The smooth, tile-based interface of Metro/Modern UI of Windows 8 and the Windows Phone are underrated in my opinion. It was simple, fast, and focused on touch. While I didn't have a touch-based Windows 8 laptop or tablet at the time, I had a Windows Phone, and I enjoyed using it more than any other device I've had since.
If it wasn't for the T-Mobile Sidekick, Microsoft probably wouldn't have had to buy Nokia.
Here's the story:
I worked on the infrastructre for the predecessor to Android, the Danger Hiptop, AKA "The T-Mobile Sidekick." (This is my real name, you can see when I worked on it on LinkedIn.)
The "Danger Device" as everyone called it, had cloud storage and a full web browser before Android and before iPhone.
In fact, the first Android basically looks like the successor to the T-Mobile sidekick, because many of the people that worked on Android, including the founder, were from Danger.
*Here's the funny part:*
This is hearsay, so please do not sue me Microsoft. I once saw an article online that confirmed the following story, but the article is long gone (this was more than 20 years ago.)
Again: Don't sue me Microsoft. I am telling a story here, that I heard through the grapevine:
*Microsoft blew up the entire "Sidekick" project.*
But they didn't blow it up intentionally. Basically, Danger ran on Sun Solaris, and when Microsoft bought them, a great deal of the infrastructure was trucked over to Microsoft. As I understand it, nothing was ported, they basically just plugged the gear in.
At some point, the backups failed.
Keep in mind: ALL THE USERS DATA WAS IN THE CLOUD. Nobody was doing this at the time, not Android, not Apple. Just Danger - and then Microsoft.
While restoring from backups, someone was feeling the heat for the mobile devices being down for so long. It takes a long time to do a restore.
One thing led to another, a decision was made... and they lost all the data.
*poof*
Gone forever.
The death of the Sidekick has been documented in various articles, but there was only ONE that got the story correct, and it was nuked over a decade ago. Here's one of the (partially correct) details: https://abcnews.go.com/Business/sidekick-disaster-shows-data...
I've got a story about the first big celebrity hack too, that was the Sidekick also. (And likely was possible because of the Sidekick's cloud storage.)
I really liked the idea of what they did with the start menu of win8. Whenever I opened the start menu, my intent was to focus on look for something in the start menu, not multitask, so live tiles were perfect. IIRC I even wrote a couple of toy apps with those tiles. Win8.1(blue?) was much more polished experience though, original 8 had a lot of rough edges.
I had an original Lenovo yoga and boy the desktop touch experience was bad. Hardware wise it wasn't winning any prizes either. The cooler died a couple of times and replacements were a pain to procure.
As much as the UI was fluid, smooth and probably best for a touch interface, I distinctly remember I hated it and frantically wanted my Start button back on my PC. It is kinda funny reading all the comments about its nostalgia, when all I could think was how annoying it was. I guess to each their own :-).
Tbf the mobile OS with a similar design language was the best mobile UI I ever had the pleasure of using. Last time I felt impressed by Microsoft but alas.
My first experience with it was I couldn't figure out how to shut down my pc (the stupid side charm bar) on Beta 1 of Windows 8.
It was last seen perhaps in the Windows 11 Beta 1 release, confined within the start menu and I think this is where it peaked. It was removed shortly after to the yuck we have now, perhaps slightly coming back in 25H2 with the New Windows 11 start menu experience app groups (I have not personally used it)
I too hated original metro on desktop back in the day and especially missed the start menu, but I also look back on it fondly.
I think that Microsoft was ahead of its time and that they had a better design language than any competitor and original metro still holds up favorably to contemporary designs.
Last time I sat down with a windows 11 pc I even thought “wouldn’t it be better if the start menu was just full screen?”
I was asking for something like this but for windows 7 sometime ago. A little bit surprised that someone made something so strikingly similar to what I requested.
I hope that somebody creates something like this for windows 7 as well. One can only hope as Windows 7 nostalgia hits hard
So nice to see this. I really loved Windows Phone for the simple UI it had which shared a lot of concepts with this. And I felt like Microsoft could have made something really great from the Win8 UI if they had iterated a few more times before dropping it.
I hope you take on that initiative and make the improvements that they didn't
Talking about the design, the further we get from 2012, the more obvious it becomes that windows 8 was kinda like the bauhaus movement for an operating system that wanted to be on touch screens but was made to work on traditional mouse-keyboard interface. It was technically correct, aesthetically pure but socially rejected because it was too stark for the general public (my opinion).
This implementation gets one thing most Metro clones miss, i.e the typography as structure paradigm. In Win8, there were no divider lines or heavy drop shadows to denote hierarchy. The hierarchy was defined strictly by the weight and size of the font.
We spent the last decade drifting back into glassmorphism and mica materials (win11) because people missed the comfort of texture but from a pure information density and rendering performance perspective - the flat, monochromatic 2D plane of windows 8 is a nice tangent. It removed the cognitive load of decoding the UI chrome for touch users.
ps: I'm impressed by the constraint of using native Qt/C++ here instead of taking the easy route with electron or QML/javascript bindings for everything.
Nice. I'm an open source guy, but being disappointed with Android's openness (years ago) I got a Nokia Lumia 800 with Windows 10 Mobile (or whatever it was called). Loved that OS. Fast, well integrated. Can't help but keep thinking it would have gone somewhere if they'd kept at it (in the form of Android app compatibility or "the defacto MS365 OS" or something).
Then they'd call it Copilot OS in 2026 and mess it up anyway. So perhaps it's good that it died ;)
The design looks cool, but it surfaces the app launchers as the protagonists of my workflow. I feel that it would be better if it was more about open windows or something in this direction.
There was nothing wrong with the Windows 2000 UI except that it was “boring”. I get wanting to make things feel new, but doing so requires great skill to achieve without losing the functional imperatives, which is exactly what they did with pretty much every design since Win2k.
The only thing worth saving from windows8-10 is the windows border. it is a huge usability win. Clear borders. square (so it's also fast). clear colors showing which window has focus. It's also funny this show up now a day after the top post was the osx windows border radius fiasco.
yet no linux WM has a decent windows8-10 window border clone.
KDE used to but since the rewrite of the theme from kde5+ they not only killed it, but also removed the option to have sane window border color to show focus. Now it's "accent color" which should be non contrast because they will force that same color on toolbars and such, just like all the bad ideas from office-ribbon era.
well there is the default style for openbsd's fvwm. clear borders, grab handles, contrasting fg/bg colors. But I won't go so far as to say it is decent.
Anyhow it's bold to claim that there are no linux window managers to rival win8, linux is like the paleozoic of desktop interfaces. It has the opposite problem there are too many of the infernal things.
I call that comment a bit of bullshit. XFWM from XFCE, Fluxbox/OpenBox have nearly every titlebar theme in existence, with even better borders than Windows 8 ones.
I am not exaggerating when I say they could be over 1000 themes for Fluxbox/Blackbox.
The default XFWM themes (coming from XFCE 4.10) include several ones with a even a clear grabbable border, if not all of them.
We had the Bluecurve theme from Red Hat when some HN users
didn't even start Elementary school.
And with FVWM literally you could mimick any interface ever.
win8 is the latest version of windows I've used (for about a week before I installed linux, ironically enough. I'm using that laptop right now lol) and I do not remember it being a good experience. Why you would recreate it is beyond me but I think it's neat that folks are doing stuff like this.
Now, if someone wants to recreate win95, I might be interested
It feels like no one in this thread has actually clicked the link or watched the video demo. Do you people only read titles? Purely from a conceptual point of view, sure, it's a cool project, but the actual UI and UX are abysmal compared to what Windows 8 was. Take one look at the lock screen.
Not to crap on the dev, but ignoring it is also counter-productive: it feels a bit like seeing one of those iPhone 4 clones that ran on J2ME trying to parody iOS - impressive attempt at making a dumb phone look less like a dumb phone, but it was miserable to use or even look at. I see this all the time around Linux UIs, no one has standards and no one wants to point the lack of them out.
63 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 78.2 ms ] threadHere's the story:
I worked on the infrastructre for the predecessor to Android, the Danger Hiptop, AKA "The T-Mobile Sidekick." (This is my real name, you can see when I worked on it on LinkedIn.)
The "Danger Device" as everyone called it, had cloud storage and a full web browser before Android and before iPhone.
In fact, the first Android basically looks like the successor to the T-Mobile sidekick, because many of the people that worked on Android, including the founder, were from Danger.
*Here's the funny part:*
This is hearsay, so please do not sue me Microsoft. I once saw an article online that confirmed the following story, but the article is long gone (this was more than 20 years ago.)
Again: Don't sue me Microsoft. I am telling a story here, that I heard through the grapevine:
*Microsoft blew up the entire "Sidekick" project.*
But they didn't blow it up intentionally. Basically, Danger ran on Sun Solaris, and when Microsoft bought them, a great deal of the infrastructure was trucked over to Microsoft. As I understand it, nothing was ported, they basically just plugged the gear in.
At some point, the backups failed.
Keep in mind: ALL THE USERS DATA WAS IN THE CLOUD. Nobody was doing this at the time, not Android, not Apple. Just Danger - and then Microsoft.
While restoring from backups, someone was feeling the heat for the mobile devices being down for so long. It takes a long time to do a restore.
One thing led to another, a decision was made... and they lost all the data.
*poof*
Gone forever.
The death of the Sidekick has been documented in various articles, but there was only ONE that got the story correct, and it was nuked over a decade ago. Here's one of the (partially correct) details: https://abcnews.go.com/Business/sidekick-disaster-shows-data...
I've got a story about the first big celebrity hack too, that was the Sidekick also. (And likely was possible because of the Sidekick's cloud storage.)
Touch-optimized UI on desktops: One step away from where it belongs.
Touch-optimized UI on servers: Very very out of touch.
Firing sinofsky for it: Good.
I had an original Lenovo yoga and boy the desktop touch experience was bad. Hardware wise it wasn't winning any prizes either. The cooler died a couple of times and replacements were a pain to procure.
I which distro this is being tested on.
Probably nice on a tablet.
It was last seen perhaps in the Windows 11 Beta 1 release, confined within the start menu and I think this is where it peaked. It was removed shortly after to the yuck we have now, perhaps slightly coming back in 25H2 with the New Windows 11 start menu experience app groups (I have not personally used it)
I think that Microsoft was ahead of its time and that they had a better design language than any competitor and original metro still holds up favorably to contemporary designs.
Last time I sat down with a windows 11 pc I even thought “wouldn’t it be better if the start menu was just full screen?”
I hope that somebody creates something like this for windows 7 as well. One can only hope as Windows 7 nostalgia hits hard
I hope you take on that initiative and make the improvements that they didn't
This implementation gets one thing most Metro clones miss, i.e the typography as structure paradigm. In Win8, there were no divider lines or heavy drop shadows to denote hierarchy. The hierarchy was defined strictly by the weight and size of the font.
We spent the last decade drifting back into glassmorphism and mica materials (win11) because people missed the comfort of texture but from a pure information density and rendering performance perspective - the flat, monochromatic 2D plane of windows 8 is a nice tangent. It removed the cognitive load of decoding the UI chrome for touch users.
ps: I'm impressed by the constraint of using native Qt/C++ here instead of taking the easy route with electron or QML/javascript bindings for everything.
Party of one, for sure, LOL
Glad to see an attempt to revive it on Linux
Then they'd call it Copilot OS in 2026 and mess it up anyway. So perhaps it's good that it died ;)
yet no linux WM has a decent windows8-10 window border clone.
KDE used to but since the rewrite of the theme from kde5+ they not only killed it, but also removed the option to have sane window border color to show focus. Now it's "accent color" which should be non contrast because they will force that same color on toolbars and such, just like all the bad ideas from office-ribbon era.
https://debugpointnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/OpenBS...
Anyhow it's bold to claim that there are no linux window managers to rival win8, linux is like the paleozoic of desktop interfaces. It has the opposite problem there are too many of the infernal things.
I am not exaggerating when I say they could be over 1000 themes for Fluxbox/Blackbox.
The default XFWM themes (coming from XFCE 4.10) include several ones with a even a clear grabbable border, if not all of them.
We had the Bluecurve theme from Red Hat when some HN users didn't even start Elementary school.
And with FVWM literally you could mimick any interface ever.
They were mostly variations of a theme, and the ones that were not had debatable aesthetics.
But yeah, Bluecurve could rock, especially when customized.
FVWM? Perl? Oh noez! Such complication! ;>
> We had the Bluecurve theme from Red Hat when some HN users didn't even start Elementary school.
True. Bring back Bluecurve on KDE. Bring it back on both. Fedora peeps, job for you.
--"I made a game for a certain kind of person. To hurt them."
Now, if someone wants to recreate win95, I might be interested
Not to crap on the dev, but ignoring it is also counter-productive: it feels a bit like seeing one of those iPhone 4 clones that ran on J2ME trying to parody iOS - impressive attempt at making a dumb phone look less like a dumb phone, but it was miserable to use or even look at. I see this all the time around Linux UIs, no one has standards and no one wants to point the lack of them out.