so I didn't really care. I always thought it made more sense as a Tablet / Touch OS, and for people without a touch screen, Windows 8 was just terrible. It had good intentions, poorly executed.
Apple did not even bother with touch screen laptops on the other hand.
My favorite goof of Windows 8 was the most googled question: "how do I turn it off?"
It required stupid mouse witchcraft and incantations to shut off if you weren't in a touch screen.
Windows 8 was Microsoft thinking everyone was going to use touch screens for EVERYTHING and ruining the non-touch screen experience for most.
I think around that time was when Ubuntu switched from Gnome to Unity as well. What a mess that was. Seemed like all the UI teams had lost their minds at once.
I also use the Windows key, but even then the WHOLE screen animating and changing to a different solid color was super jarring and tiring IMO. I much prefer a small popup like they have now
> Apple did not even bother with touch screen laptops on the other hand.
> Windows 8 was Microsoft thinking everyone was going to use touch screens for EVERYTHING and ruining the non-touch screen experience for most.
Did/Does anyone actually use the touch screen on a laptop? Surfaces still ship with a touchscreen, so I assume they've done their market research.... It just seems like the trackpad/keyboard are the better ways to interface with your laptop, especially when it's already built in and not BT accessories or something. I hate to sound like an Apple fanboy but I'd assume the thought process was something along the lines of "Customers want touch screens on phones and tablets, not laptops"
My laptop fills the role of "Desktop computer on the go" and I want it to emulate that as close as possible, aside from form factor. Maybe I'm in the minority there? Others do use a laptop as a primary 'daily driver' and want the touch screen?
I would never used the phrase "good intentions" in combination with Windows 8.1.
Say you had a mechanic you brought your car to for an inspection and they would set it on fire in the parking lot because of "evil ghosts" since they heard a squeak that sounded like evil ghosts speaking. Calling what they did "good intentions just poorly executed" isn't really fitting is it?
Microsoft got hit by a case of delusion on a corporate level where seemingly good arguments combine to create the completely wrong conclusions.
On "regular computers" I think it was flawed in two fatal ways:
- there was already an extremely heavy expectation that clicking the start button or pressing the windows key would bring up a menu, not a full screen takeover where all contextual sense of place (that you had in the past experience) was lost.
- the UI being a full-screen takeover on a phone (Windows Phone) or a tablet (10"-ish tops at the time) was OK but on a 21~27" desktop it's absurdly overwhelming.
The start screen is something you just had to get used to. I think it's more comfortable than the menu. Effectively it works as a second desktop to put application shortcuts on. I have about 30-40 on mine (on Windows 10, mind you), which is way more than would fit on a menu without submenus.
Tbf the mobile OS with a similar design language was the best mobile UI I ever had the pleasure of using. Last time I felt impressed by Microsoft but alas.
Me too! Metro design was, I don't know, a whole different league compared to Apple or the Androids of that time. I'm not sad that MS failed on that front, but damn, that was a good mobile phone UI.
It did a few things right relative to Vista but it was also bad in many different ways, including but not limited to the (double) Control Panel
So it was a bit of a love/hate relationship.
Windows 2K is still the best ever made by Microsoft. I wish they'd just stay on that design and make incremental improvements to keep it fresh and modern.
>It is kinda funny reading all the comments about its nostalgia, when all I could think was how annoying it was.
Agreed and it happens with almost every sunsetted version of Windows. At the time of XP, it was how great W98SE was, and in 7, XP was so amazing, etc., etc. I think the "every other version" meme has only recently been killed by MS because it has been so long from 8.1 to 10 to 11. But even when 11 is sunsetted, there will surely be articles about how amazing 11 was and how much they dislike 12.
First thing I did after installing upgrading to Windows 8 was installing Startisback and I forgot I was even running it. I'm not exaggerating, one time a friend sitting by asked if I was it was Windows 8 and I had to think for a moment.
Windows 8.1 combined with StartIsBack was a much better OS than Windows 10 I was actually surprised when everyone praised that ad pushing piece of crap with mandatory spyware, forced updates and inconsistent UI all over the place.
What I find slightly amusing is that my Chromebook used to have a center-aligned task menu. Now Windows has a center-aligned task menu and Chrome OS...aligned it left!
My first experience with it was I couldn't figure out how to shut down my pc (the stupid side charm bar) on Beta 1 of Windows 8.
It was last seen perhaps in the Windows 11 Beta 1 release, confined within the start menu and I think this is where it peaked. It was removed shortly after to the yuck we have now, perhaps slightly coming back in 25H2 with the New Windows 11 start menu experience app groups (I have not personally used it)
I too hated original metro on desktop back in the day and especially missed the start menu, but I also look back on it fondly.
I think that Microsoft was ahead of its time and that they had a better design language than any competitor and original metro still holds up favorably to contemporary designs.
Last time I sat down with a windows 11 pc I even thought “wouldn’t it be better if the start menu was just full screen?”
I think 8.1 and later fixed a lot of this, but in 8, even if you were on a 100% "desktop" device using mouse and keyboard, whenever you'd "close" an app, it would take to the huge start screen instead of your desktop, and you'd have to find the "desktop" button to get back to that.
This is some of what I wrote in July 2013 as suggestions for how Windows 8 should change behavior when mouse and keyboard is present:
• By default, boot to the desktop. (This is a new individually available option in Windows 8.1.)
• By default, return to previous applications. Similar to Windows Phone and Windows 7, when you close an application, you should return to where you were before. If you are in any kind of desktop experience when launching an application, whether it's for the desktop or in the Modern interface, you should return to that desktop environment upon closing the application.
• By default, open media files and documents in desktop applications. Fortunately, when you select these as your defaults, you are properly returned to the desktop when you close the application. Unfortunately, any Modern applications return you to the Start Screen when you close them.
• By default, if there is no touch screen, disable hot corners and edges. Provide an option to enable them within your mouse-driven experience.
• By default, if there is no touch screen, provide a classic Start Menu in addition to the Start Screen. Mice are well-suited to smaller menus that pop out and allow you to remain largely in the desktop experience while you select new files and applications to open. Provide an option to disable the Start Menu and jump to the Start Screen if desired.
• Upon first run and selection of the mouse-driven experience, run a video demonstration introducing users to the Modern interface, Start Screen, hot corners, gestures, charms, Windows Store and Modern applications, focused on how to access these items with a mouse and keyboard.
• By default, provide a Search experience tailored to the desktop environment.
"Most of the above options already exist in Windows 8, but it takes some information, time and effort for users to change the settings and get the experience you expect when using a system without a touch screen, largely driven by mouse control. It is in these conditions that users are frustrated by Windows 8, as they find themselves faced with interfaces that are much friendlier to touch screens, and are unexpectedly removed from the desktop experience and placed into the Modern interface and Start Screen, disrupting their workflow and adding extra steps to return to the windows, applications and tasks they were working in. An overall one-click default upon first usage of Windows would allow users to select the mouse-driven experience they prefer on systems that are not primarily driven by touch."
Funny how almost everybody hated the Windows 8 desktop environment. And to this day, Windows 8 is still seen as one of the worst versions of Windows for that reason, even if it was pretty decent under the hood.
Projects like this show that it has its fans. It feels like authors being successful only after their death. I still think of the Windows 8 UI as terrible overall, but now that the hate has passed, people are not afraid to give it some redeeming qualities.
It was pretty good on mobile though, which is the root of the problem I think. They tried to unify what shouldn't be unified.
Windows 7 was the last Windows gui optiized for keyboard and mouse users. Anything after that was sacrificed to Microsoft's desperate attempts to compete in the mobile space chasing that sweet 30% store tax.
If I had the option, I would Windows-7-ize the interface for everything on any later version.
Is that crochety nostalgia, or the innate peak of the interface design? Hard to say.
But I liked buttons that are distinct from the background, a judicious use of color, evoked depth and texture—especially for things that were supposed to pop "in" and "out" of the page, scrollbars I could always find, and things generally being keyboard-navigable in a pinch...
There used to be a competent theme for the Cinnamon DE that replicated Windows 7 fairly well from the "boomerang project" group. May still exist, but it's been a while since I've used it or checked on whether it's been updated.
Is there a Windows 98 SP2 Env for Linux? The peak of personal (non-sysadmin) computing experience. There were fewer BSOD than Windows 95, and all DOS games still worked unlike Windows 2000/XP where most DOS games worked.
I've tried it for fun, but it quickly falls apart. The consistency and attention to detail that made the Windows 95 user interface good just isn't there when reskinning an entirely different piece of UI.
My fond memory is of XP (with the child's toy color scheme changed to the Win2000 one) or simply Win2000 - it actually had preemptive multitasking and protected memory, unlike 95/89.
Everything you need, nothing you don't. The OS/DE stayed in its lane.
So nice to see this. I really loved Windows Phone for the simple UI it had which shared a lot of concepts with this. And I felt like Microsoft could have made something really great from the Win8 UI if they had iterated a few more times before dropping it.
I hope you take on that initiative and make the improvements that they didn't
There was nothing wrong with the Windows 2000 UI except that it was “boring”. I get wanting to make things feel new, but doing so requires great skill to achieve without losing the functional imperatives, which is exactly what they did with pretty much every design since Win2k.
I was asking for something like this but for windows 7 sometime ago. A little bit surprised that someone made something so strikingly similar to what I requested.
I hope that somebody creates something like this for windows 7 as well. One can only hope as Windows 7 nostalgia hits hard
Sure one can try to patch our way and this is what people suggest but if we are already having windows 8, Please lets just have windows 7 as well, there is no harm in it.
I hope that the author of the project or its community about the win 8 DE could look at resurrecting/creating win 7 DE ootb as well.
Is it just me or does anyone else notice all the little inconsistencies on these "windows ui clones" that show up on linux? I like the idea but looking at the pictures I can't get past the lock screen (font size feels wrong, the borders missing on the input field, the size.. it just all feels wrong somehow I can't explain. That On-Screen-Keyboard squeezed into a tiny square??). On the "start menu" picture the two font sizes near the battery icon, how all the linux apps on display have weird coloring and blues-that-dont-quite-match, the bright greens with white text, etc..
Not to diss the UI attempt at all, I just always seem to spot all these little things/polish every time one of these come up (I've seen so many XP clones where the minimize/maximize/close buttons look out of place and badly shaped, etc..). I genuinely wonder if it's because I spent so much time on these OSes back in the day or if all the DEs being used have some inherent limitations that cause these design inconsistencies.
I think these things tend to be somebody’s fun little mini project, so polish is not a high priority. Realistically a big community of contributors isn’t going to grow around cloning a UI that Linux users intentionally left behind.
The beautiful thing about Free software is that people can do whatever they want! In a way is is quite impressive that somebody can get into the uncanny valley with this sort of project, right?
You need tons of effort, plenty of experience in the field and a single unified direction to get them done well, and unfortunately the Linus Torvalds of Design currently does not exist.
Many underestimate just how much is behind everyday basic UIs.
Even the biggest native Linux desktop projects suffer from this. KDE is typical death by a thousand papercuts, GNOME tried but their amateurism is clearly visible.
It's because it's a tremendous amount of time and work and effort and QA to get UIs to look really really well-designed. (Even then, the design can still suck, like modern Windows or appleOS 26.x.)
I don't think people realize just what an insane amount of labor it is to get these things implemented, even if you're handed a perfect design spec up front.
Maybe LLMs will close this gap once they get better at seeing things.
I couldn't believe my eyes the first time I opened up a laptop with Windows 8 installed. I had just gotten rid of a Windows smartphone because I hated it. Boom, now it's on my laptop! That made me switch to Linux full-time for the next ~8 years.
If my employer didn't use Windows, I probably never would have used it again. But yeah... why would I want the worst part of Windows 8 on any *nix system?
win8 is the latest version of windows I've used (for about a week before I installed linux, ironically enough. I'm using that laptop right now lol) and I do not remember it being a good experience. Why you would recreate it is beyond me but I think it's neat that folks are doing stuff like this.
Now, if someone wants to recreate win95, I might be interested
I'd like a DE/theme that aims to do what the Win2k shell did. File explorer, basic window management, app switching, app launching. Back before every single UI widget had to integrate 47 types of OS feature-of-this-year's-product-cycle functionality.
Chicago95 isn't far off looks-wise. Something slightly more polished than Xfce, but way less than the behemoth that KDE is. I really feel like the modern basic desktop UI was pretty close to complete in 2002-2005, and the moment we tried to make your contacts list available for use in every single application we fell onto a slippery slope from which we have never recovered.
This is missing the best part of windows 8/metro - the glow around the cursor. I found it really fun playing with how the glow highlighted smooth sections of tile borders as well as illuminating the whole tile. IIRC it also affected window borders, etc. Very fun to play with.
The only thing I miss about Windows 8.1 is when I hovered my mouse over an application in my taskbar, it showed a little tab preview of what it's doing.
I certainly don't miss that desktop environment, though.
The design looks cool, but it surfaces the app launchers as the protagonists of my workflow. I feel that it would be better if it was more about open windows or something in this direction.
I still think the OS must feel boring and oriented to productivity. The consumer culture brought the worst usability to satisfy the media consumers, not the creators.
I doubt it actually works better. In my experience hobby FOSS is exceptional at building tools and servers, but abysmal at building GUIs and anything that requires some semblance of non-tech-user UX.
TypeScript transpile to Javascript - do you really want your operating system's shell written in slow ass Javascript? Modern C++ with hardening rules for the compiler[1] is pretty safe.
It’s funny to see that even nowadays just a few people understand Windows 8’s UI, while the majority in these comments just blindly shits at it. Not surprising, though, since there are so many happy users of crap UI’s like KDE around.
Sadly, this clone looks very‐very bad, just like millions of WP8‐like launchers compared to the actual WP8.
It feels like no one in this thread has actually clicked the link or watched the video demo. Do you people only read titles? Purely from a conceptual point of view, sure, it's a cool project, but the actual UI and UX are abysmal compared to what Windows 8 was. Take one look at the lock screen.
Not to crap on the dev, but ignoring it is also counter-productive: it feels a bit like seeing one of those iPhone 4 clones that ran on J2ME trying to parody iOS - impressive attempt at making a dumb phone look less like a dumb phone, but it was miserable to use or even look at. I see this all the time around Linux UIs, no one has standards and no one wants to point the lack of them out.
Nice. I'm an open source guy, but being disappointed with Android's openness (years ago) I got a Nokia Lumia 800 with Windows 10 Mobile (or whatever it was called). Loved that OS. Fast, well integrated. Can't help but keep thinking it would have gone somewhere if they'd kept at it (in the form of Android app compatibility or "the defacto MS365 OS" or something).
Then they'd call it Copilot OS in 2026 and mess it up anyway. So perhaps it's good that it died ;)
Glad to see someone was inspired to do this! I believe the Windows 8 UI was good - one of my unpopular opinions explained below.
I never personally owned a Windows 8 computer, but I used some at work. I logged in to Windows Server 2012 and 2012 R2 on a daily bases for several years - these had the same type of start menu.
Prior to this experience on Windows, I was a Mac OS X "power user" enjoying Quicksilver[0][1] on Snow Leopard (10.6) through (Mavericks 10.9). It's mode of interaction[2] was very similar to Spotlight[3] built-in to modern macOS.
I also learned to touch type on that very same *MacBook while waiting for a plane in an airport terminal.
All this is to say that the concept of hitting a key and typing to launch an application felt very natural to me when I first encountered the Windows 8 UI. I never felt the need to use a traditional start menu, despite having clocked lots of hours on Windows 7, Server 2008 R2, and older versions. in the office. When Windows 10 brought back the traditional start menu, I only ever searched through it like I would have on a Windows 8 or MacOS system.
Recent benchmark testing[4] showed Windows 8.1 to be faster in many ways compared to Windows 10 and Windows 11. I was surprised someone actually did this, but not surprised at the results!
Perhaps one of the reasons why I preferred it more than Windows 10 and Winows 11 is the Control Panel was still very usable in Windows 8. As someone who worked on Server versions of Windows, the Control Panel was very much embedded in my muscle memory. The erosion of it in subsequent versions of Windows is the source of my growing pains. That, plus all of the popular reasons why Microsoft/Windows gets backlash today.
* The 2010 MacBook was advertized with a 10 hour battery life. Many years would pass before Apple would again advertize such a long battery lifetime. I had upgraded the RAM and swapped the optical drive for a second 2.5 hard disk, then re-installed Mac OS X in software RAID1 mode. It was extremely stable for many years until the day I decided to decomission it (ran 'sudo rm -rf /' at the Terminal). I.e., the type of stuff that would give Tim Cook indegestion.
The smooth, tile-based interface of Metro/Modern UI of Windows 8 and the Windows Phone are underrated in my opinion. It was simple, fast, and focused on touch. While I didn't have a touch-based Windows 8 laptop or tablet at the time, I had a Windows Phone, and I enjoyed using it more than any other device I've had since.
> The ... UI of Windows 8 and the Windows Phone... underrated in my opinion. It was ... focused on touch.
That's why it was rated low. Most people were using this interface on PC's and laptops, without a touchscreen, where a touch-focused interface does not make sense. Maybe it was good choice for Windows Phone or Windows Tablet, but people were not rating it based on that experience. The very idea of using a single UI for both a touchscreen-oriented and no-touchscreen, kbd-and-mouse computers is the most problematic aspect of it.
> It was simple
No, it wasn't simple. There was the simple part, but things not integrated into the simple part were a hodge-podge of previous Windows versions' UI. Now, I like some of the previous Windows versions' UI, but putting a simple veneer on something does not make it simple; if anything, a little more complex.
> It was fast
The fact that an OS UI in the 2010s or 2020s need to be commended for being fast is kind of sad. Plus - I don't believe it was that fast. Did you try running it on, say, a 15yro machine relative to the Win8 launch time? i.e. 1998? Even with a 10yro machine I believe it was kind of sluggish.
I unironically loved my Windows Phone, it was great to develop for too coming from a WPF background at the time
It was amazing. Ran circles around Android on weaker hardware, but because duopoly duo didn’t want to accept competitor it was artificially hamstrung and subsequently killed.
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Same here. My Lumia 635 was one of my best purchases ever, it was so capable for the price. It's a shame that they stopped believing in it.
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I liked it too. But it never was great. E.g., I remember that the calculator had date computations, but the year input was a dropdown going from 1900 to 2100 or something like that.
Look at all 5 of us reminiscing here...
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The Lumia Icon/930 I had was genuinely the best phone I have ever used, from both a hardware quality and software perspective. It made the competing iPhone 5 look like garbage.
the Nokia hardware was pretty great, too!
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Spont on, I always considered WinRT, .NET Native, C++/CX is what COM evolution should have been back in 2001, instead of the J++ reboot.
However the way Microsoft has messed it all up, no one is left besides Windows team and some hardcode believers, to care about WinRT/WinUI any longer than what is only available via WinAppSDK.
I bought a 4G Nokia 3310 yesterday, and to be honest, it’s actually not bad!
How many abandoned attempts do you feel the Microsoft mobile developer ecosytem could take before losing all faith in yet another MS mobile strategy?
In the mobile space, there was no market for just Windows Phone apps. You needed to support native Android and iOS already. WP was just another burden without a clear return.
In their desperation they started paying college students for developing apps for the platform, leading to low quality experiences.
They pushed WP hard to their channel. Many employees in MS system integrators and managed services got very cheap phones, but outside that group, just nobody bought them before in the end they started dumping them to the masses as cheapest phone in the store, but there ain't no serious market there either.
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I honestly think that the windows phone development experience is where Microsoft majorly shit the bed. The sheer volume of breaking changes (and the severity of those breaks) meant rewriting a non-trivial amount of your app from version to version. I know multiple developers that just dropped support for windows phone as a result.
[dead]
If it wasn't for the T-Mobile Sidekick, Microsoft probably wouldn't have had to buy Nokia.
Here's the story:
I worked on the infrastructre for the predecessor to Android, the Danger Hiptop, AKA "The T-Mobile Sidekick." (This is my real name, you can see when I worked on it on LinkedIn.)
The "Danger Device" as everyone called it, had cloud storage and a full web browser before Android and before iPhone.
In fact, the first Android basically looks like the successor to the T-Mobile sidekick, because many of the people that worked on Android, including the founder, were from Danger.
*Here's the funny part:*
This is hearsay, so please do not sue me Microsoft. I once saw an article online that confirmed the following story, but the article is long gone (this was more than 20 years ago.)
Again: Don't sue me Microsoft. I am telling a story here, that I heard through the grapevine:
*Microsoft blew up the entire "Sidekick" project.*
But they didn't blow it up intentionally. Basically, Danger ran on Sun Solaris, and when Microsoft bought them, a great deal of the infrastructure was trucked over to Microsoft. As I understand it, nothing was ported, they basically just plugged the gear in.
At some point, the backups failed.
Keep in mind: ALL THE USERS DATA WAS IN THE CLOUD. Nobody was doing this at the time, not Android, not Apple. Just Danger - and then Microsoft.
While restoring from backups, someone was feeling the heat for the mobile devices being down for so long. It takes a long time to do a restore.
One thing led to another, a decision was made... and they lost all the data.
*poof*
Gone forever.
The death of the Sidekick has been documented in various articles, but there was only ONE that got the story correct, and it was nuked over a decade ago. Here's one of the (partially correct) details: https://abcnews.go.com/Business/sidekick-disaster-shows-data...
I've got a story about the first big celebrity hack too, that was the Sidekick also. (And likely was possible because of the Sidekick's cloud storage.)
I found a PDF that confirms the story I heard, and also has information I wasn't aware of until today:
https://availabilitydigest.com/public_articles/0411/sidekick...
Details are on page 3.
* The Sidekick servers were moved to Microsoft, and I believe they were moved from where I last saw them, which was at T-Mobile's data center in Washington.
* There weren't a heck of a lot of Solaris experts at Microsoft at that time.
* According to the PDF above, someone had posted a job ad for a database administrator for the project, two months before the database blew up.
So if we connect the dots (this is speculation Microsoft, don't sue me):
It seems possible that the database for the Sidekick service was the responsibility of someone at T-Mobile or Danger, until Microsoft acquired Danger. My hunch is that it was probably TMo, because the founder of Danger left to go start Android in 2003. By the time Microsoft bought Danger in 2008, a lot of the original Danger folks were working on Android.
It sure seems like the outage was most likely caused by an inexperienced DBA taking responsibility for a database that had been the responsibility of the same DBA (at Danger, or more likely, TMo) for over half a decade.
And that ONE database outage probably changed the entire course of mobile phone history. IMHO, Microsoft wouldn't have purchased Nokia in 2014 if Danger hadn't blown up in 2008. And Danger was way ahead of the iPhone and Android in 2005.
In some alternate universe, there is no Android, there is just Microsoft Sidekick and Apple iPhone.
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Wasn't the Sidekick the phone in the Paris Hilton hack? Man, that was a long time ago.
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Live tiles are nearly universally praised in retrospect, but it might be a case of hindsight bias [1]. The video [2] brings up some problems of the concept and why no other company copied the concept.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosy_retrospection
[2] https://youtu.be/OgXlNaYXRu4
I think if Microsoft had made an easier bridge, faster from Win32 to things like Live Tiles (and the Charms, too) there would have been a lot more people praising the Live Tiles today (and maybe even the Charms). Live Tiles really made their case on Windows Phone 8 where nearly every app supported them (relatively well), that was the only "Notification Center" for missed notifications, and its glanceability became very obvious.
Charms are somewhat similar, too. On iPhone almost every app needs a Share button somewhere and almost every app still has it in a different place today. On Windows Phone 8 it was much more obvious why a dedicated OS-level Share button accessible just about anywhere in any app was pretty great. On Desktop it wasn't seen as helpful as almost no apps supported it (either as shareable things or as apps that could be shared to) because there was no easy Win32 bridge and Microsoft also didn't think to try to integrate with clipboard operations until too late in Windows 8.1 (and then never quite delivered it because most everyone had already written off the Charms by then), as what could have been a potentially easy path to use the existing Windows "share paradigm" to bootstrap.
(You can make cases for the other 4 Charms as well beyond the Share charm, but the Share charm is the most obvious where Windows Phone proved it was a good idea but the Desktop didn't have enough supporting apps to also prove it there.)
Are live tiles universally praised? I see them mentioned positively occasionally, but I suspect they are getting some benefit… like, they are the Windows 8 feature that isn’t immediately obnoxious. Windows 8’s UI just didn’t have any redeeming features, so the element that is merely bad gets brought up as a sort of “see I’m not a relentlessly negative hater, I’m objective” thing, I bet. Is there a name for this trope?
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I'm sure there was some meeting where at the end of the pitch deck was some one said:
"...and after people acclimate to them, we'll put ads there! Advertising Directly in the UI!"
The problem MS created was WP7 was a technical dead end: a feature phone OS with a Silverlight UI, which was almost impossible to bypass, hurting third party support a lot.
WP8 was a far "better" OS, but it came with higher system requirements more comparable with Android.
Google never got enough crap on for their stunts with youtube in that era though.
Not to mention that WP7 customers couldn't upgrade to WP8, meant that both customers and resellers had devices they couldn't do shit with.
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Touch-optimized UI on phone/tablet: Perfect.
Touch-optimized UI on desktops: One step away from where it belongs.
Touch-optimized UI on servers: Very very out of touch.
Firing sinofsky for it: Good.
Yeah I agree. It was a little weird without a touch screen, but at that point I was not navigating the start menu visually with a mouse anymore anyway.
Windows phone was great. I think I got it when Android was still growing up. I liked the focus and the speed for sure.
Microsoft's bread and butter is no longer OSes, I think, and it's unfortunately starting to show.
I really liked the idea of what they did with the start menu of win8. Whenever I opened the start menu, my intent was to focus on look for something in the start menu, not multitask, so live tiles were perfect. IIRC I even wrote a couple of toy apps with those tiles. Win8.1(blue?) was much more polished experience though, original 8 had a lot of rough edges.
I had an original Lenovo yoga and boy the desktop touch experience was bad. Hardware wise it wasn't winning any prizes either. The cooler died a couple of times and replacements were a pain to procure.
This. The “mobile-ization” of desktop interfaces is a bane on current computing. The metaphors of work between desktop and mobile devices are wildly different.
Obligatory car analogy: a mechanic working in his shop has a completely different set of tools available than if he was going into the field to fix a car.
I really think GNOME is good at making an interface that works well on both, so is KDE to some extent with kirigami
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I used GNOME forever and didn't think much of it, until that horrid menu was added in 4x and I had to switch.
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I had an Android phone and my friend had a Windows Phone. I wanted to get a Windows phone but by the time I came around to needing a new device it was already killed off. Too bad.
Boy I could not stand Windows 8. Unfortunately, many of their techniques were copied into Linux distribution views and it made my life worse. The new start menu was perhaps the worst.
It created this massive doorway effect where I'd hit Start and the whole screen would whiz and spin and then there'd be all these moving tiles and I'll forget what I hit Start for. Frequently I'd then hit Esc, remember, and Start again. This was compounded by the fact that if you started typing after hitting start it wouldn't just filter to the applications. God knows what it would actually do but not that.
I was one of the people who enjoyed Windows Vista (which introduced sudo to Windows users) and Windows 7 and even Windows 10 after which the i7-4790k machine I had to do the Windows was no longer eligible for Windows 11 so I have no idea what that looks like.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event_perception#Relation_to_e...
Yes you are correct that after Windows 8 we had this obsession in Linux-land with making applications more "full-screen" and less "distracting", at a time when screen resolutions were increasing significantly and you could actually make use of the increased screen resolution for multiple side-by-side windows. It seemed to be a backwards move, and I never went to GNOME 3 from GNOME 2. macOS was also guilty of this, where the "maximise" equivalent button became a daft "full screen" button (why would I need a fullscreen calculator on a 24" screen?).
The obnoxious Windows start menu was on Windows Server for a while, and it was unbearable. Sadly the Start menu in Windows 11 is just as useless, and I miss the performance of the Windows 98 / NT / 2000 / XP (in simple mode) menu where you could press Start > P > A > N (or Start > P > across right > N) and know it would go Start > Programs > Accessories > Notepad in 4 keypresses in lightning time.
We have never returned to this speed or efficiency.
"We" have on Linux. On KDE, that't Alt-Space, kw (it probably shows KWrite now), Enter. That is KRunner, but the start menu thing has a similar feature, too.
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I maybe get hate here, but i like the start menu of win11(without counting the AI/Ads part) more than winXP.
The search in Win 11 is better. For ex: I need to change display timeout setting. I vastly remember it's in "power option" menu, and power option is in control panel. But i cant remember exactly how to reach "power option" from "control panel". In windows 11, i can just type "power option" and it would direct me to the power option screen, meanwhile in XP, i had to explore around before reaching it.
I think "Search" in Start menu is kind of heading in right direction(imo they should remove the search-on-internet), just need to improve performance.
I also loved Windows Vista, the system itself was quite buggy and slow but the UI was absolutely amazing and clear.
Windows 7 was better IMHO: clear interface, and less buggy than Vista.
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In that case, may I suggest macOS Tahoe and i(Pad)OS 26?
I hated that UI so much, I'm glad I barely had to use it (that it was slow was due to underperforming hardware, esp. laptops, for which it arguably wasn't meant to run on).
In the meantime, I'll migrate away from anything Apple, for two reasons: 1) I don't want to be dependent on a US company for my OSes, and 2) thank you very much Apple for this design choice making #1 a lot easier. But what I cannot say is 3) it is slow and buggy. I mean, the design itself is bad if you ask me, but the OSes aren't slow. The hardware can deal with it.
Talking about the design, the further we get from 2012, the more obvious it becomes that windows 8 was kinda like the bauhaus movement for an operating system that wanted to be on touch screens but was made to work on traditional mouse-keyboard interface. It was technically correct, aesthetically pure but socially rejected because it was too stark for the general public (my opinion).
This implementation gets one thing most Metro clones miss, i.e the typography as structure paradigm. In Win8, there were no divider lines or heavy drop shadows to denote hierarchy. The hierarchy was defined strictly by the weight and size of the font.
We spent the last decade drifting back into glassmorphism and mica materials (win11) because people missed the comfort of texture but from a pure information density and rendering performance perspective - the flat, monochromatic 2D plane of windows 8 is a nice tangent. It removed the cognitive load of decoding the UI chrome for touch users.
ps: I'm impressed by the constraint of using native Qt/C++ here instead of taking the easy route with electron or QML/javascript bindings for everything.
The cognitive load it's trying to guess where the button lies in the interface for flat screens. Not an issue under GTK2/3/4 with Zukitre (and QT5/6 reusing it with qt5ct/qt6ct or with an environment variable setting QT_STYLE_OVERRIDE to "gtk2" or similar.
I didn't remember having issues finding buttons on windows 8.
While they were certainly flat, they were always clearly signaled from my memory - did other people have this issue?
To be clear, when it was released I was one of the people hating on it, but it grew on me over time - and after I installed startisback, which essentially just scaled down the start screen/Metro ui to a slightly larger start menu ... It was a decent UX again, to me.
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The only thing worth saving from windows8-10 is the windows border. it is a huge usability win. Clear borders. square (so it's also fast). clear colors showing which window has focus. It's also funny this show up now a day after the top post was the osx windows border radius fiasco.
yet no linux WM has a decent windows8-10 window border clone.
KDE used to but since the rewrite of the theme from kde5+ they not only killed it, but also removed the option to have sane window border color to show focus. Now it's "accent color" which should be non contrast because they will force that same color on toolbars and such, just like all the bad ideas from office-ribbon era.
well there is the default style for openbsd's fvwm. clear borders, grab handles, contrasting fg/bg colors. But I won't go so far as to say it is decent.
https://debugpointnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/OpenBS...
Anyhow it's bold to claim that there are no linux window managers to rival win8, linux is like the paleozoic of desktop interfaces. It has the opposite problem there are too many of the infernal things.
I call that comment a bit of bullshit. XFWM from XFCE, Fluxbox/OpenBox have nearly every titlebar theme in existence, with even better borders than Windows 8 ones.
I am not exaggerating when I say they could be over 1000 themes for Fluxbox/Blackbox.
The default XFWM themes (coming from XFCE 4.10) include several ones with a even a clear grabbable border, if not all of them.
We had the Bluecurve theme from Red Hat when some HN users didn't even start Elementary school.
And with FVWM literally you could mimick any interface ever.
> ...over thousand themes...
They were mostly variations of a theme, and the ones that were not had debatable aesthetics.
But yeah, Bluecurve could rock, especially when customized.
FVWM? Perl? Oh noez! Such complication! ;>
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It's not BS. You can do it but it should be the default.
> We had the Bluecurve theme from Red Hat when some HN users didn't even start Elementary school.
True. Bring back Bluecurve on KDE. Bring it back on both. Fedora peeps, job for you.
I am currently running a utility to square off the window borders in Windows 11.
on KDE5-6, ironically, to have high-contrast windows and square borders, one must use something written because the author wanted round corners on older versions of kde :)
https://github.com/matinlotfali/KDE-Rounded-Corners
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"look, they ported the worst part of Windows' history to Linux"
Regardless of whether or not this was done for fun or due to actually missing Windows 8(as the author does), it's impressive.
I remember reading some time ago that the windows 8 UI lead got fired but I can't find proof of that now. Maybe it was just satire lol
Can't wait for the 'Show HN: MacOS Tahoe Desktop Environment for Linux' post
Here you go:
https://pearos.xyz/
"Liquid glass" and all.
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Wow they ported Windows Millennium Edition to Linux??
back then we called it Windows Mistake Edition
Don't jinx it, someone may just do it
> Wow they ported Windows Millennium Edition to Linux??
Aw, come on.
WinME had the exact same UI as Win2000, and for a lot of us, that was the peak of Windows' design.
Secondly, Win11 is worse than ME in every important way. ME was all right once it got a few fixes, and worked great on very low-end kit that NT wouldn't look at.
As much as the UI was fluid, smooth and probably best for a touch interface, I distinctly remember I hated it and frantically wanted my Start button back on my PC. It is kinda funny reading all the comments about its nostalgia, when all I could think was how annoying it was. I guess to each their own :-).
I always use the Windows key instead of pressing the start menu button, so I didn't really care. I always thought it made more sense as a Tablet / Touch OS, and for people without a touch screen, Windows 8 was just terrible. It had good intentions, poorly executed.
Apple did not even bother with touch screen laptops on the other hand.
My favorite goof of Windows 8 was the most googled question: "how do I turn it off?"
It required stupid mouse witchcraft and incantations to shut off if you weren't in a touch screen.
Windows 8 was Microsoft thinking everyone was going to use touch screens for EVERYTHING and ruining the non-touch screen experience for most.
I think around that time was when Ubuntu switched from Gnome to Unity as well. What a mess that was. Seemed like all the UI teams had lost their minds at once.
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I also use the Windows key, but even then the WHOLE screen animating and changing to a different solid color was super jarring and tiring IMO. I much prefer a small popup like they have now
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> Apple did not even bother with touch screen laptops on the other hand.
> Windows 8 was Microsoft thinking everyone was going to use touch screens for EVERYTHING and ruining the non-touch screen experience for most.
Did/Does anyone actually use the touch screen on a laptop? Surfaces still ship with a touchscreen, so I assume they've done their market research.... It just seems like the trackpad/keyboard are the better ways to interface with your laptop, especially when it's already built in and not BT accessories or something. I hate to sound like an Apple fanboy but I'd assume the thought process was something along the lines of "Customers want touch screens on phones and tablets, not laptops"
My laptop fills the role of "Desktop computer on the go" and I want it to emulate that as close as possible, aside from form factor. Maybe I'm in the minority there? Others do use a laptop as a primary 'daily driver' and want the touch screen?
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I had a Windows tablet at the time, and actually paid for a Windows 8 upgrade. It was a nice OS on that device!
I would never used the phrase "good intentions" in combination with Windows 8.1.
Say you had a mechanic you brought your car to for an inspection and they would set it on fire in the parking lot because of "evil ghosts" since they heard a squeak that sounded like evil ghosts speaking. Calling what they did "good intentions just poorly executed" isn't really fitting is it?
Microsoft got hit by a case of delusion on a corporate level where seemingly good arguments combine to create the completely wrong conclusions.
simply pressing ALT+F4 didn't do it? (of course you had to click the desktop first)
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On "regular computers" I think it was flawed in two fatal ways:
- there was already an extremely heavy expectation that clicking the start button or pressing the windows key would bring up a menu, not a full screen takeover where all contextual sense of place (that you had in the past experience) was lost.
- the UI being a full-screen takeover on a phone (Windows Phone) or a tablet (10"-ish tops at the time) was OK but on a 21~27" desktop it's absurdly overwhelming.
Especially with such a low information density. It was clearly just a massive amount of wasted screen space on desktop.
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The start screen is something you just had to get used to. I think it's more comfortable than the menu. Effectively it works as a second desktop to put application shortcuts on. I have about 30-40 on mine (on Windows 10, mind you), which is way more than would fit on a menu without submenus.
Tbf the mobile OS with a similar design language was the best mobile UI I ever had the pleasure of using. Last time I felt impressed by Microsoft but alas.
Me too! Metro design was, I don't know, a whole different league compared to Apple or the Androids of that time. I'm not sad that MS failed on that front, but damn, that was a good mobile phone UI.
Yeah I don't remember anyone liking Windows 8 at the time. I'm honestly a little bit surprised to hear that there is nostalgia for it at all.
It did a few things right relative to Vista but it was also bad in many different ways, including but not limited to the (double) Control Panel
So it was a bit of a love/hate relationship.
Windows 2K is still the best ever made by Microsoft. I wish they'd just stay on that design and make incremental improvements to keep it fresh and modern.
I really liked Vista. It's problem aside, that were fixed in future Service Packs it felt like a new OS.
>It is kinda funny reading all the comments about its nostalgia, when all I could think was how annoying it was.
Agreed and it happens with almost every sunsetted version of Windows. At the time of XP, it was how great W98SE was, and in 7, XP was so amazing, etc., etc. I think the "every other version" meme has only recently been killed by MS because it has been so long from 8.1 to 10 to 11. But even when 11 is sunsetted, there will surely be articles about how amazing 11 was and how much they dislike 12.
I think all versions after Win 7 have sucked.
First thing I did after installing upgrading to Windows 8 was installing Startisback and I forgot I was even running it. I'm not exaggerating, one time a friend sitting by asked if I was it was Windows 8 and I had to think for a moment.
Windows 8.1 combined with StartIsBack was a much better OS than Windows 10 I was actually surprised when everyone praised that ad pushing piece of crap with mandatory spyware, forced updates and inconsistent UI all over the place.
What I find slightly amusing is that my Chromebook used to have a center-aligned task menu. Now Windows has a center-aligned task menu and Chrome OS...aligned it left!
My first experience with it was I couldn't figure out how to shut down my pc (the stupid side charm bar) on Beta 1 of Windows 8.
It was last seen perhaps in the Windows 11 Beta 1 release, confined within the start menu and I think this is where it peaked. It was removed shortly after to the yuck we have now, perhaps slightly coming back in 25H2 with the New Windows 11 start menu experience app groups (I have not personally used it)
I too hated original metro on desktop back in the day and especially missed the start menu, but I also look back on it fondly.
I think that Microsoft was ahead of its time and that they had a better design language than any competitor and original metro still holds up favorably to contemporary designs.
Last time I sat down with a windows 11 pc I even thought “wouldn’t it be better if the start menu was just full screen?”
I remember that as well, and in the enterprise they added one of those start menu plugins. But boy, compared to a react based startmenu in 2025...
Click Start to end your session.
Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to login.
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I think 8.1 and later fixed a lot of this, but in 8, even if you were on a 100% "desktop" device using mouse and keyboard, whenever you'd "close" an app, it would take to the huge start screen instead of your desktop, and you'd have to find the "desktop" button to get back to that.
This is some of what I wrote in July 2013 as suggestions for how Windows 8 should change behavior when mouse and keyboard is present:
• By default, boot to the desktop. (This is a new individually available option in Windows 8.1.)
• By default, return to previous applications. Similar to Windows Phone and Windows 7, when you close an application, you should return to where you were before. If you are in any kind of desktop experience when launching an application, whether it's for the desktop or in the Modern interface, you should return to that desktop environment upon closing the application.
• By default, open media files and documents in desktop applications. Fortunately, when you select these as your defaults, you are properly returned to the desktop when you close the application. Unfortunately, any Modern applications return you to the Start Screen when you close them.
• By default, if there is no touch screen, disable hot corners and edges. Provide an option to enable them within your mouse-driven experience.
• By default, if there is no touch screen, provide a classic Start Menu in addition to the Start Screen. Mice are well-suited to smaller menus that pop out and allow you to remain largely in the desktop experience while you select new files and applications to open. Provide an option to disable the Start Menu and jump to the Start Screen if desired.
• Upon first run and selection of the mouse-driven experience, run a video demonstration introducing users to the Modern interface, Start Screen, hot corners, gestures, charms, Windows Store and Modern applications, focused on how to access these items with a mouse and keyboard.
• By default, provide a Search experience tailored to the desktop environment.
"Most of the above options already exist in Windows 8, but it takes some information, time and effort for users to change the settings and get the experience you expect when using a system without a touch screen, largely driven by mouse control. It is in these conditions that users are frustrated by Windows 8, as they find themselves faced with interfaces that are much friendlier to touch screens, and are unexpectedly removed from the desktop experience and placed into the Modern interface and Start Screen, disrupting their workflow and adding extra steps to return to the windows, applications and tasks they were working in. An overall one-click default upon first usage of Windows would allow users to select the mouse-driven experience they prefer on systems that are not primarily driven by touch."
Funny how almost everybody hated the Windows 8 desktop environment. And to this day, Windows 8 is still seen as one of the worst versions of Windows for that reason, even if it was pretty decent under the hood.
Projects like this show that it has its fans. It feels like authors being successful only after their death. I still think of the Windows 8 UI as terrible overall, but now that the hate has passed, people are not afraid to give it some redeeming qualities.
It was pretty good on mobile though, which is the root of the problem I think. They tried to unify what shouldn't be unified.
Windows 7 was the last Windows gui optiized for keyboard and mouse users. Anything after that was sacrificed to Microsoft's desperate attempts to compete in the mobile space chasing that sweet 30% store tax.
If I had the option, I would Windows-7-ize the interface for everything on any later version.
Is that crochety nostalgia, or the innate peak of the interface design? Hard to say.
But I liked buttons that are distinct from the background, a judicious use of color, evoked depth and texture—especially for things that were supposed to pop "in" and "out" of the page, scrollbars I could always find, and things generally being keyboard-navigable in a pinch...
There used to be a competent theme for the Cinnamon DE that replicated Windows 7 fairly well from the "boomerang project" group. May still exist, but it's been a while since I've used it or checked on whether it's been updated.
Apple guy here who actually liked Metro.
Party of one, for sure, LOL
Glad to see an attempt to revive it on Linux
Is there a Windows 98 SP2 Env for Linux? The peak of personal (non-sysadmin) computing experience. There were fewer BSOD than Windows 95, and all DOS games still worked unlike Windows 2000/XP where most DOS games worked.
Well, there's this, for XFCE:
https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95
I've tried it for fun, but it quickly falls apart. The consistency and attention to detail that made the Windows 95 user interface good just isn't there when reskinning an entirely different piece of UI.
My fond memory is of XP (with the child's toy color scheme changed to the Win2000 one) or simply Win2000 - it actually had preemptive multitasking and protected memory, unlike 95/89.
Everything you need, nothing you don't. The OS/DE stayed in its lane.
2000 and XP both gave me fond memories too. 3.1 and 95/98 were the starter though, like one always have fond memory with the first love :D
Oh boy. No one wanted this on Windows back when it was released. I’m sure it’ll be a hit with Linux users everywhere.
If you want to read some confessions from the guy who is responsible for Windows 8 (Steven Sinofsky) read this blog post: https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/p/108-epilog...
Whole blog is about his time at Microsoft but this particular post mentions windows 8
This could be very nice if it preserves/implements the tablet features.
So nice to see this. I really loved Windows Phone for the simple UI it had which shared a lot of concepts with this. And I felt like Microsoft could have made something really great from the Win8 UI if they had iterated a few more times before dropping it.
I hope you take on that initiative and make the improvements that they didn't
There was nothing wrong with the Windows 2000 UI except that it was “boring”. I get wanting to make things feel new, but doing so requires great skill to achieve without losing the functional imperatives, which is exactly what they did with pretty much every design since Win2k.
I was asking for something like this but for windows 7 sometime ago. A little bit surprised that someone made something so strikingly similar to what I requested.
I hope that somebody creates something like this for windows 7 as well. One can only hope as Windows 7 nostalgia hits hard
+1 for a Windows 7 clone. I have not seen a theme that comes close to copying Win7.
Windows 7 it's easy. Plastik was like that before Windows 7 itself. Just set that theme under Plasma 6 and you are done. Also, QTCurve.
One can argue that Windows 8 is easy as well but here we are (https://github.com/kavinunethsara/tiledscreen)
Sure one can try to patch our way and this is what people suggest but if we are already having windows 8, Please lets just have windows 7 as well, there is no harm in it.
I hope that the author of the project or its community about the win 8 DE could look at resurrecting/creating win 7 DE ootb as well.
Is it just me or does anyone else notice all the little inconsistencies on these "windows ui clones" that show up on linux? I like the idea but looking at the pictures I can't get past the lock screen (font size feels wrong, the borders missing on the input field, the size.. it just all feels wrong somehow I can't explain. That On-Screen-Keyboard squeezed into a tiny square??). On the "start menu" picture the two font sizes near the battery icon, how all the linux apps on display have weird coloring and blues-that-dont-quite-match, the bright greens with white text, etc..
Not to diss the UI attempt at all, I just always seem to spot all these little things/polish every time one of these come up (I've seen so many XP clones where the minimize/maximize/close buttons look out of place and badly shaped, etc..). I genuinely wonder if it's because I spent so much time on these OSes back in the day or if all the DEs being used have some inherent limitations that cause these design inconsistencies.
I think these things tend to be somebody’s fun little mini project, so polish is not a high priority. Realistically a big community of contributors isn’t going to grow around cloning a UI that Linux users intentionally left behind.
The beautiful thing about Free software is that people can do whatever they want! In a way is is quite impressive that somebody can get into the uncanny valley with this sort of project, right?
You need tons of effort, plenty of experience in the field and a single unified direction to get them done well, and unfortunately the Linus Torvalds of Design currently does not exist.
Many underestimate just how much is behind everyday basic UIs.
Even the biggest native Linux desktop projects suffer from this. KDE is typical death by a thousand papercuts, GNOME tried but their amateurism is clearly visible.
It's because it's a tremendous amount of time and work and effort and QA to get UIs to look really really well-designed. (Even then, the design can still suck, like modern Windows or appleOS 26.x.)
I don't think people realize just what an insane amount of labor it is to get these things implemented, even if you're handed a perfect design spec up front.
Maybe LLMs will close this gap once they get better at seeing things.
I couldn't believe my eyes the first time I opened up a laptop with Windows 8 installed. I had just gotten rid of a Windows smartphone because I hated it. Boom, now it's on my laptop! That made me switch to Linux full-time for the next ~8 years.
If my employer didn't use Windows, I probably never would have used it again. But yeah... why would I want the worst part of Windows 8 on any *nix system?
win8 is the latest version of windows I've used (for about a week before I installed linux, ironically enough. I'm using that laptop right now lol) and I do not remember it being a good experience. Why you would recreate it is beyond me but I think it's neat that folks are doing stuff like this.
Now, if someone wants to recreate win95, I might be interested
> Now, if someone wants to recreate win95
You can try Chicago95 [1], but it's only a XFCE theme. If you want more than a theme, there's SerenityOS [2] but it isn't suitable for daily use (yet)
[1] https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95 [2] https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity
I'd like a DE/theme that aims to do what the Win2k shell did. File explorer, basic window management, app switching, app launching. Back before every single UI widget had to integrate 47 types of OS feature-of-this-year's-product-cycle functionality.
Chicago95 isn't far off looks-wise. Something slightly more polished than Xfce, but way less than the behemoth that KDE is. I really feel like the modern basic desktop UI was pretty close to complete in 2002-2005, and the moment we tried to make your contacts list available for use in every single application we fell onto a slippery slope from which we have never recovered.
Oh helllllllll no. I’ll stick with my Linux. Cool project but Windows is just crap nowadays, even the UI. Best was XP.
I use a Windows Metro inspired launcher on Android and it's the best phone UI experience I've ever had: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nfwebdev.l...
This is missing the best part of windows 8/metro - the glow around the cursor. I found it really fun playing with how the glow highlighted smooth sections of tile borders as well as illuminating the whole tile. IIRC it also affected window borders, etc. Very fun to play with.
I want this for everything, including my phone, tablet, and tele!
I which distro this is being tested on.
The only thing I miss about Windows 8.1 is when I hovered my mouse over an application in my taskbar, it showed a little tab preview of what it's doing.
I certainly don't miss that desktop environment, though.
The design looks cool, but it surfaces the app launchers as the protagonists of my workflow. I feel that it would be better if it was more about open windows or something in this direction.
I hated Windows 8 but this would make a nice kid-friendly OS.
I still think the OS must feel boring and oriented to productivity. The consumer culture brought the worst usability to satisfy the media consumers, not the creators.
First thought that popped into my mind is the quote from Bennett Foddy for his game Getting Over It.
--"I made a game for a certain kind of person. To hurt them."
It probably works better than windows 8 ever has... Seeing it might have something called "common sense" over "org driven design".
I doubt it actually works better. In my experience hobby FOSS is exceptional at building tools and servers, but abysmal at building GUIs and anything that requires some semblance of non-tech-user UX.
I would be okay to use this DE on a mobile Linux but I'm afraid the usability on desktop is going to suffer like it did with Windows 8.
Might be away to switch some countries administration's away from Windows and minimize resistance...
Nice to see it uses Qt C++ and QML (:
No, not nice. It should use TypeScript or Rust. C++/QML is unsafe.
TypeScript is way, way too slow to use for desktop applications. People try and, surprise surprise, those applications are slow as shit.
Qt has a C++ backend, so C++ is used. Qt is relatively safe and well designed.
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TypeScript transpile to Javascript - do you really want your operating system's shell written in slow ass Javascript? Modern C++ with hardening rules for the compiler[1] is pretty safe.
[1] https://best.openssf.org/Compiler-Hardening-Guides/Compiler-...
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No one ever uses/used our windows 8 laptop because it was so horrible. Total waste of money.
It’s funny to see that even nowadays just a few people understand Windows 8’s UI, while the majority in these comments just blindly shits at it. Not surprising, though, since there are so many happy users of crap UI’s like KDE around.
Sadly, this clone looks very‐very bad, just like millions of WP8‐like launchers compared to the actual WP8.
If it doesn't come with a XAML WinRT based framework stack, it is only half way there.
As a gnome user I remember thinking I could probably get used to the start screen.
Oh god why
It feels like no one in this thread has actually clicked the link or watched the video demo. Do you people only read titles? Purely from a conceptual point of view, sure, it's a cool project, but the actual UI and UX are abysmal compared to what Windows 8 was. Take one look at the lock screen.
Not to crap on the dev, but ignoring it is also counter-productive: it feels a bit like seeing one of those iPhone 4 clones that ran on J2ME trying to parody iOS - impressive attempt at making a dumb phone look less like a dumb phone, but it was miserable to use or even look at. I see this all the time around Linux UIs, no one has standards and no one wants to point the lack of them out.
You read the title and go to discuss about it in the comments.
No one has time to follow the links and watch something there.
This would be nice for a Linux phone.
Win 8 UI was way ahead of its time.
I still prefer the time of Win 2K (or max Win 7)
Windows 2000 was peak usability. Windows XP was also good, especially with the Classic or Standard themes.
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Windows 8's UI was not new by any means. Shareware with that style already existed in early 2000's.
the time that's never came lol
The best UX ui was in Windows XP.
No. Nothing good has come from Microsoft.
Nice. I'm an open source guy, but being disappointed with Android's openness (years ago) I got a Nokia Lumia 800 with Windows 10 Mobile (or whatever it was called). Loved that OS. Fast, well integrated. Can't help but keep thinking it would have gone somewhere if they'd kept at it (in the form of Android app compatibility or "the defacto MS365 OS" or something).
Then they'd call it Copilot OS in 2026 and mess it up anyway. So perhaps it's good that it died ;)
is it the same font rendering ? if not it makes quite an akward feeling
ugh I still have to administer old w2k12 Metro vms and I hate it
Now you can install it on your linux servers and hate it even more! :)
"Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should". /jk
Probably nice on a tablet.
I guess nobody here reminiscing about Windows 8 will mention that the executive in charge of it was texting and emailing with Jeffrey Epstein.
Glad to see someone was inspired to do this! I believe the Windows 8 UI was good - one of my unpopular opinions explained below.
I never personally owned a Windows 8 computer, but I used some at work. I logged in to Windows Server 2012 and 2012 R2 on a daily bases for several years - these had the same type of start menu.
Prior to this experience on Windows, I was a Mac OS X "power user" enjoying Quicksilver[0][1] on Snow Leopard (10.6) through (Mavericks 10.9). It's mode of interaction[2] was very similar to Spotlight[3] built-in to modern macOS.
I also learned to touch type on that very same *MacBook while waiting for a plane in an airport terminal.
All this is to say that the concept of hitting a key and typing to launch an application felt very natural to me when I first encountered the Windows 8 UI. I never felt the need to use a traditional start menu, despite having clocked lots of hours on Windows 7, Server 2008 R2, and older versions. in the office. When Windows 10 brought back the traditional start menu, I only ever searched through it like I would have on a Windows 8 or MacOS system.
Recent benchmark testing[4] showed Windows 8.1 to be faster in many ways compared to Windows 10 and Windows 11. I was surprised someone actually did this, but not surprised at the results!
Perhaps one of the reasons why I preferred it more than Windows 10 and Winows 11 is the Control Panel was still very usable in Windows 8. As someone who worked on Server versions of Windows, the Control Panel was very much embedded in my muscle memory. The erosion of it in subsequent versions of Windows is the source of my growing pains. That, plus all of the popular reasons why Microsoft/Windows gets backlash today.
* The 2010 MacBook was advertized with a 10 hour battery life. Many years would pass before Apple would again advertize such a long battery lifetime. I had upgraded the RAM and swapped the optical drive for a second 2.5 hard disk, then re-installed Mac OS X in software RAID1 mode. It was extremely stable for many years until the day I decided to decomission it (ran 'sudo rm -rf /' at the Terminal). I.e., the type of stuff that would give Tim Cook indegestion.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quicksilver_(software)
[1] https://github.com/quicksilver/Quicksilver
[2] https://images.sftcdn.net/images/t_app-cover-s,f_auto/p/7e76...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotlight_(Apple)
[4] https://meterpreter.org/the-20-year-showdown-why-windows-8-1...
No, it was not good.
Sorry.
Please permanently delete this repo forever.
I am having nightmares right now.