I remember overhearing one of the sales folk having to explain to a woman that they can't sell her the white ones, only metal ones as she preferred the chunky plastic.
Look at all 5 of us reminiscing here...
Pre-announcing that they were leaving all Winphone 7 customers behind for Winphone 8 meant that every retailer/distributor was left with unsellable stock (because they hadn't gained enough traction to sell out initial shipments).
If this was because Nokia made bad/cheap phones that were un-upgradeable or MS being arrogant isn't something I'm remembering anymore but the end-result was pissed retailers and nobody selling WP8.
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.
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.
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.
"...and after people acclimate to them, we'll put ads there! Advertising Directly in the UI!"
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.
I which distro this is being tested on.
Probably nice on a tablet.
- 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.
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.
> 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 feel like trackpads do most of the above better than a touchscreen? Mac trackpads, at any rate (I do recall a lot of PC trackpads and/or drivers being hot garbage)
Nooooo, please don't touch my screen! I can't stand fingerprints on my laptop display! Pretty much every gesture you mentioned has a touch pad equivalent that works just as well or better for a desktop OS.
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."
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.
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.
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 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.
I hope you take on that initiative and make the improvements that they didn't
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.
Party of one, for sure, LOL
Glad to see an attempt to revive it on Linux
Then they'd call it Copilot OS in 2026 and mess it up anyway. So perhaps it's good that it died ;)
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.
--"I made a game for a certain kind of person. To hurt them."
Now, if someone wants to recreate win95, I might be interested
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
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.
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.
No one has time to follow the links and watch something there.
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 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.
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?
Everything you need, nothing you don't. The OS/DE stayed in its lane.
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...
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.
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
WillAdams•2h ago