If you were asked to pick the most annoying of the various Microsoft Windows interfaces that have appeared over the years, there’s a reasonable chance that Windows 8’s Metro start screen and interface design language would make it your choice. In 2012 the software company abandoned their tried-and-tested desktop whose roots extended back to Windows 95 in favor of the colorful blocks it had created for its line of music players and mobile phones.
Consumers weren’t impressed and it was quickly shelved in subsequent versions, but should you wish to revisit Metro you can now get the experience on Linux. [er-bharat] has created Win8DE, a shell for Wayland window managers that brings the Metro interface — or something very like it — to the open source operating system.
The most beautiful horror to ever exist lmao
this is INCREDIBLE news for approximately 3 people on the planet lol
I have to imagine at least 2 of those 3 worked on it
It’s gotta be 4 to make a full set of tiles
It lacks the most fundamental part of it though: live tiles.
no it doesn’t, you just have to add them for apps yourself. the readme has a whole section dedicated to live tiles.
This belongs in a category of things I’m glad exist but I will never use
I didn’t really like it on desktop, but it was pretty okay on a tablet (Surface Pro). Also ran really smoothly on my potato machine with Pentium 4, so I kinda get why some people miss it.
Gee. Um, thanks.
Unironically could be great for Linux tablet users…is there any?
Some people run Linux on the x86 Surface tablets
Yup, and i might just grab this to try on mine.
I see one use case: After office computers switched to Linux and someone forgot to lock the desktop.
Yay a bad idea was revived? But i hope the 3 people that will unironically love this, have the best time
I loved Metro and miss it.
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Looks cool, would try it
Finally!
I actually loved this interface on my surface pro 2, especially when windows 10 came out and it would auto switch between this in tablet mode and a normal desktop when the keyboard was attached. I grew to like the same design language in the desktop start menu as well. Windows 11 was such a downgrade in UI.
That said, I will take the freedom of linux and customization options of KDE plasma any day.
The looks of the UI were never bad at all. There were other problems:
- The larger distance between icons made it worse for cursor users. Specially for trackpad. But this is just a tradeoff, as it made it better for touchscreens. Also, this is the only problem with the design.
- Laggy context menus and overall slow animations
- This made it objectively worse for all mouse users
- The method to access a list of all applications was also undesirable
- No easy access to exit options
- one of the versions I had to use, didn’t exit to desktop on
Esckey. - Where do you find the Shut Down button? I actually started using the terminal to shutdown the computer on these systems.
- one of the versions I had to use, didn’t exit to desktop on
There was a similar looking UI in Windows Phone and it worked pretty well for me. I actually liked that one more than the Android UI. So, in this case it really was the substandard execution.
