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this post was submitted on 04 Feb 2026
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"Why are you looking at a cat picture on your computer, when you could admire a real feline beauty right here?" - That cutie pie there.
YOU'RE STILL USING WINDOWS XP!? AWESOME! THAT WAS ALWAYS MY FAVOURITE VERSION! It was peak Windows, I swear. 7 might have been the last good one, but only barely, and XP was better. (Though I always preferred the Luna theme. Can't go wrong with the classics. Those iconic blue window borders and all the sounds that went with manipulating windows were just such a perfect sensory combination. I'm not sure anymore if I really liked using a computer at 4 years old, or if Windows XP specially was just a really good sensory experience that I liked more than any of my toys.) Haven't actually liked any Windows version since. Highly doubt there will ever be another version I'll like. Leaving aside the sheer bugginess and user hostile system design, modern UI design is just fundamentally broken and can't make interfaces I actually want to use anymore. The sensory experience of modern graphical software is usually infuriating. It's like there's no testing anymore. Of the interfaces, or the code, or anything.
Not my picture 
just an image that the kitty and old school icons made me think of.
Also I don't think it would be safe to go online on a win XP computer today unless Microsoft are still doing security patches, which I doubt they are.
Ah. Well, the cat is still adorable and I wanna pet himbs.
Yeah, you definitely shouldn't use it as a primary system and if you're going to use it for retro software and games, airgap the machine. It's definitely not secure anymore. If it was, I would still be using it. It worked most of the time, which is a claim that Winblows 11 can't make. If they remade it, with no modern crap, just the original XP design and modern security and software support, it'd be their best selling and highest market share product ever.
Windows XP was still bad, Linux was an overall better experience even in its day.
I didn't say it was objectively good. Just that modern Winblows is a lot worse.
(And I wouldn't know myself if Linux would have been a less frustrating and generally better experience for me at that time - I'd never even heard of it back then, hadn't used it, and I've heard a lot of horror stories of it being... a lot more fiddly to get working for certain stuff back then. Sure as heck like it better than Winblows nowadays though, but beating Winblows 11 ain't that high a bar...)
Gaming was in a sorry state, and there were driver problems with Broadcom wifi modules specifically that were so bad the recommended fix if your laptop had a Broadcom wifi module was to buy a usb wifi dongle and leave it plugged in at all times, but it was still a lot more pleasant to use for non-gaming tasks than Windows was.
I loved Compiz-fusion.
I definitely didn't play a lot of games back then. (Though the ones I did play, mostly Winnie the Pooh kiddie games... six year old me probably would have strangled anyone whose advice or actions led to her not being able to play any of her Pooh games. But she also might have had a surprising amount of patience to troubleshoot them...) The main things I eenjoyed doing on the computer back then were tinkering with the system, essentially the digital equivalent of taking apart your toys (or your dad's toys...) to see how they worked (which I know lots of our type of folks probably did as kids), and drawing stuff in Paint.
Honestly? Me now would not have the patience for 00s/early 10s Linux. But little me at the time would probably have loved it. But of course, I didn't know enough about computers to know the questions to ask that would have led me there.
Ooh, I've heard of Compiz... That was the thing that could display your virtual desktops as a rotatable cube, make all the windows wobbly, and set them on fire when you closed or minimized them, right? I like to think I'm mature enough nowadays to not be too miffed I missed out on that time or that such things don't really exist anymore, but gosh, I kinda want flaming windows... and little kid me would have had so much fun with the cube thing and wobbly windows. (One of my favourite Winblows features at the time was the cursor trails... and custom cursors were neat too. Never did find the set of teddy bear ones I'd always hoped existed somewhere out there.)
I was a teen at the time, so I turned on every possible Compiz effect to the maximum and felt very smug when several years later windows introduced slightly transparent window decorations that tanked system performance.
Yeah... the glass effect was kinda cool, I really liked it. But it's got nothing on the stuff Compiz could do. I wasn't into Linux in that thing's heyday but I really wish you could still get some of those effects. I've seen videos and there was cool shit in there.
My favourite fun graphical effect I've seen on a modern Linux DE, though, has gotta be the KDE scaling cursor thing. What can I say, I still find cursor effects stupidly funny after all these years. (I remember a browser game I used to play as a child, that had a loading screen gimmick with a little monster that'd chase and eat your cursor, complete with the most delightful chomp noise. I kinda want one of those as a little desktop panel.) Yes, I do realize that I'm a very childish adult at times, especially while using a computer.
Gnome extensions has the cube of desktops, the wobbly windows, and even the burn on close available
But then, I'd have to use GNOME. Which I guess isn't necessarily a bad DE, but I don't think I want it.
I've tried most DEs at this point but I keep coming back to GNOME. I think the only major one I haven't tried is Cinnamon, because its core "selling" point is looking like the bad OS and that is entirely unappealing to me, and because it didn't exist yet in my peak distrohopping era.
That's really funny, because Cinnamon is the only one I have used... and I'm starting to get pretty sick of it. I'm not entirely opposed to a DE that looks similar to Windows, especially older versions of it that actually worked (relatively speaking, of course), but I don't think that's really what I actually want/care about.
Well, you know what they say about distrohopping. Usually, you don't really want a new distro, you just want a new DE.
Try GNOME
I see so many posts of people who "got GNOMEd" by accident, and now one of the crazy (affectionate) Linux nerds on Hexbear dot net is telling me to do it on purpose... lol.
Get GNOME'd, nerd
Okay, that one's good and I totally walked right into it.
You really like GNOME, huh?
About a month ago, I distrohopped because the distro I was using (PopOS) stopped using a customized GNOME and started using their own (buggy, unfinished) COSMIC DE. Now I'm using Fedora GNOME.
I like that it's fast and smooth and stable and looks nice with no effort, and is very customizable through extensions. And I like that it makes absolutely no effort to resemble The Bad OS in any way.
See, you make it sound very good, but then lots of other people talking about it say it's a nightmare to use and you need to find and install extensions for the smallest tweaks, so I'm hesitant to try it. Although "no effort to resemble The Bad OS" is a good selling point.
They think it's a nightmare to use because they want it to resemble The Bad OS.
Finding and installing extensions consists of going to https://extensions.gnome.org/ searching for what you want, then clicking once to install and once to confirm. No account required, just as easy as using your package manager.
The extensions I have installed right now are:
-
AppIndicator and KstatusNotifierItem Support which lets programs put a little indicator that they're running in the background in the top right statusbar
-
Dash to Dock which makes the launcher dock thing show up when I mouse over the bottom of the screen instead of just showing up when I hit the Super key (what we Linux nerds call the key with the windows flag)
-GSConnect which is the GNOME version of KDE Connect, it lets me get phone notifications on my desktop and text from my desktop, and use my phone as a wireless mouse and keyboard, and transfer files between the two
-
Compiz windows effect which gives me the classic Compiz wobbly windows effect
-
Desktop cube which gives me the classic Compiz desktop cube effect
The last two of which I found and installed because of this here conversation.
ublock origin has a filter to remove these. you just have to go into the settings to enable it.
works on mobile too btw
Bless ublock. I don't know how anyone puts up with constant advertising without going crazy
I know right?
When I was really young, the things that targeted ads thought I'd want, or the way that some video game fan websites would really confuse the topic categorization, was funny to me rather than annoying (my favourite was how it'd mistake a particular subheading of the downloads section of a Sims website and assume people viewing that website were doing real life house hunting, so the ads on that page were always for real estate and rental property listing sites), but by the time I was a teenager it was getting really old, and the annoyance was greater than the humour value. So I finally looked into doing something about it. There was a time when Internet advertising was only mildly annoying and just how free services were paid for and looking at it was part of the social contract, but as it's become a plague and a security issue, the agreement's been broken and it's only fair to fight back.
Honestly I wouldnt be bothered by "some" ads. But many websites are super aggressive with ads. Plus as you said its a legit security risk to have questionable pop ups and ads on some sites.
Yeah. I mean, if it comes down to "pay for the content by looking at the ads, but face all sorts of security risks" or "block all the ads"... yeah, sorry to the sites that are reasonable and responsible, but I can't trust anyone.