The first time Windows users started looking for an alternative OS en masse it was 2012, and Microsoft had just released a desktop UI so bad it would be almost entirely purged from existence within just three years. Windows 8 was all about big, square icons designed for a new wave of touchscreen-enabled laptops and Windows phones. The classic desktop designed for mouse and keyboard was gone, based on a prediction that soon everyone would want to use all their devices in the same way (this has still not come to pass).
At the same time Microsoft’s UI designers performed an all-time beefing-it maneuver, its business geniuses rolled out a new Apple-inspired Microsoft Store and method of locking down apps that spurred Valve’s Gabe Newell to declare “Windows 8 is a catastrophe for everyone in the PC space” and start investing into Linux development.
It was truly the nadir of Windows’ 40 year history—and is now proof that there’s an audience for literally everything, because someone has made a Windows 8 desktop environment for Linux. It’s so damn nuts I’m actually tempted to try it.
The description for Win8DE on Github is almost poetic. “If you are one of who enjoyed the windows 8 and miss its fluid animations but have since moved to linux,” it begins, before elaborating (without much interest in proper grammar) on the tragic circumstances any such theoretical person now finds themselves in:
“And cant go back to windows 8, because all apps are non functional there.”
Yes?
“And if you can bear that you cant install it on the newer hardware.”
Yes??
“This is for you.”
For me? 😍
Well, maybe not for me: for someone who actually, genuinely appreciates Windows 8 and wants to use a computer in its style once again.
A video embedded on the Github page confirms that the desktop environment, built for Wayland, really does look a hell of a lot like Windows 8. It’s got those colorful squares and rectangles, the horizontally scrolling desktop for flipping between “pages” of apps laid out however you want them, and a mobile-style app drawer for a more compact view of everything installed on your system. The fonts and default colors take me right back to the mid-2010s.
You’re not going to find this among any lists of the most comprehensive or polished desktop environments—KDE Plasma, Gnome and Cinnamon have taken years, even decades of development to cement themselves as the Linux go-tos—but I have to admit that none of them are nearly this funny.
Despite being perhaps the only person on Earth craving a way to use the Windows 8 UI on Linux, even developer er-bharat acknowledges some things are a bridge too far. “it dosent provide charms menu because i always thought its useless,” they wrote. Too true, er-bharat.
The project seems to still be in active development, but brave Linux users can find instructions for how to install it on the Github page.
