Why our website looks like an operating system

Posted by bnc319 9/11/2025

Why our website looks like an operating system(posthog.com)

684 points | 487 commentspage 3

hu3 9/12/2025|

The site is surprisingly useable on mobile.

And the theme/colours are pleasant for my eyes despite not being a dark theme.

So much so that I'll consider stealing some ideas for my next project.

Congratulations to all involved.

gibsonsmog 9/12/2025||

I love this. Internet UIs have completely degraded over the last decade and seeing an actual company decide to try something different is beautiful. I barely see devs or designers try anything new. This team even added a screen saver if you leave the tab open and inactive for a bit! Wonderful.

jez 9/12/2025||

Very neat! I was delighted to see that "drag to side of screen" tiled the window using that half of the screen. Then I opened a new window, and I was (unreasonably) surprised to see that there wasn't a tiling window manager that put my second window in the other half of the screen.

AfterHIA 9/12/2025||

Love, love, love it. You didn't need to do this but you did and it reminds me of the days when, "you needed to make things this way."

Godspeed you black emperors.

lordgrenville 9/12/2025||

More correctly, "our website looks like a desktop environment".

jfengel 9/12/2025||

I spent a few minutes trying to figure out what looked like an operating system. The desktop isn't the OS. Windows and Mac only allow one desktop on their OS, but Linux makes the separation clear.

xpe 9/12/2025|||

Spot on.

There are cases of companies providing something very close to a full OS for the focused use cases such as the Bloomberg Terminal.

But imagine if such a thing existed purely for marketing and informational purposes. "Curious about Hooli GAN Labs? Just download our Docker image to run our bespoke informational kiosk software..."

criddell 9/12/2025||

If I open my text editor and type:

    C:\>

I can make my editor look like an operating system.

copypaper 9/12/2025||

I'm curious how well this will do. Marketing websites are extremely important for first impressions (unless you're Berkshire Hathaway [1]). Although this is impressive and unique, it took me a minute to get over the "learning curve".

Reminds me of Jakob's Law, "Users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know" [2].

But given your target audience is developers, this might actually do well.

[1] https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/ [2] https://lawsofux.com/jakobs-law/

internetter 9/12/2025||

> unless you're Berkshire Hathaway

conversely, Berkshire Hathaway's website gives a great first impression

number6 9/12/2025||

I wonder what the ad costs and why it's there in the first place

Klonoar 9/12/2025||

I wonder how much, if anything, Geico pays to advertise on that page.

valleyer 9/12/2025||

Zero, as Geico is owned by Berkshire.

twalichiewicz 9/12/2025||

If you leave the page idle long enough you'll even see a screensaver.

xp84 9/12/2025||

I really like this. Side note: It has real BeOS vibes in my opinion, and that's a compliment.

I remember seeing another submission from PostHog on here a while ago, I think it was about transparent pricing? Anyway, I would definitely want to use them if I was founding a startup.

ebcode 9/12/2025||

That'd be great if I could navigate the in-browser browser with my pgup/pgn or arrow keys, but I can't. If you're going to go this route, you really should do comprehensive accessibility testing.

robinhood 9/12/2025|

The former website's version was genius. This new version is genius too, but for totally different reasons. It's so creative, funny, beautiful and technically advanced. It's also extremely hard to understand globally. I find it awesome to push things forward, but considering how different the UX is from a standard website, and how confused I've felt during the navigation, I wouldn't copy this version as much as I copied the other previous versions.

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