windowOS | Devpost

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No, we are not mocking Windows. We called it WindowOS because you'll want to throw your laptop out a window after using this OS.

Inspiration

The brainchild from a long chain of previous proposals, the singular most annoying piece of software you'll ever use in your entire life. After jumping from esolang to Password Game clone, we decided that an operating system gives us the most ~~capacity for torture~~ access to options.

This was also deeply inspired by Suicide Linux; a distro that will flat-out sudo rm -rf / upon a typo, a modification we thought belonged right in WindowOS, along with a few other less-than-operable distros such as TempleOS.

What it does

Window OS has many, many features to make you want to punch someone and/or something very, very hard. Let's break it down.

What do we hate about using the Internet? Personally, advertisements are the pinnacle of 😒 to me. Especially when they're forced upon you with absolutely no consent (ahem, Fandom, ahem). To circumvent this, I myself have three-layered protections: custom DNS, tracker blocking, and resource injection protection. Nowadays, escaping the threat of unwanted ads is almost too easy. Too... un-annoying.

What if the ads were built into your OS? With some creativity and craziness, we handcrafted 6, stunning, flawless, dazzling, heartrendingly beautiful ~~advertisements~~ artworks to be shoved onto your screen. Every 15 or so seconds, one of my creations will make its way onto your screen, and you will be forced to close it.

WiFi breakdowns are another source of frustration. It always seem to me that my router has a meltdown when I'm in the most intense game of Valorant I've ever played, or in a heated debated over the best distribution. However, this is also preventable with a nice ethernet cable, proper router setup and a reliable ISP. Once again, too un-annoying.

What if the problem wasn't your router, or your ISP, but rather, your computer itself?

WindowOS will periodically disable your WiFi card, completely. No amount of driver wrangling, router restarting or crying will fix that. You'll just have to sit, wait, and unfortunately, lose the accolade of winning against that one stranger on r/Memes.

If you've ever played a game, or even got close to the gaming world, you'll know lag is the most potent enemy of us all. Be it network lag, input lag or graphical lag, it's an endless source of frustration for everyone.

Let's not beat around the bush this time; WindowOS will, upon startup, immediately apply a 300ms delay to all your trackpad movements. Bid farewell to smooth mouse movements, ease-of-use and an enjoyable experience as you ~~attempt to~~ explore your new OS.

Once, I wanted to download a cheat for a game called Geometry Dash. I went onto the website, bought the file and attempted to download. Nada. Blocked. "Fair enough", I thought. The cheat does some DLL injections, it's reasonable it got marked as dangerous. I disabled some of Chrome's security measures, triply-confirmed the download and proceeded to try and install.

Run as administrator. Error. No access. Utter confusion. This was not an error I'd seen anywhere online. Why? Turns out, Windows Firewall was not the only thing I had to disable. Windows Defender was now stopping my file from running, without even telling me that it was doing so. Thirty minutes of my life wasted.

We've taken this frustration and built upon it ten-fold. In today's society, confidence is key. We want to foster this by making sure that you are absoutely certain you want to run a particular application. Want to run Firefox? What if wannacry.exe got baked into it overnight? What if it turned evil? An unknown layer of confirmations will stand between you and your glorious applications.

Did you think clicking "confirm" seven times was too easy? Well, we've got good news. Now, to open your terminal, you'l need to solve a multi-step, three-digit math problem! And no, you can't copy the problem, paste it into Google and get your answer. The textbox is read only, and, well, you'll need to confirm seven times to even open Google at all. So good luck.

As Linux users, our team are avid (or sometimes less so) supporters of the open source project. To commit ourselves to this, we've made our project entirely open source, if you ever want to try and disable the annoyance that pester you. Except...

You'll find that the repository is flooded with red-herrings and fake files. Even someone familiar with the Linux FS will struggle to find the executable that is actually being ran. Still open source though~

The icing on the top, the magnum opus of this work: rmrf.sh. I don't think it requires much explanation. Much thanks to the Suicide Linux developers for this idea: https://qntm.org/suicide.

How we built it

Put simply: a f*** ton of shell scripting, and configuring a custom Ubuntu ISO image.

More deeply: Each unique ~~torture device~~ script required our understand of a unique package.

For instance, for our window popups, we used Zenity. For general annoyance, we use iNotifyWait. There's a pretty wide array of stuff in there to explore. And, well, for the input lag? C. Need I say more?

Challenges we ran into

I've never touched C, nor bash scripts. This is uncharted territory. My teammate had little experience too. We also haven't even thought about delving into our OS, much less creating one. Everything is utterly unstudied. We learnt everything today, on the spot.

Once we finished scripting, we thought porting to an OS would be easy. It was not. We spent a good 7-8 arduous hours on this process. We abused rubber duckies. We almost punched holes into our laptop screens. It was very, very, frustratingly painful and slow.

Non-technically, the venue was SO COLD. Non-stop shivers and uncontrollable spasms were just... not good for workflow, to say the least. Nothing quelled the tempesting chill, not even hot tea. Even as I sit here writing this I am freezing. We did not overcome this.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Everything, really. The fact that I even managed to stay up was a miracle. I'm very proud of my other teammate, who did the bulk of the OS porting and scripting.