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Comment by Borg3 | Hacker News Reader

Oh well, he does it for fun. I do it daily, running Win2003 and last PaleMoon browser that works on WinXP. Why? Because I really like XP/2003. Sure, I could run Firefox 52 ESR, but it looks like junk and its slow. Palemoon on warm cache starts right away (around 200ms probably).

Luicky, most of web sites I care still runnining fine, but dark clouds are on horizon. I cannot belive that rendering "mainstream" web pages eats more RAM than playing first Stalker game!! What the hell happened? Everything gets bloated. UIs are terrible and yet people are using it, just mumbling to themselfs..

For shitty webpages I have VM running Linux and using of course latest crappy firefox. But hey, some newest firefox starts to lag terrible when rendered over X server. Thank you Mozilla for putting even more bloat to Firefox..

Okey, I vented abit :) Time to play some TRS2004 instead...

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Joking or not, that ‘stuck in time’ story is so terrifying! I have my worries with bloatware as well, but I solve that with Linux or FreeBSD, minimalistic DE and other modern ways. Attempts to freeze time for some mediocre event (be it some Windows version of the past or good-ol’-days) scares me so so very much! My personal hell would be living that very life you praised.

I yet to have to find my new great OS. Im 100% sure it wont be Windows. I have an eyes on some minimalistic Linux distro. But who knows, maybe Haiku will grow enough, before I will be forced to make a switch.

As for staying in past, im not that much afraid for SW part. I have all toys mirrored. What worries me is the HW part. Those scrapyards where I get pretty decent HW will eventually run dry. And we know what new HW is...

Have a look at SerenityOS, it's early days but I think it's a truly awesome project and expecting good things in future years. It's a completely new OS. The founder just hired two developers full time which is promising

I really hope that one becomes daily driveable. The pairing of the consistent UI and the BSD-style holistic unix is something I'd relish.

The biggest hindrance will be, as ever, drivers. They are making consistent progress with USB and PCIe from what I can tell in the Discord. If they targeted a known platform like RPI4 and got all the drivers for that right it could be big.

Serenity WINE port could be decent. Tried ReactOS a few times but it also seems some ways off

Hmm, I think I never heard of it.. Looks really cool.. Ill keep an eye on it! Thanks.

The article does not mention memory, and to me, that is the largest constraint on old systems when choosing an OS.

For a Minimal OS on an Old system, you can try NetBSD or OpenBSD, i386. Modern Browsers will be a no-go, but you will find NetBSD and OpenBSD very usable.

One note for OpenBSD, if you have less than say ~2 gig of memory, you may need to disable the kernel re-link. It will work, but will hammer the system. For NetBSD, I have it on a system with 512M and it works great.

Both fully are able to handle the 2038 issue on their i386 builds (32 bit) and has been able for a while. That is something you should be aware of for long term use.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem

For OpenBSD, only 512MB is needed even with the kernel relinks. Or so my experience with virtual machines says.

I sometimes run two VMs at 512MB each on my 4GB Windows 10 laptop. And I can use Windows apps too at the same time. (VMware workstation.)

If you want to shrink the kernel and the relink memory footprint, @unangst has an unofficial recipe.

Yeah, I am aware of that problem. Windows seems to store TIME differently that UNIX so it should be all right here. But I have dozens of old Linux 32 bit servers here and there...

As for RAM, well I have 16GB RAM and its pretty much upper limit Win2003 can handle. Ideal seems to be 8GB because you will have more Pools and PTEs. For todays web, limiting factor is per process 2GB limit (or 3GB on Linux). It barelly enough to browse using new FF browser. Older browsers like Palemoon are much more memory efficient. When it uses 300MB of RAM, its already quite a lot for it.

You could have a look at Plan9 which has a small community of enthusiasts.

Yeah, I know Plan9. Similar problem, low HW coverage. Additionaly, it doest give me anything I already have, and I get drivers problem. Not worth of switch IMO. I can stay in Win2003 then and utilize VMs for newer stuff. Big plus of staying is that I have all the apps/tools mirrored and I know this system pretty well.

Just wondering, did you compile that Win2k3 yourself? Since it is technically source available ;)

Well, I have them, but they arent really Win2003 but XP.SP1, and they seems to be incomplete. If you have better source, I am all ears :D

Anyway, those sources are handy to check some internals of Win2003. I have few binaries hex edited so they are tweaked to my needs. Like Desktops 2.0, IPMON.DLL helper to accept DNS server as 127.0.0.1 from netsh and few more probably.

I would LOVE to have Win2003 sources :)

I guess there are places on the internet where I have seen people being able to build some versions of Windows from source.

Since this is illegal I can't say a lot more about it.

There's always the ReactOS project, I wonder how good things will be if we just slipstreamed their DLLs into Windows. That would be a good way to do this.

I care about stability. Its a must. And my Win2003 is absolutly reliable. In old desktop I had random BSODs due to driver issue. Some Audio driver was not happy about PAE and 8GB RAM. After long fight I isolated faulty .sys driver and decided to use HW drivers instead instead of my mobo vendor ones. Problem vanished.

We'll if you already have the code, you should be able to get farther with it. I think :-)

Well, there is not much to do really. Im happy with it. Its stable, fast, nice looking. If I had a source code and could compile part of kernels I would try to do some more hacks maybe. Like one thing in CM annoys me that there is no knob to limit how much RAM can be used as Filesystem Cache. Once all RAM is eaten by cache, system ca be a bit erratic under load. With should NOT really happen because Win2003 implements LRU cache, so it should discard least used pages on fly and make them to use either by apps or cache. But, this not happens often really, so not big issue :)

In true video game fashion: There are rumours that there are non-Microsoft people out there compiling Windows kernels. If you choose to investigate, the reward would be a FS-Cache RAM Knob.

Out of curiosity: have you ever considered React OS as a WinXP alternative?

Yeah, I track ReactOS. Unfortunately, its not stable to my needs. I would really like it in better shape.. Im too old/tired to try to contribute to it sadly :(

Writing OS today is nightmare because of drivers. HW vendors are shady, HW is very complicated and whats worse, it changes often. You need army of skilled devs to handle that.

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