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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 P

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?

XorNot 1y ago
Feels like you just want Cinnamon with maybe 1 or two more polished features?
- apatheticonion 1y ago
  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
  - inetknght 1y ago
    > ...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).
    - apatheticonion 1y ago
      Not recently. I think the last time I used it was a few years ago. I'll take a look though!
whartung 1y ago
> maybe a spotlight-like search 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.

XorNot 1y ago

Feels like you just want Cinnamon with maybe 1 or two more polished features?

apatheticonion 1y ago
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
- inetknght 1y ago
  > ...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).
  - apatheticonion 1y ago
    Not recently. I think the last time I used it was a few years ago. I'll take a look though!

whartung 1y ago

> maybe a spotlight-like search 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.