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 7

dewey 9/12/2025|

I'm not sure I would be brave enough to do experiments like that with my landing page. I wonder how it converts.

While it's a fun experiment for a personal website seems a bit impractical for a marketing page for a tool that is not always bought by engineers.

xpe 9/12/2025|

Well, it does look a lot like Windows, macOS, and many Linux desktop environments. Yes, it might feel unfamiliar to people who have only used tablets or phones.

dewey 9/12/2025||

I understand that, but it behaves very differently to what's usually expected of such a website where you can maybe search by Cmd + F, or more importantly have it correctly indexed by search engines. The latter is probably not that straight forward with such a page structure.

Razengan 9/12/2025||

An operating system running on an operating system to view a mockup of an operating system

Gualdrapo 9/12/2025||

Things like this makes me think that controls for stuff like content density (line height, text width...), per-page dark mode, "scroll to top" and cookie banners should be a task of the web browser/user agent, not of each website.

jabwd 9/12/2025||

While cute, that cookie banner isn't actually required if you aren't doing any tracking. This is the common misconception a lot of people have with the cookie banners -- its not required, it is a confession from a website.

iiyama 9/12/2025|

Surely they have consulted a layer before putting words "legally required" on their from page, right?

47282847 9/12/2025||

What’s it with the definitely not legally required “legally-required Cookie Banner“.

talkingtab 9/12/2025||

Except look at it from a phone. (Developer tools if you don't have a phone).

ochrist 9/12/2025||

Why can't I use my keyboard (e.g. spacebar) to scroll on you website? Apparently I have to use a mouse all the time, and that's annoying. Most OS's have accessibility options (even a lot of websites do this).

nayuki 9/12/2025|

I agree with this complaint. The first thing I noticed about the page - other than the excessive and unnecessary UI - is that even when focused on the page interior text, hitting Up/Down/Space/Shift+Space/PgUp/PgDn does not scroll the interior page content at all. This is how I read most articles, and it is massively disrespectful for their website to disable the keyboard-based movement that I'm used to by default.

mbirth 9/12/2025||

This reminds me of those virtual desktops/virtual “PC”s that popped up like 10-15 years ago. Which were very similar and had some basic tools for writing notes, calculator, managing files, etc. - all with web technologies.

bigfishrunning 9/12/2025||

Seems kind of redundant -- I don't need a window manager in a website. If i want to open several articles at once, can't i just open several browser windows in the window manager I'm already running?

fny 9/12/2025|

Very fun! Some constructive feedback: the mobile experience is painful. Lots of real estate gets eaten up, and a lot of content ends up being hidden.

Also you broke the back button.

Finally, it's not intuitive where to click to get started.

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