Comment by cookiengineer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cookiengineer | Hacker News Reader

Last year I was also in a Windows 7 rabbit hole. There's lots of ongoing stuff in the community, and even huge driver packs for Ryzen hardware.

The website that led me down that hole was the one from "spacedrone808" [1] who appeared regularly in /r/windows7 mod posts and issue trackers.

There's also the snappy driver installer project [2] which shares a 44GB torrent with all kinds of drivers, from SATA controllers to NIC to GPU. There's also driverpacks which is sometimes down, sometimes not. In the web archive of either of those you can still find the torrent links though.

Oh and there's driveroff [4] which led me down the rabbit hole of Russian hacking communities that backport software to win7, which is amazing to see that there's this isolated modding community on the internet that uses hardcore win7 modded variants, with self-built firewall software, backported hash file databases for antivirus tools etc.

[1] https://win7sp2.neocities.org/

[2] https://sdi-tool.org/

[3] https://driverpacks.net/

[4] https://driveroff.net/

I’ve long suspected that a Linux desktop environment designed to closely mimic Windows 7 (with light modernization where it makes sense) would prove popular, and the existence of all this reinforces that idea. A rough facsimile can be built using KDE, Cinnamon, or XFCE, but many details will still be wrong (and aren’t practically fixable without forking) and I think that’s enough to prevent many users from considering Linux as a viable alternative.

IMHO, what's important for Windows 7 is the established userbase and all the hardware that's already running on Windows 7, not it's UI.

Maybe, but there’s no reason why a thoughtfully engineered Win7 clone DE on a lightweight Linux couldn’t run just as well or better on the same hardware.

> but there’s no reason why a thoughtfully engineered Win7 clone DE on a lightweight Linux

Why not a "thoughtfully engineered Win7 clone Desktop Environment" (without Linux :-) ). By the way: people are working on ReactOS:

> https://reactos.org/

Your opinion. Win 7 was the best Windows UI, both in looks (Aero) and usability. It was abandoned primarily because Microsoft was trying to achieve some hybrid desktop/tablet/mobile UI that worked poorly for all form factors. Win 11+ (or whatever the next version is called) would be well-suited to return to an Aero-like UI.

it is the other way around. ms copied heavily from what people where doing with compiz and gnome 2 back in the day

No... get the timing and the attribution right.

Both Vista's Aero compositor (not 7) and Compiz copied from Apple Quartz Extreme.

Apple worked out how to use a 3D accelerator to speed up a 2D GUI.

Quartz Extreme was first released in Mac OS X 10.2 in 2002.

Vista and Compiz were both 2006.

i did not know about quartz but compiz was not the only 3d compositor iirc xcompmgr which became compton was older

I am not claiming Compiz was first. It's just the one I still use so it happens to spring to my mind. (My own laptops run Ubuntu with the Unity desktop.)

As far as know, Apple invented the concept of a display compositor using 3D hardware. If anyone has prior art from before 2002 I'd love to know.

i thought probably sgi would have done something but it turns out it was amiga lol

The Amiga did not have hardware 3D at all, so I doubt that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compositing_manager#History

Hmmmm.

I am not sure I personally consider that closely enough related to count.

It often seems to me that even today Amiga fans are so passionate about the machine that they make rather exaggerated claims that do not really stand up.

For instance in many places I have read the claim that AmigaOS was a microkernel OS, or closely-related claims such as that it was the first widespread microkernel, or the first GUI microkernel, and so on.

The point of a microkernel is that only the microkernel runs in kernel space (in x86 terms, in Ring 0) and the rest of the OS is divided into multiple "servers" which run in user space (again in x86 terms, in ring 2 to 3). This in turn brings a problem, which is how to make comms between the microkernel and the servers fast. IPC is the big problem and that is what microkernel OSes struggle with, which has shaped the design of Mach, XNU, L4, seL4 etc.

AmigaOS is small but everything runs in ring 0. There is no division and so there is no need for tricky performance-critical IPC and all processes can read and write each others' RAM. That makes it (1) easy (2) fast (3) not a microkernel.

I would regard direct blitting into 2D windows as not unique, not the first such implementation, and not the same as 3D compositing.

"Methinks milady doth protest too much."

>AmigaOS is small but everything runs in ring 0.

Not accurate.

In AmigaOS, everything runs in unprivileged mode, except for some specific critical code within exec.library which runs in supervisor mode or interrupt mode.

What's true is that exec.library does offer a call to run code as supervisor[0], and that there's no memory protection.

0. http://amigadev.elowar.com/read/ADCD_2.1/Includes_and_Autodo...

OK, I concede. :-)

I would suggest a few hours of open source work on Amiga stuff as penance :^)

OMG, please no!

Look, I am writing a news story about the release of update 3 for Amiga OS 3.2.2 -- is that enough?

That's just sad news, a reminder that AmigaOS still isn't Open Source, and that the ownership drama[0] isn't settled.

0. https://sites.google.com/site/amigadocuments/

It really is.

FWIW I am also linking to AmigaOS 4, MorphOS and AROS...

I wish "Notch" Persson or some other billionaire nerd would just buy the things and declare the whole lot freeware. There surely cannot be much residual value to extract any more.

https://linuxiac.com/kumander-linux-a-windows-7-nostalgia-tr...

Not bad for an XFCE mod, but falls under the “rough facsimile” category I mentioned.

:-D Can't deny that. I have not tried it myself. (Possibly "yet".)

I did try Wubuntu.

https://www.theregister.com/2024/12/05/wubuntu/

Not good.

All of these look so off that I wonder why they even exist.

Windows Vista/7 screwed up file associations badly, you can do far less with them than you could under Windows 95. Under Windows 95, you could customize the right click menu for any file type, and add all your favorite programs to that menu as a different option. That's gone since Vista, which added in the buggy "Open With" submenu.

The worst is that today, if you associate Icon files with an icon editor, Icons suddenly lose their ability to display themselves, and instead turn into pictures of the associated application!

Similarly I went on an XP odyssey late last year. I acquired a retired workstation from $dayjob that I decided to turn into a retro XP game machine. It was very late for XP but within a generation or two before Intel, Nvidia and the motherboard provided drivers (Ivy bridge and GTX 660 GPU).

But that didn't get you through the installer... I discovered a plethora of alternative install media with built in community drivers providing support for nvme drives, modern ACPI extensions etc.

It's so complete you can install it on today's current hardware.

Care to share sources for those alternative media with modern drivers?

Likely the "XP Integral Edition" that is updated every now and again

https://zone94.com/software/operating-systems/123-windows-xp...

Yep that was it.

> retro XP game machine

This still gets me as I vividly remember when the family computer was finally going to move past Windows 98 in 2001.

This capability exists in large part because large parts of heavy industry still run on software that only runs (right) on XP.

a 44GB torrent with all kinds of drivers, from SATA controllers to NIC to GPU

My first reaction was "that's an absolutely insane amount of drivers", but then I realised that some GPU and printer drivers are already around 1GB.

I didn't know what's in that package/torrent but those 1gb drivers are drivers AND applications which are frequently not required at all.

How much of the Nvidia driver is just GFE?

GFE and its replacement "nVidia App" are bloated and large, but the drivers themselves are still 600-900MBs each.

That "optimized for Game X" thing where GFE/nVidia App brags that the driver has all sorts of custom relationships with all the recent exciting games is strangely literal in most cases because the drivers include a frankly wild amount of application/game-specific microcode/optimizations.

I've been using https://www.ntlite.com/ for a while now for various custom/integration needs at home. Well worth it.

It's also nifty when I need to slap hardware drivers into a Windows 11 ISO on the fly to bring up a new machine.

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