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Comment by lelanthran | Hacker News Reader

> In general, open-source all abandonware. Here's a few examples of non-game old software that would benefit the society if open-sourced:

That's not the heuristic companies use to determine whether or not to release source code.

> Windows 9x and classic Mac OS. No one has sold these OSes for 20+ years and they turned out to be evolutionary dead ends. It would make sense to release their sources so people could learn from them and run them on new hardware more easily.

The companies would not do that, for the very simply reason being that it would cannibalise their existing offerings if "people could [...] and run them on new hardware more easily."

The biggest competitor to Windows 10 was not Linux or Mac, it was Windows 7. The biggest competitor to Windows 12 will be Windows 11.

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> The biggest competitor to Windows 10 was not Linux or Mac, it was Windows 7.

I have to wonder how relevant Microsoft will remain in the long run. There are several projects maturing that allow people to run Windows apps — the one reason people use Windows in the first place — without any Microsoft involvement whatsoever. The fact that Win32 API has barely changed over the last 15 years also helps.

Wine compatibility is getting ever better. ReactOS is aiming to reach beta quality "soon".

  the one reason people use Windows in the first place

The other reason is UX and people's familiarity with it. I tried switching to ubuntu a few times but small inconveniences adds up eventually and at some point I don't see a reason to switch. Windows works just fine and I like its UX (however we will see if that will change with 11), Linux needs to provide a bit more for people like me to switch for their personal computers

Well, ReactOS is a reimplementation of most of Windows, including the shell and the kernel.

Anecdotally, I once installed Ubuntu + Wine for someone non-technical who broke several Windows installations by infecting them with ransomware. He used it for like half a year calling it "this strange Windows" because some people don't know what an operating system is. He eventually irreparably broke its file system because apparently he was shutting down his machine by pulling the plug while it was running.

  shutting down his machine by pulling the plug while it was running

Well, if windows was more reliable when it comes to unexpected shutdowns then it is also partially linux's fault.

I have a similar experience as well. I have a pi server and I was trying to use an ntfs external hdd. For some reason it breaks the file system if I remove hdd or shutdown pi unexpectedly. I am not expecting there to be no data loss if i am not writing or editing a file, just doing nothing, then why FS breaks?

When that happens, I connect hdd to Windows and it is able to repair it but there is no such option in ubuntu

> if i am not writing or editing a file, just doing nothing, then why FS breaks?

For a few reasons, but the most common is that when you write a file, you 'fwrite' operation doesn't typically immediately write blocks to the disk, instead it gets written to caches that will be written to disk in due course. Changes to the disk, tables with crucial data, etc again are just updated in memory, and written to the disk at a 'sensible' time. It's possible that you aren't actively performing operations to modify the disk, but various previous changes are sitting in memory waiting to be synced. If you kill the power then these changes aren't flushed so you can end up with corruption/filesystem problems. The main reason things work this way is for performance.

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