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Comment by noisy_boy | Hacker News Reader

I still keep my 12 year old legal copy of Windows XP available to be run as a VM via VirtualBox for occasions when I need to try out some Windows/DOS stuff - works pretty well :)

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Not sure why you got downvoted (too off-topic? no idea), because this is imo actually a rather interesting point. And 'pretty well' feels like an understatement when it comes to performance (or at least snappiness): I have XP on a VM for a while just for software which didn't support 7. Despite being in a VM (VirtualBox), the thing feels snappier and faster than current day desktop OS (XFCE on Ubuntu, Windows 10, OSX) on beefy workstations. It does lack quite some usability though in comparison with modern counterparts.

Yeah - probably considered off-topic - I just couldn't help sharing the anecdotal tidbit :) My xperience(!) has been the same - boots within seconds and basically gets out of the way. No advertisements/analytics (that I know of), great to quickly check a Word document that doesn't render well in LibreOffice etc. I don't use it often though - Linux has truly come a long way that such occasions are getting rarer as time goes.

One could also try ReactOS for such cases.

The ReactOS team might gain some insights from this leak...

and they get prison time.

If they copy code line for line yes, but might get insights they otherwise couldn't have. Or just pretend they happened to come up with solutions by themselves.

https://github.com/reactos/reactos#contributing--

" Legal notice: If you have seen proprietary Microsoft Windows source code (including but not limited to the leaked Windows NT 3.5, NT 4, 2000 source code and the Windows Research Kernel), your contribution won't be accepted because of potential copyright violation. "

That's a really honest approach, thanks for posting it. I stand corrected!

Edit: Might of course also just be covering their backs legally... but who am I to say.

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