What would a Microsoft engineer do to Ubuntu? AnduinOS is the answer AnduinOS, a one-man project from a Chinese Microsoft engineer, is quite a new Ubuntu remix that reshapes GNOME in the image of Windows 11. So far, AnduinOS is only on its fourth release. The current release, version 1.3, is based on Ubuntu 25.04 and appeared at the start of this month. Although it is not technologically …
Maybe Wubuntu/Winux is just too small to go after at the moment. They did got after Lindows a long time back, and everything that had "Windows" in its name but wasn't from Microsoft, e.g. Windows Commander became Total Commander because of this.
All my distant cousins (aged 70+) use Win10 on computers that won't go 11. They need to switch. I've set up their Win 10 to look like the XP they can still handle. What I will need is a USB stick that will partition and reliably save their pix and data, then install an unobtrusive Linux, and get them going again. Elive is close, but still too complicated/machine sensitive. Scope for a paid 'upgrade path'?
Talk about a niche market. your aiming this at some who already uses and is happy with Windows 11 but also wants to move to Linux and retain the same style of Windows 11 UI. There can't be many of those about.
Of course this MS employee might know something we don't about future Windows UI decisions and perhaps the existing Windows 11 UI is due to change shortly and so there maybe a nostalgia for classic Window 11 UI in the future.
> Indeed, and all the worst bits too.
Look, I personally agree. Windows 11 is my least favourite version. Windows ME and Windows Vista were both much better than Win11.
But that is not the point. It has enviable customer awareness. It apes the very popular Apple UIs.
Make no mistake, that immovable taskbar with centred icons is an hommage to the macOS and iOS Dock.
This was not done for efficiency or usability. Centred icons _move around_ depending on how many there are. This destroys muscle memory. It was done because the cooler company does it and has strong market presence, especially in mobile. The dominant mobile platform, Android, also does it, and Microsoft has unsuccessfully tried to sell Android devices too, remember.
You might protest that MS has the skills to give Android a Windows style taskbar, but that was the old MS. Now it doesn't even have the skills to upgrade the NT kernel's built-in POSIX environment to Linux compatibility and it had to write a bolt-on Linux emulator to try to get Windows Phones to run Android apps. Then it killed Windows Phone so it repurposed that Android runtime and renamed it Windows Services for Linux 1.
Win11 is current, and it looks trendy, and it apes the more fashionable laptop/phone/tablet OSes.
There are loads of Linux desktops which copy the Windows 95 (Xfce) or Windows 98 (KDE) or Windows XP (MATE) or Windows Vista/7 (Cinnamon) or Windows 10 (Budgie, UKUI, Deepin) desktops.
Fewer of them copy the latest one. This makes AnduinOS visible.
The poor guy's webserver collapsed in recent weeks because this went viral in Linux circles.
Never underestimate the masses' urge to follow fashion.
If you know how to use the desktop you know it's worse. But most people don't know how to use it.
Very clearly and demonstrably Microsoft no longer knows how to use its own products well and efficiently: it has repeatedly demonstrated this with Office 2007, then Windows 8, then grudgingly backtracked with 8.1 and then 10, and *it got away with it* so now it changed its mind. Suddenly Windows 10 isn't the last version any more. Just like Google, it's aggressively pushing the enshittification. Make the product worse if it makes the dumb users pay for it.
> Then go to the headmaster and explain what you have done.
I absolutely stand by it.
Both Vista and ME were tolerable and useful after they'd been out for a while and received some updates. Vista SP1 is perfectly serviceable *on a well specified PC* -- meaning at least a dual-core x86-32 with 4GB RAM, of which there would be 10% it couldn't use but that's a Microsoft choice -- or on a for-the-time high-end Core 2 Duo with 8GB.
It introduced the Windows compositor, a major new feature, also the basis of all subsequent versions. Win7 is just Vista with minor tweaks, and everyone loved 7. People are nostalgic for it now.
ME was a valid product for its time. It was up against NT 4 (no USB, no FAT32, almost no power management or PnP) or Windows 2000 (i.e. NT 5, needing at least 128MB RAM and ideally 256MB for real productive use, all-compliant hardware, and for good results 2 CPUs.)
In about 2000 I built a PC for an impoverished mate and as he was the last in line all my good spare kit was gone. The best I could muster was an AMD K6, 80MB of RAM, and two smallish EIDE hard disks. I put together an NT4 box and by then it was already hard to find a browser, free antivirus, etc. But the box was way too low-end for Win2K.
I also wasted about 2 days trying to fix a laptop for a client who wanted to use a Firewire iPod with a Windows 98SE Sony Vaio.
Later, I discovered 98SE has no native Firewire support but ME did. ME was quite happy in 80MB of RAM. Both those people would have been better off with ME, but I found this out too late. There's an unofficial service pack for ME with a bunch of updated subcomponents and with that it's arguably the best, most capable, and most solid iteration of the whole Win9x family.
But it was too late; the reputation was stained, the damage done.
Liam
I get where you are coming from, but every instance of Me I had to ever support fell over more than a drunk with undone shoe laces. One where logging in was a lottery on if it would make it to the desktop without blue screening...
Very glad when the 9x codebase finally departed...
> Then go to the headmaster and explain what you have done.
I absolutely stand by it.
You poor delusional fool you!
Both Vista and ME were tolerable and useful after they'd been out for a while and received some updates. Vista SP1 is perfectly serviceable *on a well specified PC* -- meaning at least a dual-core x86-32 with 4GB RAM, of which there would be 10% it couldn't use but that's a Microsoft choice -- or on a for-the-time high-end Core 2 Duo with 8GB.
I would argue the same is true of Windows 11 and Windows 10, neither are the same as when released, and both are useable.
My issue with modern Windows is tracking, but that aside I think the OS is usable and snappy. A lot of the slimming down done for Windows 7 has carried over, so on modern hardware it tends to fly.
(To be fair on modern work hardware it crawls, but that's my work putting horrible IDS systems on it and setting everything to paranoid).
It introduced the Windows compositor, a major new feature, also the basis of all subsequent versions. Win7 is just Vista with minor tweaks, and everyone loved 7. People are nostalgic for it now.
It did, the first version of it. Which had a giant round robin lock in the re-draw loop.
This means the more windows you open the slower your machines UI goes, and if one of the programs gets paged out or crashes you can have periods where the whole desktop appears to hang as it's waiting for the lock to timeout.
This wasn't fixed until WDDM 1.1 in Windows 7 (Where things were lovely and snappy again).
The architectural changes between Vista and 7 are small, but they're very impactful.
ME was a valid product for its time. It was up against NT 4 (no USB, no FAT32, almost no power management or PnP) or Windows 2000 (i.e. NT 5, needing at least 128MB RAM and ideally 256MB for real productive use, all-compliant hardware, and for good results 2 CPUs.)
I will confess to never actually using ME in anger, 98SE was my last DOS based OS, then it was NT4 and 2K. ME always reminds me of that scene in the Simpsons where they're explaining that all the ilnesses Mr Burns have are wedged in a doorway so it somehow works.
"Windows ME and Windows Vista were both much better than Win11." - Vista maybe, provided it was run on decent hardware. The UI was excellent - the problem was the the minimum recommended hardware specs were too low, and on computers just meeting those requirements it was an absolute dog.
Windows ME was certainly worse than 11, and worse than any other version of Windows. It was basically 98SE buggered around with badly, and frequently wasn't very stable.
"Make no mistake, that immovable taskbar with centred icons is an hommage to the macOS and iOS Dock."
It is, and it ignores the crucial point that a Mac doesn't reallly have an equivalent of the start menu, and users will pin the programs they use to the dock in whatever order suits them. Trying to translate this to Windows, with its start menu, doesn't work at all as the start button moves around. If Microsoft wanted to go down this route they should have fixed the position of the start button in the middle of the taskbar, with the position being fixed irrespective of what other programs were open. Or better still just left it alone! All our work computers have a policy applied which left-aligns the taskbar!
Very clearly and demonstrably Microsoft is aggressively pushing the enshittification.
Indeed ...
Not that I care but they have been doing it for at least the last 20+ years.
Fortunately, I no longer have to deal with anything MS, not even the nefarious systemd.
All my boxes run on Devuan and none of them have Gnome.
.
I get it, it familiarity with the most well known OS. And it will comfort people who might be considering a switch without much knowledge of what is going on behind the scenes. But tbh if you were going for popularity then a look-a-like of W10 (or 7) would gain more traction.
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"The AnduinOS desktop strongly resembles Windows 11, so it could provide a soft landing for users who are familiar with the newest version of desktop Windows, but perhaps want to try Linux on an older PC that can't run the latest release."
Let's just say that it's not the 1st time that we have read statements similar to this one.
The various flavours/desktops of Linux are fine as they are trying to make them look like Windows is not doing anyone any favours.
Should we try and make Mercedes cars look like BMW cars, do you think that it would encourage previous BMW owners to by Mercs. Somehow I doubt it.
It's a Microsoft developer. He works with what he's got.
Now that the project exists, I'm confident that competent people will fork it/reskin it into whatever shape doesn't offend penguinista sensitivities.
And as far as "doesn't need to be done" is concerned, everything and anything that offers an alternative to Redmond's iron grip on the market is welcome as far as I'm concerned.
"The various flavours/desktops of Linux are fine as they are trying to make them look like Windows is not doing anyone any favours."
OK, they're not necessarily doing you any favours. OTOH what would be a favour for somebody attempting to move away from Windows? The UI will necessarily look like something but what? Some SciFi fan's homage to their favourite films which seems to ba a favourite basis for theming DEs? Or something that looks reassuringly familiar?
You're not the target market for this sort of distro. Neither am I. But that doesn't mean that it isn't what the users it's aimed at won't want.
Having said that, maybe a W10 look would have been better.
"Or W2000 (in which case there's, e.g., Mint/Xfce)."
Any distro with KDE with Reactionary for window decorations and any of the various early Windows application style, colour and icon themes. It's very easy to do with KDE, especially as the panel and menu button are in the right place by default unless the distro developers have chosen to apply some NIH sauce.
>> OTOH what would be a favour for somebody attempting to move away from Windows?
If you are comfortable with Windows then almost any modern distro, Mint, Ubuntu is already similar, there is very little to learn really. It's mostly about learning which apps replace Windows alternatives,
>>You're not the target market for this sort of distro. Neither am I. But that doesn't mean that it isn't what the users it's aimed at won't want.
Who do you actually believe is the target market? No-one with an IT background, that's for sure, the majority of people dont' really care, they don't even know what Linux is. So who is left that hasn't already made the switch.
"So who is left that hasn't already made the switch."
All those who've heard about the end of W10 and have a box that won't downgrade to 11 and which they can't afford to replace. There must be a lot of them. Add to that those of us with non-tech relatives whom we wish to ease off to something better.
Back when it was a new addition to the range I was given a BMW 1-series as a hire car.
Neither me or my mate could work out how to start it. There as an electronic gizmo key fob thing, with no actual key. I'd never previously encountered the like. In the dash was a hole loosely the same shape, but inserting it didn't do anything noticeable beyond lighting up the dials. There was also a button, prominently labelled Start, but pressing it did not start the engine. Pressing it a second time turned everything back off again.
While my chum was trying to work it out I found the user manual in the glove box. Speed reading I discovered that you had to be pressing the brake pedal at the same time as the Start button. Nope, that made no difference. Ah! That's for the automatic model. For the manual you have to depress the clutch. We have ignition.
Leaving the carpark the "key" fell out of its slot going up the exit ramp, falling conveniently under the pedals. This happened frequently over the next few days.
Out on the motorway I discovered that I couldn't cancel the indicators after a lane change. Counter to expectation, the stalk immediately returned to the centre position leaving the winkers doing their thing with no obvious way of stopping them. Pushing the stalk in the other direction just made them flash on the other side. So I went some distance flashing alternately left and right while maintaining the same lane. Eventually I worked out that you had to push the stalk a second time in the same direction to make them stop.
Congratulations to BMW for releasing a new car that required the driver to read the instruction manual. Special thanks to the hire car company for inflicting this on the general public.
-A.
Geting Ubuntu to run on an Arduino platform would be a feat indeed.
Alas it's AnduinOS presumably named after the great river, Anduin, that ran from the north of middle earth southward through Gondor past Minas Tirith during the third age.
I vaguely recall "and" meant great and "uin" meant river, or some such, in one of the elvish languages.
Is there a medical or psychological term for this? I read it as ArduinOS several times, for sever days. And now I went back in the browser, from the comments section, and it says AnduinOS without reloading the page. I could bet real money that it said ArduinOS and it just changed (even though it had no way it could have done that). Mandela Effect seems to fit somewhat, but this wasn't a memory. This was me reading the same thing wrong consistently, and I'm not usually known to be dyslexic.
I haven't tried it: I'm just going on the published claims of the distribution, that it includes Wine, as at May 2025:
https://docs.anduinos.com/Skills/Introduction.html#further-exploration
AnduinOS incorporates a wide array of technologies that enhance its functionality and versatility:
Containers: Lightweight, portable units for deploying applications consistently across environments.
KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine): A virtualization solution integrated into the Linux kernel, enabling the creation of virtual machines.
Wine: A compatibility layer that allows running Windows applications on Linux.
If ArduinOS is making false claims, that's certainly something that should be mentioned. Perhaps it's an English Language problem?
Windows isn't an OS. It's an app delivery mechanism. It's job is to deliver apps that the workforce are used to. And with a chicken-and-egg situation, the workforce gets used to the apps it delivers.
2 years ago - as IT manager - I had to save a lot of money urgently. One of the low hanging fruits was Adobe. An audit of who was using what and what for pointed to a direct blend of FOSS and much cheaper alternatives.
Job done, you'd think.
Only none of the managers could accept it. Turned out they - and their staff - saw proficiency and exposure to Adobe as an industry norm. I was told in no uncertain terms that if we ditched Adobe we would lose talent and struggle to recruit new talent a no one wanted to work with knock-off software.
Now it doesn't matter a jot what the reality of the situation is. This is what people believe, and therefore base their decisions on. So it was keep Adobe and lose money.
Been a Linux dev/end user since 1997.
Downloaded the install image and spun it up in a VM.
It's not, as others have bitched about, W11... it's actually a nice clean UI that doesn't use the tired menu paradigm.
The taskbar can be anywhere, you can disable the display of the home and trash can desktop icons, stick your favourite apps on the taskbar and the rest are one click away via the Anduin "pancake stack" icon.
This type of lean,clean desktop is why I have been a Zorin user for a long time... don't understand why people want a menu driven GUI.
I like it doesn't use SNAP and flatpak is empty.
Would have tried it as my daily driver (after removing all the crud processes in Gnome that I don't like and the preinstalled apps and installing my usual suspects) but it failed my main test....while it doesn't use pulseaudio, it does use pipewire... and for "reasons", I dont want anything in front of ALSA.
Thus removing pipewire meant the whole GUI got removed. Same happens in many others distro's where if you remove pulseaudio/pipewire the GUI gets zapped.
I have no clue why an audio subsystem should be so tied into a GUI. Yes, you can disable pulse/pipewire but having a GUI collapse with their removal says things are rotten in the state of Gnome for that specific Linux spin.
Zorin has no issues with adding/removing pulseaudio/pipewire so it stays as my preferred desktop.
Bluck
Foolish dynamic linking and inherited dependencies. That has always bugged my ass about pulseaudio, libpulse becomes a dependency for things that don't even have anything to do with audio because they link against things that link against libpulse. Now you need both pulseaudio and pipewire libraries for package dependencies on typical distributions.
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