[1] https://www.drivencarguide.co.nz/news/new-zealand-startup-le...

[2] https://thespinoff.co.nz/partner/17-09-2017/the-airbnb-for-c...

XFCE comes a bit closer to the old UX and cohesiveness, but is still a bit off. In saying that, Chicago95[1] for XFCE does a really great job of bringing that classic Win9X look to XFCE, so it's worth giving a shot. There's also a fork of it called MENT2K[2], which recreates the Win2K experience, also worth checking out.

The DEs I've seen being closest to recreating that classic experience have unfortunately been outside of Linux: ReactOS being the most obvious choice, and the other one being SerenityOS. Although not viable for daily driving yet, still fun to play around with in a VM.

[1] https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95/

[2] https://github.com/User738git/MENT2K

I also recall this 3D shell where your desktop was basically like an first-person shooter, where there would be a literal desk with files that you could click on, a media wall that would display your photos and so on. I forgot what it was called, but it was one of the coolest things ever. In reality it wasn't very practical, but it was still cool. I miss those days of crazy mods and customisation. Everything so locked up and dumbed down these days, in the name of "security".

I also don't want the app to use GTK, libadwaita and the like. Although Qt is somewhat acceptable, I would strongly prefer something more lightweight like Slint, Iced or egui. Or even better, make it a terminal app with a TUI (that doesn't use bloated frameworks like Ratatui/Bubbletea etc).

[1] https://flox.dev/

- There was no option to activate a specific set of machines sitting in a particular OU or AD group, which means you'd have to manually import machines that you want to activate - and you can't do a bulk import from a simple text/CSV file either.

- VAMT does not automatically retry failed devices, or devices which were offline. Trying to find these devices and manually activate them via VAMT is also not feasible, especially if you have a large fleet.

- Pretty much no useful reporting capability especially if you want to track failed/offline devices.

I've had to end up hacking together a bunch of PowerShell scripts and scheduled tasks to make up for the lack of functionality - something I shouldn't have to do. And it wasn't nice that the VAMT module isn't compatible with PowerShell v5.1, which means I needed to run my scripts under PowerShell v2...

And please don't tell me that the answer is "cloud". Cloud doesn't work for everyone, and I'm sure MS have plenty of Fortune 500 customers or critical organisations (like government agencies) that are still on-prem only.

The current tools for fixing NTFS filesystems in Linux are less than ideal, but it seems like your tool is almost there (but designed to handle extreme case, instead of the simple ones).

And in the rare event you get a bad update, you can just boot to the previous two images right from the boot menu, no need for any commands or restores - just boot the image and keep using it without any worries. You can pin known good images too, so you know for sure you always have a working image you can boot into. And you have access to the previous 90 days of images (via Github), so you can switch to any old image (or the latest beta) for bug/regression testing, without needing to do lengthy backups and restores.

All this makes it ideal for someone who just wants their system to work without worrying about updates and stuff, getting you a console-like experience on PC.

In fact you can even run an entire DE from Distrobox if you wanted to, although I can imagine that being a bit awkward. But a single GUI app? Shouldn't be an issue unless you've got a tricky/niche setup.

https://commandlinux.com/statistics/linux-server-market-shar...

Clearly an expert on Linux distros, as you can see.

[1] https://www.xda-developers.com/author/joao-xda/