Free Windows 8 Desktop Environment For Linux 2026

If you are one of who enjoyed the windows 8 and miss its fluid animations but have since moved to linux. And cant go back to windows 8, because all apps are non functional there. And if you can bear that you cant install it on the newer hardware. This is for you it is a shell for wayland window managers like Labwc hyprland etc. It gives a wallpaper utility, a lock screen, a start menu, an OSD for volume and brightness a settins app for wall. it dosent provide charms menu because i always thought its useless. Win8De.webm

it will build all binaries and put it in "build/bin" folder you can use it in config files to autostart and bind to system keys for brightness and volume with local location. you can't run settings from start screen bc it uses system location so you will have to run it from binary built. bind win/super key to Win8Start

it will automatically run build.sh and move the binaries to "/usr/bin/" and will be available systemwide, so it will be easier to put in configs and autostart

it will use different config file so that your current config is not affected. create a copy of config folder and paste it with diff name like labwc2 hypr2 etc.

find your compositors config loading command and make a .desktop file like this example.

[Desktop Entry] Name=labwc-win8 Comment=A wayland stacking compositor Exec=labwc -C /home/user1/.config/labwc3 Icon=labwc Type=Application DesktopNames=labwc;wlroots

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Source: HackerNews