Why would you go with over ReactOS?
They are far closer to cloning Windows 95/98/2000.
this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2025
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I’m clueless as to why one would want either. Running old hardware peripherals?
Some win95 / win98 software doesn't work all that well on Windows 10/11. It's mostly stuff that was targeted for the early releases of Windows and cannot be run in DOS (or the DOS version is more primitive than the Window aversion).
One example:
https://archive.org/details/biestystowaway
It's mostly games and random educational releases like the one above.
Cool, thanks for explaining! I take it they don’t work that well on WINE either?
I am not that well acquainted with WINE, but I do know there are examples where WINE does not work well.
ReactOS is cloning NT, so the 2000 part of that is correct.
95/98/98se/ME are completely different beasts, even if they happen to share the same GUI.
I am well aware of the difference between 95/98 and 2000/XP. I actually used 95/98 and eventually switched to 2000 and then XP.
Turns out that ReactOS is indeed focused on turn of the millennium NT support. They say their target is Windows Server 2003.
I always thought that 95/98 era support was also a key goal due to he history of the project.
Same reason why there are so many text editors that all do basically the same thing, I suppose. More options are not a bad idea, IMO. Maybe they'll do something different and interesting.
A text editor is a whole different beast than cloning Windows 95/98/2000. I will note that ReactOS isn't simply building a compatibility layer, their end goal is to allow users to actually run unmodified driver binaries from that era to get hardware working.
True
Waiting for Action Retro coverage now.
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