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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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.
True
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.
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.
Waiting for Action Retro coverage now.
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