Kumander Linux – A Linux Distro with a Windows 7 Desktop(kumander.org) |
Kumander Linux – A Linux Distro with a Windows 7 Desktop(kumander.org) |
If someone's interested in a real Windows 7 lookalike, take a look at https://gitgud.io/aeroshell/atp/aerothemeplasma, it's extremely close.
See for yourself:
- Kumander: https://www.kumander.org/img/images/kumander.png
- AeroShell: https://gitgud.io/aeroshell/atp/aerothemeplasma/-/raw/Plasma...
How wrong were you. Lot's of people don't want to use wayland until it reaches a certain feature-complete maturity. I for instance have again put it off for another year and won't consider running a wayland only DE at all for the forseable future since it breaks too many things for no good reason and I need to be able to switch back to X11 if needed. I use my pc for for work, not just as a troubleshooting toy.
Taking the topic into account of people moving from old school Windows 7 to this Windows-like distro, these people will probably be more pleased by X11 (hassle free screen sharing, global shortcuts) vs the wayland "in theory it is great and modern but in practice there still are way too many incomplete and missing pieces" situation.
First thing that caught my eye is the space between the command prompt and the first character of the command; but other than that, it's very much "I can't believe it's not Windows".
I believe that “my favorite OS, frozen in time” has substantial demand (which will only increase as the big commercial OSes continue to enshittify) and it’s surprising that there aren’t more attempts to capitalize on that.
A high-quality replica takes tremendous effort and time, but it’s not really financially viable.
I’d be happy to be proven wrong.
Oh, and I’d be super happy to pay for such a replica too! For example, $99 a year for a Mac OS X Jaguar to Tiger era skin/theme/desktop environment.
Whereas AIUI the alternative here is just a cosmetic change to Xfce and shouldn't need any maintenance at all. There are only new KDE releases once every 2 years.
I know which of those I'd want. As it happens, I also much prefer Xfce to KDE: it's smaller, simpler, lighter, faster, more coherent, and complies much better with Windows's keyboard UI.
Despite nostalgia, it was stripped in pursuit of a mobile-friendly UI (at the time).
'...calling the UI that debuted in Vista and continued in Windows 7, “cheesy” and “dated.”'
https://www.computerworld.com/article/1437474/microsoft-dump...
All Windows UIs will die, on Microsoft's time, not the user community.
In the end we all know how "well" W8 was received due to Metro components. Slightly modified Aero theme was still there, all resource files like icons, graphics were largely carried in. Aesthetically and visually that version of Windows was like 5-year old would made a papier mache operating system of two different products.
https://www.deviantart.com/zainadeel/art/Shine-2-0-for-Windo...
Looks better than MacOS as well.
There are no true title bars, so I can't middle-click the title bar to send the window to the back. I can't roll up windows into the title bar. Random dialog buttons end up in there although I have not yet had a chance to read the text and work out what answer I need; the GNOME design is "answer first then we'll ask the question." Keyboard UI is woeful because it's GNOME. Files was cut down into a sad castrated replica of itself a decade ago, and still is. Apps mostly have no menu bars and I have to mess around with tiny hidden hamburger menus as if I were trying to control an iPad that had a broken touchscreen.
It feels like trying to operate a desktop with my nose because both hands are tied behind my back. It is painful.
It's pretty, though.
Iirc it was a bit wonky and it eventually convinced me that, if I wanted to ever use Linux, I didn't need a Windows UI — I needed to learn to use Linux.
Heavily XP inspired and it even came with similar task-oriented interface "hacks"
Oh, and getting some part of the OS/window manager to remember window placement/size. Wayland/GTK don't and this is NOT an innovation, it's trying to turn the desktop into a phone.
Corel LinuxOS did this at the turn of the century. Xandros took it even further.
Sadly, although a company is still around and owns the names, they do not use any of the original code.
Xandros's version of KDE 2 was the best Linux desktop of its era and it wasn't even close. By a decade later, Ubuntu Unity took that role, but a lot of people don't know how to drive Windows by keyboard, and aren't willing to learn new things, so they hated it -- especially here on HN, which called for it to be cancelled, and Canonical listened.
The logo looks like Firefox, Thunderbird, and a Charmander mixed together.
Windows 7 is nearer to Windows 95 than to Windows 11.
And yes, time flies.
Not enough dark glass.
KDE, GNOME, etc spend a lot of resources on new features and overhauls to enable new features. A fixed-feature replica project by comparison would eventually achieve a “finished” state, with resources instead going towards optimizations, bug fixes, code correctness, etc which are overall less demanding and make unavoidable tech migrations (e.g. X11 → Wayland) less of a pain since the project won’t be mired in tech debt.
Windows 1.x/2.x were noted for being rather primitive, and similar to the "flat design" trend hated by many when Win8 came out. 3.x is when the UI elements became 3D, and then they retained nearly the same appearance until XP introduced the bitmap-based theme.
It's also technically cross-platform, as evidenced by FreeBSD's support for Wayland compositors. But it's not its goal either, the goal is an excellent Linux desktop, not something that serves the 17 people in the world that routinely run the same exact desktop config on Linux and non-Linux PCs.
X11 used to crash all the time, especially after an update, back when it was being vibrantly developed. It's been a lot more stable since it got abandoned. I've not had a crash in 13 years.
I've been using Wayland for two and a half years and it's been more stable than X11 that I've been using prior for years.
Fact is still that wayland does some things better, and a bunch og other things worse.
