Windows XP Professional

https://win32.run/

168•pentagrama•4h ago

Comments

kardianos•3h ago

Yes please. Can I please have a simple desktop that doesn't get in my way back?

FirmwareBurner•3h ago

Linux

andrepd•3h ago

linuxmint.org :)

saubeidl•3h ago

Get an Arch-based distro with KDE.

Der_Einzige•3h ago

You mean xfce? KDE is bloated. Yes it’s still bloated even if Valgrind says it has no memory leaks.

saubeidl•3h ago

xfce is nice, too, but aren't they still on gtk3?

kardianos•3h ago

I also run Linux using XFCE.

But some of my Clients use windows and were just "forced" to upgrade their hardware and use Windows 11.

reorder9695•2h ago

KDE is bloated, but coming from Windows10 it feels very familiar but with all of Windows' extra shite (ads/tracking/sign in/fucking onedrive) chopped out. I couldn't be happier with it to be honest.

[edit]: I forgot to mention as well, at least on arch you dont have to install the (I forget the package name exactly) kde applications package off pacman, if you don't install it you'll need to install dolphin and a few other things but it really cuts down the bloat.

jasperry•2h ago

Yes, this. I'm a long time XFCE user but when I got a beefier machine I switched to KDE, and unlike XFCE it manages the hardware thoroughly enough (sleep/brightness/network/audio) that I don't have to manually hack anything. I tolerate the bloat for that reason. I disabled all the kwallet and pim stuff though, that was a mess.

dartharva•2h ago

You mean Cinnamon? XFCE is ugly as hell and breaks a lot of things.

LargoLasskhyfv•1h ago

Does it matter when my current uptime is 51 days?

ikari_pl•3h ago

or just KDE?

giancarlostoro•3h ago

I prefer Budgie myself.

mvieira38•2h ago

I switched from Windows 10 to Fedora KDE 2 years ago and it's been good. Not great, but good. I do have the occasional problem with drivers and whatnot, but honestly Windows was just as bad, just with different stuff, and Windows was much less stable and much slower

askonomm•1h ago

I also switched to KDE, and man, not needing an online account to use a operating system, not having any ads or constant spyware sending every click and keystroke to some ad partner is absolutely amazing. Sad that to get a decent user experience feels amazing, even though it's not really anything special, really goes to show how bad things have gotten.

pantalaimon•2h ago

There is still Mate, the Gnome 2 fork.

freedomben•2h ago

I'm mostly a gnome 3 guy now, but mate is way underrated IMHO. I usually use it in VMs and the performance and usability is incredible. For those of us who grew up on this paradigm, it's a joy

LargoLasskhyfv•1h ago

There is still Trinity, the KDE 3 fork.

https://www.trinitydesktop.org

whalesalad•3h ago

Insane how performant this is in the browser.

elbac•3h ago

lol, I can't tell if you are serious or not, but it's a recreation in HTML/CSS.

whalesalad•3h ago

I just assumed it was wasm

bravetraveler•3h ago

Dragging 'Word' is rough on my setup... while 'Notepad' is fine, lol. More styling is expensive.

tux3•3h ago

This is a nice replication of the WinXP UI in JS (it is not a virtual machine running in your browser).

https://docs.win32.run/

https://github.com/ducbao414/win32.run

rasengan•2h ago

It is slightly more than just a UI since all of the applications actually work (you can save and reload for example and still see your previous files too).

It seems functional to me!

Kudos to the author!

voidUpdate•3h ago

I was hoping this was emulation, like the windows 95 in js that exists, but its more of a simulator. The web browser doesnt work and the minesweeper game uses a text emoji instead of a picture for the face

jasperry•3h ago

I also hoped it was actual emulation. I could tell it wasn't when I saw the bootup progress bar moving more smoothly than it ever did in real Windows :)

personalityson•3h ago

I was able to create a vbs script (MsgBox "Test"), but it keeps opening in Notepad...

philipwhiuk•3h ago

Yeah I was gonna navigate to the website and try to recurse :(

LetsGetTechnicl•3h ago

I was able to get the "browser" to work by opening the Flash Player and clicking the link to the Ruffle website. It's just an embedded view so some sites don't work (I think dependent on your browser settings.)

sunaookami•2h ago

Vast majority of sites disallow embedding nowadays.

twalichiewicz•2h ago

Turns out you can just click and drag to select everything in Minesweeper, and it reveals all the hidden numbers. There’s even a sneaky little “debug” text in the bottom-left corner that shows where all the bombs are.

DustinBrett•2h ago

Seems like v86 will be the king of this for a while longer.

pjmlp•3h ago

Cool example, however yet another "runs best on IE" sites, ah sorry it is Chrome nowadays.

simondotau•3h ago

It must be using ActiveX, ah sorry I mean some feature that Google has unilaterally decided is part of the official web standard, soon to be known as the Chrome Platform standard.

mohamez•3h ago

The bootup sound brought a flood of old memories.

ferguess_k•3h ago

Both the OS and Word 2003 run smoothly. It's quite a show. I think I might want to keep an old 16GB RAM laptop to run Windows 7, MS Office 2010 and VS 2012. I'll cut off as much Internet as possible and concentrate on my projects.

Edit: Just realized that this is not a VM, just a replicate. No wonder Word 2003 looks weird.

accrual•2h ago

It is still nice to use old versions of Office. I think 2003 was my favorite. Simple, usable, no usage-based UI, no pop-ups like "look at this new feature we silently installed!" while you're trying to write.

ferguess_k•1h ago

Yeah 2003 is probably good enough for me too. I only need it to write my CV.

gia_ferrari•1m ago

On a whim a few years ago I wrote an engineering proposal on my Pentium MMX using Word 2003. It opened within 2 seconds via the aging hard disk. Today even LibreOffice feels a bit overwrought. I've found AbiWord delightful recently - it's the WordPad analog of LibreOffice.

gmaster1440•3h ago

No Pinball :(

zamadatix•2h ago

Fear not! https://98.js.org/programs/pinball/space-cadet.html

accrual•2h ago

Pinball music plays in head...

mmastrac•3h ago

How can you tell that any Windows or Mac clone UI is a re-implementation? Easy: try to move your mouse diagonally into the Send To menu after letting it pop up. If the send-to menu closes as you mouse over the item into the submenu, it's a clone. If the menu stays up even if you brush over another menu item, it's either real or a Good Clone. :)

For the fun history, @DonHopkins had a thread a few years back:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17404345

wahnfrieden•3h ago

Google has not learned this lesson

maplant•3h ago

I could tell instantly in the loading screen because the three blocks in the progress bar move smoothly across it.

jkingsman•2h ago

Yup, and on just about every system I used there was a stutter in it about 75% of the way through.

wibbily•1h ago

Man nothing drives me further up the wall than when a nice progress indicator with discrete segments gets animated with a lazy `to { rotate(360deg); }` etc[1]. It is my molehill to die on

[1] https://cdn.dribbble.com/userupload/41647820/file/original-8...

metalliqaz•1h ago

you just don't like how it looks, or is there something else wrong with it?

AlecSchueler•19m ago

It's just moving, it gives no actual indication of progress.

CrimsonCape•1h ago

You know talking about progress bars, it takes a lot of confidence to program a linear progress bar. You think you know when loading will be complete and think you know can break down the incremental progress made during loading.

Instead we get these spinning wheels that are like "maybe in the future this wheel will stop and we will have a return value." No confidence whatsoever.

I know this is true because Apple tries to implement progress bars in IOS like real chads. But their progress bars are just fake. They are a cheap animation all the way up to 90% and just stop moving until the progress is actually complete which could be 5 seconds of 90% and 40 seconds of the last 10%. So they think they are chad but lie.

DustinBrett•2h ago

On my website daedalOS it does indeed have a delay when your mouse leaves a sub menu. I didn't know people looked for that though.

mmastrac•2h ago

I believe that anyone who isn't explicitly looking for it is subconsciously frustrated by the lack of it and they just don't know why the UI is "annoying".

stronglikedan•2h ago

If you have another option with a submenu on either side of Send To, the Send To menu will close. It closes as soon as you move over any item with a submenu. But it just so happens that Send To is typically by itself, so it's a good test regardless.

jaffa2•2h ago

I must be a freak then because one of the first tweaks I do to any Windows install since possibly Win98 days is to set menu delay to 0ms. I like the snappy precise feel and have no problems not taking shortcuts across menu items.

rayiner•2h ago

Crazy how much UI still fails this test.

alnwlsn•2h ago

There's something like this in every desktop Linux I've tried, which made it feel like using the mouse was in some way weird and broken. But I've been using it for long enough now that it either got fixed, or more likely, I got used to it. I don't even remember what it was, something about clicking drop down menus a certain way?

Reminds me of the first time I ever used classic Macintosh System OS, and how you have to hold the mouse button down to keep menus open. It doesn't take much to throw everything off.

randunel•1h ago

Ugh, all the links in that comment are dead, imgur and microsoft alike :(

tczMUFlmoNk•1h ago

A classic article about a no-delay solution to this problem, not mentioned in the linked thread:

https://bjk5.com/post/44698559168/breaking-down-amazons-mega...

rao-v•1h ago

Lovely and simple … you’d think it would have become the best practice in most libraries by now

webstrand•1h ago

It also fails the "hold right click" test, Windows didn't popover context menus until right click was released. Instead, for file, it did a kind of "contextual drag and drop".

self_awareness•1h ago

Padding of buttons and around text usually immediately tells that it's a reimplementation.

OptionOfT•57m ago

I love reading about old UI interface guidelines, and how much research was done to make it useful to the user.

Now it's all about how to make it useful to the company.

Anyway, the links in that post have deteriorated.

Here's the link to Raymond Chen's blog: https://web.archive.org/web/20190218080905/https://blogs.msd... (shame on MS for redirecting you to another page when showing you a 404, which make it harder to find the original URL).

Updated link to Raymond Chen's blog, where the comments have been 'retired': https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20080619-00/?p=21...

And the 2 imgur links (same issue with the redirecting...):

https://web.archive.org/web/20230509182201/https://i.imgur.c...

and

https://web.archive.org/web/20230507201645/https://i.imgur.c...

Catbert59•3h ago

Will call our IT support tomorrow and start this as a full screen.

That will be fun in the office :-)

NitpickLawyer•2h ago

That's actually not a bad April Fool's prank.

sergiotapia•3h ago

Design peaked here for OS's. Perfect balance of colors and functionality, and gloss. This was the top.

ianhawes•3h ago

No, it's just nostalgic.

Fergusonb•2h ago

I don't know, it's nice to have icons and buttons that actually look like what they're going to do instead of amorphous blobs.

silverquiet•2h ago

I often have a hard time telling if I'm being nostalgic. For me, 7 was peak Windows, but Win2K/XP would rank pretty close as well. I suppose the question for me is what have subsequent releases given us; what can we actually do with more recent versions of Windows that we could not accomplish back then?

LargoLasskhyfv•1h ago

XP or 7 in "classic", aka 2000 look. For practical reasons, like hardware-support, really working USB.

If running in some isolated VM for some superspecial APP still supporting running on 2000, why not? Uses much less memory.

brandon272•1h ago

People love to dogmatically claim that any appreciation for past design can only be chalked up to nostalgia but the XP design is objectively an excellent balance between UI 'gloss' and very simple and clear, unambiguous functionality.

People rarely complained that finding an application under the Start menu was difficult. In current versions of Windows, the Start menu is such a disaster, such a mess, that people don't even open it and rely much more on the search function.

frozenseven•3h ago

Playing Age of War right now.

sangeeth96•3h ago

Real thing is possible on https://copy.sh/v86/ I think but need an XP disk image[1], not readily available at the moment (probably for copyright reasons?).

[1]: https://github.com/copy/v86/issues/86

yakz•3h ago

Windows 2000 in a JS VM is available: https://bellard.org/jslinux/

zamadatix•2h ago

Windows 2000 is also available in the above (with more pre-installed apps).

benbristow•3h ago

So close that Microsoft Edge's heuristics picked it up as a potential scam after being used for a bit!

accrual•2h ago

Wow, did you get some kind of notification in Edge? Maybe they're trying to detect certain remote desktop sessions used in scams or something.

benbristow•2h ago

Yes. It's the new AI powered Scareware blocker.

https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2025/01/27/stand-up-to-s...

devnull3•2h ago

Win XP remains my favourite OS till date. I was in college and getting hands on a pirated copy back then makes me so nostalgic.

There was a cambrian explosion of tools to customize the look and feel. TweakXP pro is the one I remember. All pirated off-course.

dijit•2h ago

I remember being extremely envious of the "Alienware theme" that you could only get with an actual Alienware machine.

That was surprisingly short-lived though, such custom experiences are uncommon these days. Seems like nobody is theming Windows- they just fill it with crapware.

accrual•2h ago

I remember those themes - the sleek "glowing" blue accents on shiny silver and black UI elements looked so fancy back then. There was a Windows Media Player skin too if I recall correctly.

tracker1•2h ago

I preferred the Media Center Edition theme myself... kept a copy of it for a long time to drop into XP and other windows flavors.

rayiner•2h ago

How was it better than Win2K?

AlecSchueler•6m ago

Lots of relatively small UI improvements that all added up. I honestly never noticed them until years later when I had to use a slightly older machine and had an "oh wow" moment.

floxy•1h ago

OS/2 is the nostalgic one for me.

Mistletoe•2h ago

Using this made me feel happy. I don't get that feeling from modern Windows.

ch_123•2h ago

I feel slightly ashamed that I spent enough time using Windows XP that was able to spot that this was a clone based on the fonts and shadow effects alone.

Nice effort though.

accrual•2h ago

It could be a badge of honor! You used the system so much that clones can't fool you. To be fair, Windows text rendering does have a very specific look that's difficult to perfectly replicate without using the actual Windows APIs.

I'm sure some here could look at a screenshot of the same text rendered on Windows, macOS, and Linux and tell them apart.

jmkni•2h ago

So disappointed it doesn't include OG solitaire!

easton•2h ago

If you want the real thing: https://lrusso.github.io/VirtualXP/VirtualXP.htm

(takes less memory than Miro, at least in Firefox :D)

jeffhuys•2h ago

Works great! Tested on Orion. Sad to see I couldn't delete system32.

autoexec•47m ago

no spider.exe tho

1970-01-01•2h ago

Back when the Start Menu made sense. It wasn't rose colored glasses, it was functional.

accrual•2h ago

Yep. No web search. No ads or news or weather or links to apps that aren't actually installed. Opens virtually instantly. Lots of stock customization options (icon size, icon order, pinned icons, classic vs XP style, all shortcuts toggleable).

The only thing I miss is the search bar - I became quite used to that with Windows 7.

sunaookami•2h ago

The Windows XP start menu sucked, no search function and it was common to have 3 columns full of shortcuts with folders inside folders. It only got better with Windows Vista.

imafish•2h ago

You cannot drag & drop the Recycle Bin :(

notpushkin•2h ago

GPT-5

GPT-5 for Developers

Building Bluesky comments for my blog

Infinite Pixels

SUSE Donates USD 11,500 to the Perl and Raku Foundation

How to sell if your user is not the buyer

Laptop Support and Usability (LSU): July 2025 Report from the FreeBSD Foundation

Foundry (YC F24) Is Hiring Staff Level Product Engineers

Jepsen: Capela dda5892

Monte Carlo Crash Course: Quasi-Monte Carlo

New AI Coding Teammate: Gemini CLI GitHub Actions

Show HN: Browser AI agent platform designed for reliability

Emailing a one-time code is worse than passwords

GPT-5 System Card [pdf]

The Sunlight Budget of Earth

The Lightweight LSAT

Benchmark Framework Desktop Mainboard and 4-node cluster

Italy's Undercover Pizza Detectives

Lithium compound can reverse Alzheimer’s in mice: study

Arm Desktop: x86 Emulation

Windows XP Professional

Sweatshop Data Is Over

PyPI: Preventing ZIP parser confusion attacks on Python package installers

More shell tricks: first class lists and jq

The Whispering Earring (Scott Alexander)

Koalas vs. Crows: An Evolutionary Theory of Software

Claude Code IDE integration for Emacs

Hopfield Networks Is All You Need (2020)

Global Trade Dynamics

Let's stop pretending that managers and executives care about productivity

GPT-5

GPT-5 for Developers

Building Bluesky comments for my blog

Infinite Pixels

SUSE Donates USD 11,500 to the Perl and Raku Foundation

How to sell if your user is not the buyer

Laptop Support and Usability (LSU): July 2025 Report from the FreeBSD Foundation

Foundry (YC F24) Is Hiring Staff Level Product Engineers

Jepsen: Capela dda5892

Monte Carlo Crash Course: Quasi-Monte Carlo

New AI Coding Teammate: Gemini CLI GitHub Actions

Show HN: Browser AI agent platform designed for reliability

Emailing a one-time code is worse than passwords

GPT-5 System Card [pdf]

The Sunlight Budget of Earth

The Lightweight LSAT

Benchmark Framework Desktop Mainboard and 4-node cluster

Italy's Undercover Pizza Detectives

Lithium compound can reverse Alzheimer’s in mice: study

Arm Desktop: x86 Emulation

Windows XP Professional

Sweatshop Data Is Over

PyPI: Preventing ZIP parser confusion attacks on Python package installers

More shell tricks: first class lists and jq

The Whispering Earring (Scott Alexander)

Koalas vs. Crows: An Evolutionary Theory of Software

Claude Code IDE integration for Emacs

Hopfield Networks Is All You Need (2020)

Global Trade Dynamics

Let's stop pretending that managers and executives care about productivity

Windows XP Professional

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