in reply to FoundFootFootage78

lemmy - Link to source

thingsiplay

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?

in reply to thingsiplay

lemmy - Link to source

Peasley

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%

This entry was edited (Saturday, April 25, 2026, 2:40 PM)
in reply to FoundFootFootage78

lemmy - Link to source

thingsiplay

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...
in reply to osanna

lemmy - Link to source

Obin

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.

Cooperative Linux

www.colinux.org
This entry was edited (Saturday, April 25, 2026, 12:58 PM)
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