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Imustaskforhelpyesterday at 6:35 PM5 repliesview on HN

Someone please create a windows 7 like user interface or even XP like interface too and you got yourself a serious fan

I might seriously recommend it to newbies and like there is just this love I have for windows 7 even though I really didn't use it for much but its so much more elegant in its own way than windows 10

like it can be a really fun experiment and I would be interested to see how that would pan out.


Replies

cosmic_cheeseyesterday at 7:53 PM

It stuns me that a polished 1:1 2K/XP/7 clone DE (which it mimics is a setting) hasn’t existed for a 10y+ already. It’s such an obvious target for a mass appeal Linux desktop that many techies and non-techies alike would happily use.

Rough approximations have been possible since the early 2000s, but they’re exactly that: rough approximations. Details matter, and when I boot up an old XP/7 box there are aspects in which they feel more polished and… I don’t know, finished? Complete? Compared to even the big popular DEs like KDE.

Building a DE explicitly as a clone of a specific fixed environment would also do wonders to prevent feature creep and encourage focus on fixing bugs and optimization instead of bells and whistles, which is something that modern software across the board could use an Everest sized helping of.

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Zen1thyesterday at 9:39 PM

You should try KDE with https://github.com/ivvil/aerothemeplasma

The screenshots could easily fool me into believing it actually is Windows 7 :p

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trelaneyesterday at 9:27 PM

> it can be a really fun experiment and I would be interested to see how that would pan out.

It would fail, and just be another corpse in the desktop OS graveyard.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitachi_Flora_Prius

https://www.osnews.com/story/136392/the-only-pc-ever-shipped...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linspire

Unless you ship your own hardware or get a vendor to ship your OS (see the above), and set up so the user can actually use it, you have to get users to install it on Windows hardware. So now your company is debugging broken consumer hardware without the help of the OEM. So that hopefully someone will install it on exactly that configuration for free.

This is not a winning business model.

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HeckFeckyesterday at 10:43 PM

https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity is just that, except it's a whole OS that's Win2k styled. If it ever gets good hardware support it might have a chance.

Or maybe ReactOS - the actual windows clone - gets finished. Rumours put a first release date some time after Hurd.

fragmedeyesterday at 7:39 PM

XFCE plus a windows theme would get you pretty far. Is there anything specific you're thinking of which that plus some pre-configured Wine wouldn't hit?

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