AeroThemePlasma is by far the closest that exists now, but I think there’s still a space for DE dedicated to being as close of a Windows analogue as possible while remaining legally distinct with a fixed feature set to prevent feature and resource creep. Think a desktop close enough to the user’s choice between 2K, XP, 7, 10 or 11 that they could transition from Windows to Linux and barely even notice that there was a change.

I believe that “my favorite OS, frozen in time” has substantial demand (which will only increase as the big commercial OSes continue to enshittify) and it’s surprising that there aren’t more attempts to capitalize on that.

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felixding 19 hours ago | parent [-]

I think about this all the time.

A high-quality replica takes tremendous effort and time, but it’s not really financially viable.

I’d be happy to be proven wrong.

Oh, and I’d be super happy to pay for such a replica too! For example, $99 a year for a Mac OS X Jaguar to Tiger era skin/theme/desktop environment.

	▲	cosmic_cheese 16 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I think in the long term, such a project could be more sustainable than projects focused on an “original” experience. KDE, GNOME, etc spend a lot of resources on new features and overhauls to enable new features. A fixed-feature replica project by comparison would eventually achieve a “finished” state, with resources instead going towards optimizations, bug fixes, code correctness, etc which are overall less demanding and make unavoidable tech migrations (e.g. X11 → Wayland) less of a pain since the project won’t be mired in tech debt.