How can you tell that any Windows or Mac clone UI is a re-implementation? Easy: try to move your mouse diagonally into the Send To menu after letting it pop up. If the send-to menu closes as you mouse over the item into the submenu, it's a clone. If the menu stays up even if you brush over another menu item, it's either real or a Good Clone. :)
For the fun history, @DonHopkins had a thread a few years back:
There was an economies of scale back then with OS-level UI components.
If Microsoft spent money on UX research that improved its UI controls, it would benefit a lot of people. Essentially the cost of that research was bore by all application developers.
The problem now? Every company is designing their own UI components. Every company has to bear the cost of UX research individually. It’s a lot of wheel re-inventing. UX easily takes a backseat.
I work on design systems for an enterprise software company. I was talking with one of the engineers on the team about how great it would be if there were better built in browser-based solutions for things like autocomplete, select and multi-select.
As a side note: With the Internet (and myself) getting older and older, I appreciate the effort of the Internet Archive more and more. So many links I was able to revive thanks to a cached version. So many of my own works I was able to retrieve. It's a blessing, and not praised enough.
Man nothing drives me further up the wall than when a nice progress indicator with discrete segments gets animated with a lazy `to { rotate(360deg); }` etc[1]. It is my molehill to die on
You know talking about progress bars, it takes a lot of confidence to program a linear progress bar. You think you know when loading will be complete and think you know can break down the incremental progress made during loading.
Instead we get these spinning wheels that are like "maybe in the future this wheel will stop and we will have a return value." No confidence whatsoever.
I know this is true because Apple tries to implement progress bars in IOS like real chads. But their progress bars are just fake. They are a cheap animation all the way up to 90% and just stop moving until the progress is actually complete which could be 5 seconds of 90% and 40 seconds of the last 10%. So they think they are chad but lie.
> I know this is true because Apple tries to implement progress bars in IOS like real chads.
Back in The Day, Mac OS X Tiger just faked it by measuring how long it took to boot to LoginWindow, writing that number of seconds to a file, and displaying the next boot's progress indicator as a percentage of that time.
Power words: `/usr/libexec/WaitingForLoginWindow` and `/var/db/loginwindow.boottime`
Progress bars are very hard. I implemented a PowerShell progress bar in a script I wrote, and even that was hard. The script did a nested iteration, deleting objects and re-starting the iteration. I updated the progress bar based on completion of the outermost iteration, but because of how things processed, the progress bar would move more or less logarithmicly; super fast at the start, but slowing down significantly at the end.
I'm sure I could have made the progress bar move more smoothly, but it would have required restructuring my entire program. (It probably needed it, but for a simple script I ran occasionally, not worth it.)
I would imagine that progress bars generally represent the progression of the task state and not time, for that very reason. Or is that not the case in practice?
It is, but traditionally progress bars were often paired with labels showing estimated remaining time.
That said, back in DOS era, this kind of thing was much more straightforward because most operations that would warrant a progress bar involved some kind of disk I/O, which - if you amortize it - is fairly linear, so one can estimate the completion time relatively well. In more complicated cases - e.g. Win95 installer doing things like hardware detection - those estimates were often wildly off.
Back in the dark ages, "idiot dots" or "idiot marks" was a phrase I heard for the various text terminal equivalents.
It would cycle through a small number of text values with some kind of backspace/overwrite to keep things localized to where the cursor ought to be.
One version was a variable length ellipses: . .. ... that would grow and reset in place.
Another was an expanding "dot": . o O that would cycle in place as one character.
And the early "spinner" was: - \ | / that would cycle in place as one character. Hmm, not sure this will render properly on HN but it is hyphen, backslash, pipe, forward slash.
Also back then the movement of the symbols was kind of proof that the program was still running properly and not crashed because it had to be updating the symbols. But nowadays, waiting animations are independent of the thing they're waiting for and their movement isn't a sign of life but just a puppet made from a corpse.
this reminds me of a tool at work that uses a progress bar but the software doesn't calculate the job size so it just fills up quickly and then goes back down again, and repeats endlessly.
I don't have the time to research where I heard this, but I recall a UI focus group study that found pretty much equal user satisfaction between accurate linear progress bars and random progress bars, but universal dissatisfaction with progress bars that "reset". My own feelings mirror this finding.
I've had times where I aborted an operation that was obviously not working. Eventually out of ideas, I waited out the 1,163 seconds and it completed normally.
There's something like this in every desktop Linux I've tried, which made it feel like using the mouse was in some way weird and broken. But I've been using it for long enough now that it either got fixed, or more likely, I got used to it. I don't even remember what it was, something about clicking drop down menus a certain way?
Reminds me of the first time I ever used classic Macintosh System OS, and how you have to hold the mouse button down to keep menus open. It doesn't take much to throw everything off.
It also fails the "hold right click" test, Windows didn't popover context menus until right click was released. Instead, for file, it did a kind of "contextual drag and drop".
If you have another option with a submenu on either side of Send To, the Send To menu will close. It closes as soon as you move over any item with a submenu. But it just so happens that Send To is typically by itself, so it's a good test regardless.
I must be a freak then because one of the first tweaks I do to any Windows install since possibly Win98 days is to set menu delay to 0ms. I like the snappy precise feel and have no problems not taking shortcuts across menu items.
I believe that anyone who isn't explicitly looking for it is subconsciously frustrated by the lack of it and they just don't know why the UI is "annoying".
It is slightly more than just a UI since all of the applications actually work (you can save and reload for example and still see your previous files too).
Check out SmolXP [1]. The one I setup had a 340MB qcow2 image, took about ~10 sec to boot to desktop with qemu, and used only 58MB ram idling on desktop.
I remember being extremely envious of the "Alienware theme" that you could only get with an actual Alienware machine.
That was surprisingly short-lived though, such custom experiences are uncommon these days. Seems like nobody is theming Windows- they just fill it with crapware.
Why theme it? For many people, it has three main functions: starting a game, starting Chrome, and starting MSO. All three kinds have their own custom look, or theme support. The native UI is barely visible, unless you're a heavy Explorer user.
I remember those themes - the sleek "glowing" blue accents on shiny silver and black UI elements looked so fancy back then. There was a Windows Media Player skin too if I recall correctly.
More games ran on it (mostly thanks to higher DirectX version).
From developer perspective, XP was the first version of Windows with registration-free COM and side-by-side assemblies, which (if used properly by app devs) fully solved the "DLL hell" problem.
Lots of relatively small UI improvements that all added up. I honestly never noticed them until years later when I had to use a slightly older machine and had an "oh wow" moment.
Win2K did multiple users more or less the same, the only difference I remember from XP is the login screen that would list all accounts so you didn't have to type the username.
As for UI, it was very easy to switch to classic mode.
I was hoping this was emulation, like the windows 95 in js that exists, but its more of a simulator. The web browser doesnt work and the minesweeper game uses a text emoji instead of a picture for the face
Turns out you can just click and drag to select everything in Minesweeper, and it reveals all the hidden numbers. There’s even a sneaky little “debug” text in the bottom-left corner that shows where all the bombs are.
I also hoped it was actual emulation. I could tell it wasn't when I saw the bootup progress bar moving more smoothly than it ever did in real Windows :)
I was able to get the "browser" to work by opening the Flash Player and clicking the link to the Ruffle website. It's just an embedded view so some sites don't work (I think dependent on your browser settings.)
I feel slightly ashamed that I spent enough time using Windows XP that was able to spot that this was a clone based on the fonts and shadow effects alone.
It could be a badge of honor! You used the system so much that clones can't fool you. To be fair, Windows text rendering does have a very specific look that's difficult to perfectly replicate without using the actual Windows APIs.
I'm sure some here could look at a screenshot of the same text rendered on Windows, macOS, and Linux and tell them apart.
Yep. No web search. No ads or news or weather or links to apps that aren't actually installed. Opens virtually instantly. Lots of stock customization options (icon size, icon order, pinned icons, classic vs XP style, all shortcuts toggleable).
The only thing I miss is the search bar - I became quite used to that with Windows 7.
The Windows XP start menu sucked, no search function and it was common to have 3 columns full of shortcuts with folders inside folders. It only got better with Windows Vista.
it's not an emulator -- it's a (very realistic) re-implementation of the desktop using standard JS and CSS. Flash is run through Ruffle. Edge opens pages using native iframes.
Essentially the browser split comes from the usual browser split: discrepancies in JS and CSS implementations
This means the developer hasn't tested it on Firefox. Platform compatibility is way better than it used to be but you still occasionally get differences in supported APIs or interpretation of the standard.
God I miss Windows XP. I feel like, with a few small changes, the Windows XP GUI would be the most solid desktop experience you could possibly have.
Throw in POSIX compliance/bash, first party Linux compatibility (not WSL), window snapping, dark mode, maybe a spotlight-like search and a few enhancements to the file manager and you'd have a pretty much perfect desktop/productivity OS.
As I recall, XP had a background indexing process, to facilitate system wide search.
I distinctly recall having to turn it off as I had builds fail more than once because the indexer had a derivative file open that the build was trying to delete.
Locking open files has been a Windows pet peeve of mine for decades.
I daily drive Linux and deeply appreciate the fact that pretty much everything (at least in the DE space) is developed for free by people donating their time - so don't take this the wrong way.
...but I've yet to experience the level of DE stability you get from Windows XP/7
That also applies to Windows 11 (low bar, I know) and MacOS.
It is getting much better and that's happening very quickly - but there is always some jank.
For instance, dragging a Chrome tab off the current window to create a new window. The various file managers in Linux (dolphin, files, thunar) fall short (also MacOS Finder is an actual joke).
Also matching glibc versions when distributing software is a bit tedious
> ...but I've yet to experience the level of DE stability you get from Windows XP/7
Have you used Cinnamon? I used Cinnamon for five years and the only weird quirk is needing to change the keybind for locking the machine (Power key + L defaults to opening some stupid debugger).
This is awesome! I recreated Win XP for my personal website a few years ago (https://www.sohailsayed.com/), but this completely blows it out the water on functionality.
I absolutely love just how much depth there is to the functionality in this (from being able to use apps like word, or being able to drag and move around icons on desktop).
Real thing is possible on https://copy.sh/v86/ I think but need an XP disk image[1], not readily available at the moment (probably for copyright reasons?).
Is 86box period-accurate for Windows XP? It seems to go up to Socket 370 (Pentium III) which is very early for XP. Additionally, from my experience using PCem (which 86box is based on), you need pretty beefy hardware to emulate a Pentium II or K6, let alone to go beyond them. And those are period-accurate for Windows 98, not XP.
This brings back so many memories I still remember having a cd with the serial key written right on it. Even now, that key is stuck in my mind qqwd7-8gr47-x9rcp-jjwh7-qpgqq
I went through the "Install Windows" option just to hear the Windows XP installation music again. That track is such a vibe, I have loved it since I was a 14 year-old installing a pirated copy of XP in 2001.
wow it's one of the most nostalgic feelings I've ever felt. Like coming back home after leaving for many years. And you still know your way around even though you already forgot you knew.
Check margin/padding in filename input line of "save file as" menu.
Ms Word is totally not real
Main menu font should be monotype if I remember correctly
Minesweeper has other fonts and pictures
Browser in browser can not work by some browser policy.
BTW the shot of nostalgy is MASSIVE
My favorite video player from that times was LightAlloy and Winamp 2.
People have been making these for a while. I used to see them on Flash game sites all the time as a kid. It'd be "Windows 96" or "Windows XD" or whatever else they decided to call it. They all had a start menu, notepad, maybe a calculator, and maybe a Minesweeper clone, and not much else.
Judging by the amount of Windows startup sound compilation videos out there, "the kids yearn for desktop UIs" might just be a little more common than you think.
Strangely enough, the first thing that some subconscious forces brought me to was to listen to Beethoven's 9th symphony (the file in media sub folder in the home folder).
The 1990s were very Information Superhighway (I get that's said in a mocking tone now for people who didn't actually know what the internet was, but I tend to use it unironically)
It's just a shame about the antitrust stuff and the bugs and glitches that came with MS Windows
I often have a hard time telling if I'm being nostalgic. For me, 7 was peak Windows, but Win2K/XP would rank pretty close as well. I suppose the question for me is what have subsequent releases given us; what can we actually do with more recent versions of Windows that we could not accomplish back then?
I was one of those people who stuck to classic theme all the way up to Win7, but that was the version that finally made me switch because the fancy default theme in it actually looked pretty well after they made the glass effects of Vista more subtle. WinXP looked like some kind of cheap plastic horror in comparison.
It's very funny to look at Apple progressing from "looks like Vista" to "looks like Win7" in its iOS 26 betas.
People love to dogmatically claim that any appreciation for past design can only be chalked up to nostalgia but the XP design is objectively an excellent balance between UI 'gloss' and very simple and clear, unambiguous functionality.
People rarely complained that finding an application under the Start menu was difficult. In current versions of Windows, the Start menu is such a disaster, such a mess, that people don't even open it and rely much more on the search function.
I switched from Windows 10 to Fedora KDE 2 years ago and it's been good. Not great, but good. I do have the occasional problem with drivers and whatnot, but honestly Windows was just as bad, just with different stuff, and Windows was much less stable and much slower
I also switched to KDE, and man, not needing an online account to use a operating system, not having any ads or constant spyware sending every click and keystroke to some ad partner is absolutely amazing. Sad that to get a decent user experience feels amazing, even though it's not really anything special, really goes to show how bad things have gotten.
I'm mostly a gnome 3 guy now, but mate is way underrated IMHO. I usually use it in VMs and the performance and usability is incredible. For those of us who grew up on this paradigm, it's a joy
KDE is bloated, but coming from Windows10 it feels very familiar but with all of Windows' extra shite (ads/tracking/sign in/fucking onedrive) chopped out. I couldn't be happier with it to be honest.
[edit]: I forgot to mention as well, at least on arch you dont have to install the (I forget the package name exactly) kde applications package off pacman, if you don't install it you'll need to install dolphin and a few other things but it really cuts down the bloat.
Yes, this. I'm a long time XFCE user but when I got a beefier machine I switched to KDE, and unlike XFCE it manages the hardware thoroughly enough (sleep/brightness/network/audio) that I don't have to manually hack anything. I tolerate the bloat for that reason. I disabled all the kwallet and pim stuff though, that was a mess.
It's bloated if you judge it by the standards of the WinXP era. And I'm not saying that's unfair, but realistically speaking, it's not an issue for any modern PC.
It must be using ActiveX, ah sorry I mean some feature that Google has unilaterally decided is part of the official web standard, soon to be known as the Chrome Platform standard.
Both the OS and Word 2003 run smoothly. It's quite a show. I think I might want to keep an old 16GB RAM laptop to run Windows 7, MS Office 2010 and VS 2012. I'll cut off as much Internet as possible and concentrate on my projects.
Edit: Just realized that this is not a VM, just a replicate. No wonder Word 2003 looks weird.
It is still nice to use old versions of Office. I think 2003 was my favorite. Simple, usable, no usage-based UI, no pop-ups like "look at this new feature we silently installed!" while you're trying to write.
On a whim a few years ago I wrote an engineering proposal on my Pentium MMX using Word 2003. It opened within 2 seconds via the aging hard disk. Today even LibreOffice feels a bit overwrought. I've found AbiWord delightful recently - it's the WordPad analog of LibreOffice.
How can you tell that any Windows or Mac clone UI is a re-implementation? Easy: try to move your mouse diagonally into the Send To menu after letting it pop up. If the send-to menu closes as you mouse over the item into the submenu, it's a clone. If the menu stays up even if you brush over another menu item, it's either real or a Good Clone. :)
For the fun history, @DonHopkins had a thread a few years back:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17404345
I love reading about old UI interface guidelines, and how much research was done to make it useful to the user.
Now it's all about how to make it useful to the company.
<YOUR FILES ARE NOT BACKED UP, WOULD YOU LIKE TO TURN ON ONEDRIVE?>
<Yes> <Maybe later>
Anyway, the links in that post have deteriorated.
Here's the link to Raymond Chen's blog: https://web.archive.org/web/20190218080905/https://blogs.msd... (shame on MS for redirecting you to another page when showing you a 404, which make it harder to find the original URL).
Updated link to Raymond Chen's blog, where the comments have been 'retired': https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20080619-00/?p=21...
And the 2 imgur links (same issue with the redirecting...):
https://web.archive.org/web/20230509182201/https://i.imgur.c...
and
https://web.archive.org/web/20230507201645/https://i.imgur.c...
There was an economies of scale back then with OS-level UI components.
If Microsoft spent money on UX research that improved its UI controls, it would benefit a lot of people. Essentially the cost of that research was bore by all application developers.
The problem now? Every company is designing their own UI components. Every company has to bear the cost of UX research individually. It’s a lot of wheel re-inventing. UX easily takes a backseat.
I work on design systems for an enterprise software company. I was talking with one of the engineers on the team about how great it would be if there were better built in browser-based solutions for things like autocomplete, select and multi-select.
Are UI libraries no longer a thing?
As a side note: With the Internet (and myself) getting older and older, I appreciate the effort of the Internet Archive more and more. So many links I was able to revive thanks to a cached version. So many of my own works I was able to retrieve. It's a blessing, and not praised enough.
(Only ignorant fools would start to fight it.)
I could tell instantly in the loading screen because the three blocks in the progress bar move smoothly across it.
Man nothing drives me further up the wall than when a nice progress indicator with discrete segments gets animated with a lazy `to { rotate(360deg); }` etc[1]. It is my molehill to die on
[1] https://cdn.dribbble.com/userupload/41647820/file/original-8...
You know talking about progress bars, it takes a lot of confidence to program a linear progress bar. You think you know when loading will be complete and think you know can break down the incremental progress made during loading.
Instead we get these spinning wheels that are like "maybe in the future this wheel will stop and we will have a return value." No confidence whatsoever.
I know this is true because Apple tries to implement progress bars in IOS like real chads. But their progress bars are just fake. They are a cheap animation all the way up to 90% and just stop moving until the progress is actually complete which could be 5 seconds of 90% and 40 seconds of the last 10%. So they think they are chad but lie.
> I know this is true because Apple tries to implement progress bars in IOS like real chads.
Back in The Day, Mac OS X Tiger just faked it by measuring how long it took to boot to LoginWindow, writing that number of seconds to a file, and displaying the next boot's progress indicator as a percentage of that time.
Power words: `/usr/libexec/WaitingForLoginWindow` and `/var/db/loginwindow.boottime`
- https://daringfireball.net/misc/2005/04/tiger_details#waitin...
- https://web.archive.org/web/20060427030025/http://www.macosx...
- https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2005/05/397/
- https://web.archive.org/web/20060506092123/http://www.macosx...
Measuring the time it takes to complete a process and using that for the progress bar on the next run seems like the opposite of faking it to me.
There's also the "Achilles and the tortoise" solution where the progress bar consumes the remaining 80% of unclaimed space in each iteration.
Progress bars are very hard. I implemented a PowerShell progress bar in a script I wrote, and even that was hard. The script did a nested iteration, deleting objects and re-starting the iteration. I updated the progress bar based on completion of the outermost iteration, but because of how things processed, the progress bar would move more or less logarithmicly; super fast at the start, but slowing down significantly at the end.
I'm sure I could have made the progress bar move more smoothly, but it would have required restructuring my entire program. (It probably needed it, but for a simple script I ran occasionally, not worth it.)
I would imagine that progress bars generally represent the progression of the task state and not time, for that very reason. Or is that not the case in practice?
It is, but traditionally progress bars were often paired with labels showing estimated remaining time.
That said, back in DOS era, this kind of thing was much more straightforward because most operations that would warrant a progress bar involved some kind of disk I/O, which - if you amortize it - is fairly linear, so one can estimate the completion time relatively well. In more complicated cases - e.g. Win95 installer doing things like hardware detection - those estimates were often wildly off.
And of course...
https://xkcd.com/612/
I think the most common operations a user will see is stuff like CRUD, which means you're waiting on a remote database and a network round trip
Hard drives and networks are both so fast that you rarely are waiting for data to stream, you're just waiting for the stream to begin
you just don't like how it looks, or is there something else wrong with it?
It's just moving, it gives no actual indication of progress.
Back in the dark ages, "idiot dots" or "idiot marks" was a phrase I heard for the various text terminal equivalents.
It would cycle through a small number of text values with some kind of backspace/overwrite to keep things localized to where the cursor ought to be.
One version was a variable length ellipses: . .. ... that would grow and reset in place.
Another was an expanding "dot": . o O that would cycle in place as one character.
And the early "spinner" was: - \ | / that would cycle in place as one character. Hmm, not sure this will render properly on HN but it is hyphen, backslash, pipe, forward slash.
The latter is known as a "twiddle" in BSD land.
(c.f: https://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-release-10/src/sys/...)
Also back then the movement of the symbols was kind of proof that the program was still running properly and not crashed because it had to be updating the symbols. But nowadays, waiting animations are independent of the thing they're waiting for and their movement isn't a sign of life but just a puppet made from a corpse.
this reminds me of a tool at work that uses a progress bar but the software doesn't calculate the job size so it just fills up quickly and then goes back down again, and repeats endlessly.
I don't have the time to research where I heard this, but I recall a UI focus group study that found pretty much equal user satisfaction between accurate linear progress bars and random progress bars, but universal dissatisfaction with progress bars that "reset". My own feelings mirror this finding.
I called those Congress bars, con being the antonym of pro.
Yup, and on just about every system I used there was a stutter in it about 75% of the way through.
Windows installers and upgrades seem to like to reach 100% and then continue working for a few more minutes.
Old, but good mandatory xkcd
https://xkcd.com/612/
I've had times where I aborted an operation that was obviously not working. Eventually out of ideas, I waited out the 1,163 seconds and it completed normally.
A classic article about a no-delay solution to this problem, not mentioned in the linked thread:
https://bjk5.com/post/44698559168/breaking-down-amazons-mega...
Lovely and simple … you’d think it would have become the best practice in most libraries by now
There's something like this in every desktop Linux I've tried, which made it feel like using the mouse was in some way weird and broken. But I've been using it for long enough now that it either got fixed, or more likely, I got used to it. I don't even remember what it was, something about clicking drop down menus a certain way?
Reminds me of the first time I ever used classic Macintosh System OS, and how you have to hold the mouse button down to keep menus open. It doesn't take much to throw everything off.
...the number of times I accidentally selected the wrong menu item because my finger slipped off the mouse button... I'm getting bad flashbacks!
You can also right-click the desktop and choose 'Properties'. If the resulting window has a tab called 'Screesaver', it's a clone.
Or you can look at the start button. If it has an uppercase S, and the rest of the system is in English, it’s a clone.
It also fails the "hold right click" test, Windows didn't popover context menus until right click was released. Instead, for file, it did a kind of "contextual drag and drop".
Ugh, all the links in that comment are dead, imgur and microsoft alike :(
The "Welcome" text on boot should be "welcome"
If you have another option with a submenu on either side of Send To, the Send To menu will close. It closes as soon as you move over any item with a submenu. But it just so happens that Send To is typically by itself, so it's a good test regardless.
I must be a freak then because one of the first tweaks I do to any Windows install since possibly Win98 days is to set menu delay to 0ms. I like the snappy precise feel and have no problems not taking shortcuts across menu items.
MS Paint though is "either real or a Good Clone :)", because you can zoom to 12x by clicking one-pixel-wide line below 8x.
Crazy how much UI still fails this test.
On my website daedalOS it does indeed have a delay when your mouse leaves a sub menu. I didn't know people looked for that though.
I believe that anyone who isn't explicitly looking for it is subconsciously frustrated by the lack of it and they just don't know why the UI is "annoying".
Google has not learned this lesson
Padding of buttons and around text usually immediately tells that it's a reimplementation.
[dead]
This is a nice replication of the WinXP UI in JS (it is not a virtual machine running in your browser).
https://docs.win32.run/
https://github.com/ducbao414/win32.run
It is slightly more than just a UI since all of the applications actually work (you can save and reload for example and still see your previous files too).
It seems functional to me!
Kudos to the author!
but not command.com
If you want the real thing: https://lrusso.github.io/VirtualXP/VirtualXP.htm
(takes less memory than Miro, at least in Firefox :D)
Works great! Tested on Orion. Sad to see I couldn't delete system32.
Crashes the tab on iOS.
Runs just fine on Firefox for Android. Display is stretched to a weird resolution in portrait mode, though.
no spider.exe tho
Check out SmolXP [1]. The one I setup had a 340MB qcow2 image, took about ~10 sec to boot to desktop with qemu, and used only 58MB ram idling on desktop.
https://github.com/AFellowSpeedrunner/SmolXP
Win XP remains my favourite OS till date. I was in college and getting hands on a pirated copy back then makes me so nostalgic.
There was a cambrian explosion of tools to customize the look and feel. TweakXP pro is the one I remember. All pirated off-course.
I remember being extremely envious of the "Alienware theme" that you could only get with an actual Alienware machine.
That was surprisingly short-lived though, such custom experiences are uncommon these days. Seems like nobody is theming Windows- they just fill it with crapware.
Why theme it? For many people, it has three main functions: starting a game, starting Chrome, and starting MSO. All three kinds have their own custom look, or theme support. The native UI is barely visible, unless you're a heavy Explorer user.
I preferred the Media Center Edition theme myself... kept a copy of it for a long time to drop into XP and other windows flavors.
I remember those themes - the sleek "glowing" blue accents on shiny silver and black UI elements looked so fancy back then. There was a Windows Media Player skin too if I recall correctly.
> Seems like nobody is theming Windows
We found more fun in ricing our linux desktops :) https://reddit.com/r/unixporn
Specifically to look like Windows XP: https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/pdd4o6/xfce_windo...
Did you have the devils0wn copy though?
FCKGW-RHQQ2... is the first thing that pops into my head upon seeing that name.
There was a time I had that whole thing memorized - even when I had legitimately obtained licenses it was easier to type that in …
How was it better than Win2K?
Better hardware support.
Taskbar grouping.
ClearType.
Remote Desktop.
More games ran on it (mostly thanks to higher DirectX version).
From developer perspective, XP was the first version of Windows with registration-free COM and side-by-side assemblies, which (if used properly by app devs) fully solved the "DLL hell" problem.
A huge percentage of XP drivers worked just fine in w2k - sometimes you had to edit the ini or inf file or whatever it was.
Vectored Exception Handlers.
Better support for dealing with "we never tested outside of windows 98" apps.
early version of SxS.
Various small enhancements.
Win2k Pro was peak Windows.
It had Pinball, Solitaire and other games we never really understood.
Lots of relatively small UI improvements that all added up. I honestly never noticed them until years later when I had to use a slightly older machine and had an "oh wow" moment.
Multiple users on a same machine out of the box and way faster boot time.
Didn't care for the UI, though - looked childish...
Win2K did multiple users more or less the same, the only difference I remember from XP is the login screen that would list all accounts so you didn't have to type the username.
As for UI, it was very easy to switch to classic mode.
> Win2K did multiple users more or less the same
No, it didn't. You had to use some 3rd party software for that.
For me the look and feel of Win XP was breath of fresh air compared to Windows 98. WinXP was more user friendly and I was not a power user back then.
OS/2 is the nostalgic one for me.
I was hoping this was emulation, like the windows 95 in js that exists, but its more of a simulator. The web browser doesnt work and the minesweeper game uses a text emoji instead of a picture for the face
Turns out you can just click and drag to select everything in Minesweeper, and it reveals all the hidden numbers. There’s even a sneaky little “debug” text in the bottom-left corner that shows where all the bombs are.
I also hoped it was actual emulation. I could tell it wasn't when I saw the bootup progress bar moving more smoothly than it ever did in real Windows :)
I was able to get the "browser" to work by opening the Flash Player and clicking the link to the Ruffle website. It's just an embedded view so some sites don't work (I think dependent on your browser settings.)
Vast majority of sites disallow embedding nowadays.
I was able to create a vbs script (MsgBox "Test"), but it keeps opening in Notepad...
Yeah I was gonna navigate to the website and try to recurse :(
Seems like v86 will be the king of this for a while longer.
I feel slightly ashamed that I spent enough time using Windows XP that was able to spot that this was a clone based on the fonts and shadow effects alone.
Nice effort though.
It could be a badge of honor! You used the system so much that clones can't fool you. To be fair, Windows text rendering does have a very specific look that's difficult to perfectly replicate without using the actual Windows APIs.
I'm sure some here could look at a screenshot of the same text rendered on Windows, macOS, and Linux and tell them apart.
Also the Windows boot loading bar was way too smooth.
Back when the Start Menu made sense. It wasn't rose colored glasses, it was functional.
Yep. No web search. No ads or news or weather or links to apps that aren't actually installed. Opens virtually instantly. Lots of stock customization options (icon size, icon order, pinned icons, classic vs XP style, all shortcuts toggleable).
The only thing I miss is the search bar - I became quite used to that with Windows 7.
The Windows XP start menu sucked, no search function and it was common to have 3 columns full of shortcuts with folders inside folders. It only got better with Windows Vista.
Win 11 has no (decent) search function
Will call our IT support tomorrow and start this as a full screen.
That will be fun in the office :-)
Have an automatic defibrillator ready just in case
That's actually not a bad April Fool's prank.
These are fun too - https://fakeupdate.net/
"WIN32.RUN might have unexpected behaviors on browsers that are NOT Chromium-based (Safari, Firefox, Internet Explorer, etc.)"
What would be the reasons this wouldn't run on Firefox? Genuine question from a non-web developer.
it's not an emulator -- it's a (very realistic) re-implementation of the desktop using standard JS and CSS. Flash is run through Ruffle. Edge opens pages using native iframes.
Essentially the browser split comes from the usual browser split: discrepancies in JS and CSS implementations
This means the developer hasn't tested it on Firefox. Platform compatibility is way better than it used to be but you still occasionally get differences in supported APIs or interpretation of the standard.
I ran it in icefox without an issue, even got a few games of minesweeper in.
The only issue I had was the mobi reader wouldn't work, but that was fine with me.
Wow. This is very impressive. It would be trippy if IE can run https://win32.run again.
God I miss Windows XP. I feel like, with a few small changes, the Windows XP GUI would be the most solid desktop experience you could possibly have.
Throw in POSIX compliance/bash, first party Linux compatibility (not WSL), window snapping, dark mode, maybe a spotlight-like search and a few enhancements to the file manager and you'd have a pretty much perfect desktop/productivity OS.
Why can't we have nice things?
I distinctly recall having to turn it off as I had builds fail more than once because the indexer had a derivative file open that the build was trying to delete.
Locking open files has been a Windows pet peeve of mine for decades.
Feels like you just want Cinnamon with maybe 1 or two more polished features?
I daily drive Linux and deeply appreciate the fact that pretty much everything (at least in the DE space) is developed for free by people donating their time - so don't take this the wrong way.
...but I've yet to experience the level of DE stability you get from Windows XP/7
That also applies to Windows 11 (low bar, I know) and MacOS.
It is getting much better and that's happening very quickly - but there is always some jank.
For instance, dragging a Chrome tab off the current window to create a new window. The various file managers in Linux (dolphin, files, thunar) fall short (also MacOS Finder is an actual joke).
Also matching glibc versions when distributing software is a bit tedious
> ...but I've yet to experience the level of DE stability you get from Windows XP/7
Have you used Cinnamon? I used Cinnamon for five years and the only weird quirk is needing to change the keybind for locking the machine (Power key + L defaults to opening some stupid debugger).
Not recently. I think the last time I used it was a few years ago. I'll take a look though!
This is awesome! I recreated Win XP for my personal website a few years ago (https://www.sohailsayed.com/), but this completely blows it out the water on functionality.
I absolutely love just how much depth there is to the functionality in this (from being able to use apps like word, or being able to drag and move around icons on desktop).
Brilliant!
Real thing is possible on https://copy.sh/v86/ I think but need an XP disk image[1], not readily available at the moment (probably for copyright reasons?).
[1]: https://github.com/copy/v86/issues/86
Better yet ditch the browser and get a proper emulator, preferably one that emulates all the period-accurate hardware such as https://86box.net.
Is 86box period-accurate for Windows XP? It seems to go up to Socket 370 (Pentium III) which is very early for XP. Additionally, from my experience using PCem (which 86box is based on), you need pretty beefy hardware to emulate a Pentium II or K6, let alone to go beyond them. And those are period-accurate for Windows 98, not XP.
Windows 2000 in a JS VM is available: https://bellard.org/jslinux/
Windows 2000 is also available in the above (with more pre-installed apps).
I loved XP. However, one of the first things I would do is make it look like Win2k. :-)
This brings back so many memories I still remember having a cd with the serial key written right on it. Even now, that key is stuck in my mind qqwd7-8gr47-x9rcp-jjwh7-qpgqq
I got stuck in the serial number part
Huh? I thought the serial numbers are available for free in the internet.
I went through the "Install Windows" option just to hear the Windows XP installation music again. That track is such a vibe, I have loved it since I was a 14 year-old installing a pirated copy of XP in 2001.
An installer having the ability to load drivers and play music was mind blowing
wow it's one of the most nostalgic feelings I've ever felt. Like coming back home after leaving for many years. And you still know your way around even though you already forgot you knew.
Check margin/padding in filename input line of "save file as" menu. Ms Word is totally not real Main menu font should be monotype if I remember correctly Minesweeper has other fonts and pictures Browser in browser can not work by some browser policy. BTW the shot of nostalgy is MASSIVE My favorite video player from that times was LightAlloy and Winamp 2.
No Pinball :(
Fear not! https://98.js.org/programs/pinball/space-cadet.html
Also on web, Android and iOS: https://ksylvestre.itch.io/space-cadet-pinball
Oh my, thanks for this. Quickly made 1.5M
Used to spend lot of time when I was a kid (I didn't even see a real pinball machine before)
Pinball music plays in head...
Little fun tidbit: I happen to use the WinXP wallpaper on my Macbook (just for fun nostalgia, and because I like it), so when I open this up on my browser the background blends: https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/70a66a71-3f6a-485...
Looks good but it's a JavaScript look alike, it's not a real deal.
We get these cheap recreations semi-regularly on here. Why does stuff like this keep being spammed on here, besides the nostalgia factor?
People have been making these for a while. I used to see them on Flash game sites all the time as a kid. It'd be "Windows 96" or "Windows XD" or whatever else they decided to call it. They all had a start menu, notepad, maybe a calculator, and maybe a Minesweeper clone, and not much else.
Judging by the amount of Windows startup sound compilation videos out there, "the kids yearn for desktop UIs" might just be a little more common than you think.
Maybe this is the "running Doom" of the UI/UX crowd.
Of web UI in particular.
And this game is very old. I remember trying to get native-looking dropdown menus in IE6.
Strangely enough, the first thing that some subconscious forces brought me to was to listen to Beethoven's 9th symphony (the file in media sub folder in the home folder).
Very well done...
I am viewing this post on a real Windows XP system on a 440BX platform from 1998. ;)
The BIOS splash text loads and animates but not much else. I'm using Palemoon 25 (SSE1). Impressive that it loads at all!
Sadly, accrual's system was just compromised so they're offline for now
So close that Microsoft Edge's heuristics picked it up as a potential scam after being used for a bit!
Wow, did you get some kind of notification in Edge? Maybe they're trying to detect certain remote desktop sessions used in scams or something.
Yes. It's the new AI powered Scareware blocker.
https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2025/01/27/stand-up-to-s...
I've been on a Teams call with a dev colleague, who just randomly clicked stuff and got web popups that were spoofing the Windows 11 UI...
Using this made me feel happy. I don't get that feeling from modern Windows.
The 1990s were very Information Superhighway (I get that's said in a mocking tone now for people who didn't actually know what the internet was, but I tend to use it unironically)
It's just a shame about the antitrust stuff and the bugs and glitches that came with MS Windows
Design peaked here for OS's. Perfect balance of colors and functionality, and gloss. This was the top.
No, it's just nostalgic.
I don't know, it's nice to have icons and buttons that actually look like what they're going to do instead of amorphous blobs.
I often have a hard time telling if I'm being nostalgic. For me, 7 was peak Windows, but Win2K/XP would rank pretty close as well. I suppose the question for me is what have subsequent releases given us; what can we actually do with more recent versions of Windows that we could not accomplish back then?
XP or 7 in "classic", aka 2000 look. For practical reasons, like hardware-support, really working USB.
If running in some isolated VM for some superspecial APP still supporting running on 2000, why not? Uses much less memory.
I was one of those people who stuck to classic theme all the way up to Win7, but that was the version that finally made me switch because the fancy default theme in it actually looked pretty well after they made the glass effects of Vista more subtle. WinXP looked like some kind of cheap plastic horror in comparison.
It's very funny to look at Apple progressing from "looks like Vista" to "looks like Win7" in its iOS 26 betas.
People love to dogmatically claim that any appreciation for past design can only be chalked up to nostalgia but the XP design is objectively an excellent balance between UI 'gloss' and very simple and clear, unambiguous functionality.
People rarely complained that finding an application under the Start menu was difficult. In current versions of Windows, the Start menu is such a disaster, such a mess, that people don't even open it and rely much more on the search function.
Yes please. Can I please have a simple desktop that doesn't get in my way back?
I switched from Windows 10 to Fedora KDE 2 years ago and it's been good. Not great, but good. I do have the occasional problem with drivers and whatnot, but honestly Windows was just as bad, just with different stuff, and Windows was much less stable and much slower
I also switched to KDE, and man, not needing an online account to use a operating system, not having any ads or constant spyware sending every click and keystroke to some ad partner is absolutely amazing. Sad that to get a decent user experience feels amazing, even though it's not really anything special, really goes to show how bad things have gotten.
There is still Mate, the Gnome 2 fork.
I'm mostly a gnome 3 guy now, but mate is way underrated IMHO. I usually use it in VMs and the performance and usability is incredible. For those of us who grew up on this paradigm, it's a joy
And Cinnamon, which is modern Gnome beaten into some sensible shape.
There is still Trinity, the KDE 3 fork.
https://www.trinitydesktop.org
Get an Arch-based distro with KDE.
You mean xfce? KDE is bloated. Yes it’s still bloated even if Valgrind says it has no memory leaks.
KDE is bloated, but coming from Windows10 it feels very familiar but with all of Windows' extra shite (ads/tracking/sign in/fucking onedrive) chopped out. I couldn't be happier with it to be honest.
[edit]: I forgot to mention as well, at least on arch you dont have to install the (I forget the package name exactly) kde applications package off pacman, if you don't install it you'll need to install dolphin and a few other things but it really cuts down the bloat.
Yes, this. I'm a long time XFCE user but when I got a beefier machine I switched to KDE, and unlike XFCE it manages the hardware thoroughly enough (sleep/brightness/network/audio) that I don't have to manually hack anything. I tolerate the bloat for that reason. I disabled all the kwallet and pim stuff though, that was a mess.
It's bloated if you judge it by the standards of the WinXP era. And I'm not saying that's unfair, but realistically speaking, it's not an issue for any modern PC.
I also run Linux using XFCE.
But some of my Clients use windows and were just "forced" to upgrade their hardware and use Windows 11.
Does it matter when my current uptime is 51 days?
You mean Cinnamon? XFCE is ugly as hell and breaks a lot of things.
xfce is nice, too, but aren't they still on gtk3?
I prefer Budgie myself.
or just KDE?
linuxmint.org :)
Linux
Not an authentic experience, it boots way too fast.
The bootup sound brought a flood of old memories.
Any support for Direct3D?
You cannot drag & drop the Recycle Bin :(
See also: https://www.windows93.net/
Playing Age of War right now.
So disappointed it doesn't include OG solitaire!
Cool example, however yet another "runs best on IE" sites, ah sorry it is Chrome nowadays.
It must be using ActiveX, ah sorry I mean some feature that Google has unilaterally decided is part of the official web standard, soon to be known as the Chrome Platform standard.
[dead]
Insane how performant this is in the browser.
lol, I can't tell if you are serious or not, but it's a recreation in HTML/CSS.
I just assumed it was wasm
Dragging 'Word' is rough on my setup... while 'Notepad' is fine, lol. More styling is expensive.
Both the OS and Word 2003 run smoothly. It's quite a show. I think I might want to keep an old 16GB RAM laptop to run Windows 7, MS Office 2010 and VS 2012. I'll cut off as much Internet as possible and concentrate on my projects.
Edit: Just realized that this is not a VM, just a replicate. No wonder Word 2003 looks weird.
It is still nice to use old versions of Office. I think 2003 was my favorite. Simple, usable, no usage-based UI, no pop-ups like "look at this new feature we silently installed!" while you're trying to write.
On a whim a few years ago I wrote an engineering proposal on my Pentium MMX using Word 2003. It opened within 2 seconds via the aging hard disk. Today even LibreOffice feels a bit overwrought. I've found AbiWord delightful recently - it's the WordPad analog of LibreOffice.
Yeah 2003 is probably good enough for me too. I only need it to write my CV.