[egor83]

Makes me wonder - why hasn't anyone made a Linux desktop environments that tries to mimic Windows look and behaviour as much as possible? IP/patent issues maybe?

There would be a huge market for something like that, as this situation shows.

[ejr]

It's an extremely difficult thing to do from a design and engineering perspective. The majority of office suites available are good, but different and "quirky" enough that the flow isn't seamless. The same goes for design applications and many other utilities that people use every day.

At the end of the day, any OS that requires some command-line at any point has failed to appeal to the mass market. Instead of Windows, Linux would be better off mimicking Mac as it tries to be as unobtrusive as possible while still leaving the command-line power intact.

Linux needs to escape the Uncanny Valley of general purpose computing to become more mainstream.

[DSMan195276]

It's kinda interesting, Zorin does exactly what you've mentioned but I've never seen it get really popular. I think the big issue is that the UI isn't what people stumble with when moving to Linux. The bigger issues is the differences in file-system and programs, and it would be extremely hard to create a compatibility layer for such differences because Wine just isn't perfect (Nor should it really be recommended when Linux equivalent exist), and lots of programs ask for files and there's no easy way to patch them all in such a way that it appears like the Windows drive system instead of a Unix file system.

[varkson]

There has been, like PCLinuxOS. The problem is that it's not just the interface keeping people off GNU/Linux, it's everything else, like software and hardware support.

[ronwl]

Linux Mint with Cinnamon?

I think its good enough since I've managed to convert at least 42 user from Windows to that. Its been almost 2years and they still stick with that.

[fiatjaf]

42? You're a hero. I've succeeded with 1, failed with 2, and still trying with 3 more.

[rrradical]

Check out Linspire (formerly Lindows): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linspire

[jnamaya]

There is, and its getting popular http://zorin-os.com/ there is another OS that is trying to build a windows compatible open source architecture, but it hasn't got out of the alpha stage for the last 10 years, so I think the project is dead. The name of the OS is reactOS. I think they still have the website up.

[byerley]

I think this is an unstated (stated?) goal of Kubuntu, and there are some guides floating around to make it look even more like Windows.