Exploring Windows XP on macOS ARM64 | Hacker News Reader

Exploring Windows XP on macOS ARM64

milen.me

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Mypal is a good (non-period-correct) browser to run on XP; it's based on a newer version of Firefox and fixes websites, including downloading files from GitHub (and possibly watching YouTube?). But I miss the 2000s Internet, and the only thing we have left are incomplete archives and YouTube "Unregistered HyperCam 2" tutorials from decades past.

Related: you can make Linux look like Windows 95 (98/2000/XP), icons and all: https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95

It works really well.

Tempting.. Windows XP, best OS ever created, in MacOS keyboard combined with M2 legendary battery life....

Do you just like Windows XP's UI, or do you really like the OS?

Not GP, but I think NT as a whole is great OS. It likely has the largest and oldest software repository out there, excluding phone app shovelware.

I think I'm not as fond of XP's UI as I am fond of the early NT UI as a whole. The UI was relatively the stable from 95 to Windows 7 with the classic theme. I adore this UI and I'm glad to see it still carries on in modern projects like SerenityOS.

But at the same time, we have high DPI displays now and the classic UI doesn't scale well, so I'm happier to have a flat high res UI than a tiny classic UI these days.

Windows 2000 was peak Windows, I agree 100%.

>Not GP, but I think NT as a whole is great OS. It likely has the largest and oldest software repository out there, excluding phone app shovelware.

The sheer history and depth of the Win32 library of programs is the reason Windows continues to be dominant in the desktop space.

Just the other week we had a thread about how Windows 11 will happily run Win32 programs from 30 years ago. Kudos to Microsoft, their dedication to backwards compatibility is exceptional.

> Just the other week we had a thread about how Windows 11 will happily run Win32 programs from 30 years ago. Kudos to Microsoft, their dedication to backwards compatibility is exceptional.

Yes, that is indeed a strong point. They place great emphasis on upgrading your Windows being a no-brainer, instead of a potentially risky decision.

(As developers we dislike the ugly technical compromises that brings. But the consumer benefit is definitely there.)

Btw, the Linux kernel people are also quite fanatical about not breaking user space. But the rest of the Linux ecosystem ain't.

See https://www.computerworld.com/article/2821929/torvalds-patch...

> Btw, the Linux kernel people are also quite fanatical about not breaking user space. But the rest of the Linux ecosystem ain't.

Yes, even for basic end users. If I'm just using Ubuntu, the entire GUI layout changes randomly over the years for no reason. And we have Linux workstations at work that I hardly use; one day, they all changed desktop environments because of some chain of incompatibilities involving X and Wayland, idk idc.

Best UI..

> with M2 legendary battery life....

Is this true when running non-MacOS? A lot of the things that make a system blow through battery are OS-related things. XP wasn't exactly designed with battery life in mind.

Heh, I once wrote a script that disabled pretty much every darn service I could get away with on XP, and ended up with an estimated 7 hours (or so, it's been a while) of offline battery life on an Eee PC 901...

It definitely won't be true when you're emulating an x86 OS, regardless of other power saving features.

SP2 to be precise, was the best.

I kept using XP SP2 way, way later than I was supposed to. Everything later was plain annoying.

Was there anything wrong with SP3?

The nostalgia from those images was more than I expected. XP was "Windows" for me by and large. I used Windows 7 (skipped Vista after trying early versions) a little bit but most of my Windows knowledge came from messing around with XP. I reinstalled XP more times than I can count both for myself and for friends/family and I'll always look fondly back on it.

The Visual C++ screenshot [0] took me back. The clean and clear UI, much simpler times.

[0] https://milen.me/images/writings/windows-xp-on-macos-arm64/v...

What I love is that Winamp has not changed one bit for the version that is on my Windows laptop.

Yup, and I find this air of nostalgia amusing since I still use Winamp everyday.

What's even funnier is mIRC, though. Unlike Winamp, mIRC is still actively developed and it still looks more or less exactly like it did back in the Windows 3.1 days.

I love the mIRC design and would still use it but the developer rugpulled the ‘lifetime’ licences and requires you to beg him to give a free one or buy again.

I have no idea why they thought that a good idea.

I mean, I wouldn't like it either, but if I really had to I would buy it again seeing as I use mIRC every single day. The RoI on that is massive, certainly better than just buying another game on Steam.

Incidentally, when did he nix the lifetime licenses? I bought one over a decade ago and I used it to activate mIRC on my Windows 11 machine last year just fine.

Sometime in the last few years, for licences older than 10 years.

I’d have renewed it too if he had done it by request - but it just leaves a bad taste in my mouth to have it unilaterally changed and Khaled can go jump. I installed mIRC… and found my licence didn’t work.

Oh, man, BEGIN_MESSAGE_MAP eye twitch

By the way, I loved that movable "toolbar menu" design. It seems to have been forgotten in the move to "modern" but think it was the best one so far.

You could put it inline with other toolbars so it didn't waste vertical space. The full menu was very discoverable, like a table of contents for a featureful app. It could even be hidden completely if wanted.

None of the newer designs—obliterate in favor of titlebar buttons, or hamburger, are a such a great combo of power and friendliness. The traditional permanent menu is not very flexible.

Toolbar customization (ability to modify their contents) was nice too. Firefox still has it (for now) and you still find the occasional Mac app that has the old native customizable toolbar intact but even those are becoming uncommon.

The first place I saw both fixed toolbars and hamburger menus in desktop apps I think was probably in Chrome, which due to its popularity no doubt had a strong normalizing effect on both.

So true, that was once something you could count on from any mature application that had much of any UI to speak of. We took for granted that because it was a computer, of course almost everything can be customized. That was a lot of what was exciting about computers.

Today everything (web, mobile app, desktop) is converging toward "One lazy UI, optimized for aesthetics, riddled with junk drawers ( ••• buttons) and static" -- except not really static since the whole UI is ripped and replaced every 18 months or so to capitalize on some trend or because a new "UX designer" came to power.

^also Marketing Department.

Also GTK 1.0, which let you pull out a toolbar into its own separate miniwindow. And IIRC you could also do that with menus.

The Excel VBA editor still looks like this!

Lazarus still looks like the classic versions of Delphi, albeit with the version of Windows you run it on's UI elements. So something a little more modern looking for Windows 10/11:

https://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/images/5/5d/Windows_10.p...

and classical on Windows Classic:

https://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/File:Windows_2000.png

Visual C++ still looks basically the same though? There's (by default) another column on the right now, and I guess a few more toolbar buttons, but really it's extremely similar.

So. Many. Colors. I miss color so much, today's interfaces are downright depressing to look at :-(

But now you have dark mode and fancy flat design languages that enhance your "corporate image". /s

Similar experience here. Nostalgia from XP days is so strong I forget the monstrosity the OS became from every release from 8.1 onwards.

How slow is this? I needed x86 windows for something just after I got my M1 MBP in 2021. So I installed a copy of windows 10. I don't recall which hypervisor I used, but it was super slow.

> I don't recall which hypervisor I used, but it was super slow.

You didn't. You used an emulator rather than a hypervisor, which is why it was slow.

For most use cases, running x86 Windows applications is much better either under ARM Windows 11 in a VM, or with a Wine-based solution. But if you really need an x86 Windows kernel running, it's going to be slow.

I thought the M1 could run x86 code via some sort of layer they added?

It can run Intel Mac applications via translation, but this doesn't extend to virtual machines. Your VM host (more accurately, your emulation host) must perform the x86 emulation itself. UTM for example uses qemu for this.

There is a way to use apples Rosetta translation layer, through the vm, to run x86 binaries on arm Linux.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization/run...

That's very cool, but doesn't help you run an Intel OS in a VM under Rosetta.

Ah yes true, thank you.

I recently had to use an x86 version of Linux on my M1Pro MBP, hence using QEMU emulation instead of virtualization. The system was barely usable, although I only had basic headless server/SSH requirements. Researching a little showed that this is basically what can be expected running x86 emulation and the systems will just be wonky and slow, although it was running flawlessly, just slow.

There seem to be ways to use Rosetta2 inside a VM [0] to then translate binaries but I found no official support or documentation (using UTM+QEMU that was), this would be such a cool feature, at least there are discussions about it [1,2]

- [0] https://mybyways.com/blog/using-rosetta-in-a-utm-linux-vm-wi...

- [1] https://github.com/utmapp/UTM/discussions/4939

- [2] https://github.com/utmapp/UTM/issues/5460

This shows how to run x86 software inside an ARM Linux VM using Rosetta

https://www.nocentino.com/posts/2023-01-02-running-sql-serve...

Have you tried running your app on ARM Windows 10/11 and using their translation layer? It runs so damn fast, the M1 Mac is ironically the snappiest Windows machine I've ever used ha ha. Its faster than this 2019 Core i9 Macbook Pro I got sitting here running the same Windows app.

Same here. Blown away how was Windows 11 for ARM is in a VM on on M1 Mac.

If you can use HVF it would be near-native speed. Just like KVM, but quite a bit simpler.

Windows 10 is far more bloated than XP, which was designed to run acceptably on sub-GHz processors. Windows 11 is even more so.

Try these emulators of previous Windows versions running in a web browser for something that'll definitely be slower than QEMU, but are surprisingly still not unusably slow; in fact, I suspect a lot of new corporate machines with the pre-installed spyware and other background stuff will feel slower:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24955706

On the other hand, in somewhat of a converse to your situation, I tried ARM Windows 11 in QEMU running under x86 emulation on a relatively new (2 years) machine, and it was an absolute slug. Installing took over an hour, booting to the desktop took 10-15 minutes, and right-clicking the start menu required a 10-second wait for it to appear (I dared not left-click, for the ad-filled monstrosity that summons would likely have taken far longer to appear.) Even the "modern" Task Manager took most of a minute to show up, and then continued to consume 60-70% CPU when "idle".

Edit: care to give some counterarguments?

> I couldn’t get directory sharing to work using SPICE tools, so instead I ended up creating an .iso with Firefox and all additional software I needed.

Yeah, I've run into the same issue with Win7 x64 recently. None of the QEMU guest utility drivers is running on Windows at the moment - I have no idea why.

Uh oh Uh oh.. Im still running Win2003 :)

But dark clouds are on horizon... What to choose? I cannot find good replacemenent.

Recently I tried haiku on VM and found 3 bugs right away :(

which part of it is "exploring windows xp"? it only shows installation of the os and some software.

Is modern crypto, networking and web browsing avaliable on XP through any way?

> If you’re feeling similarly nostalgic, definitely check out SerenityOS

Then from SerenityOS FAQ:

> Where are the ISO images?

> There are no ISO images. This project does not cater to non-technical users.

Not that its impossible but from their project info it requires a bit of effort to read the docs and compile the project assuming everything goes alright without hitches.

Having said that I would gladly watch some SerenityOS based content. Maybe NCommander wrecking his brains while trying to build and port something to this OS? Would be cool.

For what it's worth, Andreas does post a lot of SerenityOS development content on his YouTube channel:

https://www.youtube.com/@awesomekling

I feel like it's pretty great that people /don't/ know about Andreas' YouTube channel nowadays. Shows how much the project grew.

You do have to build it from source, but the documentation for how to do so is luckily quite good, and there's a dedicated channel in the Discord server for helping people with build issues if you run into any problems.

You're obviously not obligated, but I'd encourage you to try building it if you're interested!

I am a technical user, but don't intend to utilize it. I guess it functions as gatekeeping to make sure you actually are interested in it. If anything, I only want to check it out for a second.

It's also just true that the OS is not useful to anyone who cannot compile it themselves. ISO builds would be just a waste of time at this point, especially that the supported way to run this thing is only via QEMU (which the build script does).

The licensing doesn't prohibit it, so anyone who wants to can offer ISOs for download.

You can try it here (somewhat slow, but works as a demo): https://copy.sh/v86/?profile=serenity

If it helps at all, it's actually a lot less intimidating than it might look at the first glance. You just have to have all the build software and QEMU installed, and the scripts do the rest (and even launch the VM).

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