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Comment by legrande | Hacker News Reader

Windows 7/8 are the last good versions of Windows IMHO. Yeah they have security issues, but I run them in a virtual machine not connected to the Internet where I need things like iTunes and MS Office. Some games don't run in a VM very well because of the overhead and abstraction (unless they're lightweight or not resource intensive). I have a separate Alienware laptop for gaming on Windows however.

My hypervisor OS is a Linux Mint install, with Virtualbox. I use Mint as a daily driver. I also use Cloudready[0] for interacting with the Google ecosystem. I can't recommend Cloudready enough, although I think Google bought out[1] Cloudready and it's now called Flex[2]

[0] https://www.neverware.com/freedownload

[1] https://cloudreadykb.neverware.com/s/article/Neverware-is-no...

[2] https://edu.google.com/intl/ALL_us/products/chromebooks/chro...

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For gaming? Ditch virtualbox and migrate your VMs to libvirt/KVM/qemu.

On my main PC I have an RTX2070 Super and a GTX 1070.

I pass the RTX2070 Super through to a libvirt Windows VM and via Scream & looking-glass I can play any and all Windows games at full speed. Elite: Dangerous, No Mans Sky, and so on, run at full speed inside this VM.

An alternative is to run a lot of games via WINE and/or Proton-via-Steam for Linux, which also works fine.

Turns out Windows is basically a gaming OS these days for me - the rest of the work I do gets done on Linux.

And lastly I think I'll be stopping at Windows 10. Running nice and snug in a VM.

>Windows 7/8 are the last good versions of Windows IMHO. Yeah they have security issues

Windows 8 is still supported upto 2023. As for Windows 7, ESU and turning off a lot of unnecessary stuff (ATMFD, Windows Installer unless you're installing an update, etc.) can get a reasonably secure configuration.

[EDIT: ATMFD is a dll for old Adobe Type fonts which almost nobody uses. It doesn't exist on newish Windows 10 builds and above. Given its security history and the nature of Turing-complete font hinting, the odds of there not being another security issue are IMHO low, and since nobody's looking there anymore...]

I still run windows 7 as the primary os on my daily driver.

Soon enough you will be better off running ReactOS as your daily driver.

I'd love to, and support the project with my bucks, but that seems a bit optimistic in the short term. Getting more and more work done with linux in the meantime.

With these efforts, at least my craving for sovereignty is mostly satisfied. With windows I feel like a crofter living on someone else's land.

> seems a bit optimistic in the short term

ReactOS was started in 1998, 24 years ago.

Just saying :-)

Well, clean-room reverse-engineering something as complex as Windows will take time. I'm sure most are fine using their machines (virtual or otherwise) while they wait however more years until ReactOS reaches feature parity.

That's the thing, it might never happen. Windows itself is a moving target plus it's a multi tens of billions development effort.

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