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Long before WSL there was coLinux. Back when I still dual-booted (i.e. around 2010) I used it extensively to access my Linux filesystems from within Windows, including assembling the mdadm RAID5. It booted in around 10s, much faster than a full VM and had the filesystems available via SMB-share almost as soon as Windows 7 was done lagging after login.
it’s funny that a lot of people can’t try this because they don’t have windows 95 nor win95 hardware.
also: this might be an answer to industries reliant on windows 95 systems.
It would be amazing if Microsoft decided to open source Windows 95.
I’m sure there’s shady crap in Windows 95 that they’d rather not be made public too.
It would be nice to have a Windows distribution dedicated for old games, without emulating or without relying on Virtual Machines. Installing a true Open Source Windows 95 on modern hardware to play old games would be kind of cool. I guess the drivers (and other software on top of it) would be still closed source though. There are probably lot of proprietary code and art involved, that it could be difficult to change the license of it? I don’t know what contracts they had back then (nor do I know what contracts they have now to be honest :D), that could affect such decisions.
Do you think WINE would benefit from an Open Source Windows 95? I mean in practical terms, is there a “need” for?
There is ReactOS, which is an ABI-compatible kernel and operating system. That is as close as we are going to get unless pigs start flying.
If MS just released the source of W95 as GPL you could still use the existing proprietary drivers, but like now you’d still have to download them from each vendor.
Making it possible to study the code itself would allow WINE devs to audit their code for edge cases and get W95-era compatibility to pretty much 100%
My concern is, that the proprietary drivers wouldn’t work, because they are for older hardware. I am curious how this work out. Maybe the developers from ReactOS could work together to adapt some of their drivers into GPL W95? I have no idea. Just open sourcing the code is not enough to use Windows 95 on modern hardware.
Ah i see. You are right, new hardware would need new drivers.
Oh it just hit me that ReactOS would heavily benefit from an Open Source Windows 95. They are reimplementing a Windows binary compatible operating system from scratch. And it covers up to Windows 10 right now I think, but its not usable in real world. And the devs are joking about their own OS, its so funny and lighthearted. I digress…
Wine would get some benefit too
One could install Windows 95 in DOSBox to host a Linux subsystem. I wouldn’t call this Galaxy Brain Move, but it is possible (just assuming, didn’t actually try).
Wild, windows 95 pushed me to use linux and now…
