10 ms·
Windows XP Professional
- danieldrehmer 1y agoI got stuck in the serial number part
- bagol 1y agoHuh? I thought the serial numbers are available for free in the internet.
- kardianos 1y agoYes please. Can I please have a simple desktop that doesn't get in my way back?
- FirmwareBurner 1y agoLinux
- andrepd 1y agolinuxmint.org :)
- saubeidl 1y agoGet an Arch-based distro with KDE.
- Der_Einzige 1y agoYou mean xfce? KDE is bloated. Yes it’s still bloated even if Valgrind says it has no memory leaks.
- saubeidl 1y agoxfce is nice, too, but aren't they still on gtk3?
- kardianos 1y agoI 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 1y agoKDE 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 1y agoYes, 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 1y agoYou mean Cinnamon? XFCE is ugly as hell and breaks a lot of things.
- LargoLasskhyfv 1y agoDoes it matter when my current uptime is 51 days?
- int_19h 1y agoIt's bloated if you judge it by the standards of the WinXP era. And I'm not saying that's unfair, but realistically speaking, it's not an issue for any modern PC.
- ikari_pl 1y agoor just KDE?
- giancarlostoro 1y agoI prefer Budgie myself.
- mvieira38 1y agoI 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 1y agoI 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 1y agoThere is still Mate, the Gnome 2 fork.
- freedomben 1y agoI'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 1y agoThere is still Trinity, the KDE 3 fork. https://www.trinitydesktop.org https://www.trinitydesktop.org
- int_19h 1y agoAnd Cinnamon, which is modern Gnome beaten into some sensible shape.
- whalesalad 1y agoInsane how performant this is in the browser.
- elbac 1y agolol, I can't tell if you are serious or not, but it's a recreation in HTML/CSS.
- whalesalad 1y agoI just assumed it was wasm
- bravetraveler 1y agoDragging 'Word' is rough on my setup... while 'Notepad' is fine, lol. More styling is expensive.
- tux3 1y agoThis 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://docs.win32.run/ https://github.com/ducbao414/win32.run https://github.com/ducbao414/win32.run
- voidUpdate 1y agoI 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 1y agoI 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 1y agoI was able to create a vbs script (MsgBox "Test"), but it keeps opening in Notepad...
- philipwhiuk 1y agoYeah I was gonna navigate to the website and try to recurse :(
- LetsGetTechnicl 1y agoI 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 1y agoVast majority of sites disallow embedding nowadays.
- twalichiewicz 1y agoTurns 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 1y agoSeems like v86 will be the king of this for a while longer.
- pjmlp 1y agoCool example, however yet another "runs best on IE" sites, ah sorry it is Chrome nowadays.
- simondotau 1y agoIt 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 1y agoThe bootup sound brought a flood of old memories.
- ferguess_k 1y agoBoth 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 1y agoIt 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 1y agoYeah 2003 is probably good enough for me too. I only need it to write my CV.
- gia_ferrari 1y agoOn 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.
- accrual 1y agoVery nice! I wrote a Christmas letter on my Pentium 3 to my partner's family last year, it was very cozy feeling. Not only that, but I was able to print it to my networked Brother printer without a problem.
- gmaster1440 1y agoNo Pinball :(
- zamadatix 1y agoFear not! https://98.js.org/programs/pinball/space-cadet.html https://98.js.org/programs/pinball/space-cadet.html
- HelloUsername 1y agoAlso on web, Android and iOS: https://ksylvestre.itch.io/space-cadet-pinball https://ksylvestre.itch.io/space-cadet-pinball
- kmarc 1y agoOh my, thanks for this. Quickly made 1.5M Used to spend lot of time when I was a kid (I didn't even see a real pinball machine before)
- accrual 1y agoPinball music plays in head...
- mmastrac 1y agoHow 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17404345
- wahnfrieden 1y agoGoogle has not learned this lesson
- maplant 1y agoI could tell instantly in the loading screen because the three blocks in the progress bar move smoothly across it.
- jkingsman 1y agoYup, and on just about every system I used there was a stutter in it about 75% of the way through.
- projektfu 1y agoWindows installers and upgrades seem to like to reach 100% and then continue working for a few more minutes.
- wibbily 1y agoMan 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-8dfda86dd346ccde4fc8b5fc0173c4dd.gif https://cdn.dribbble.com/userupload/41647820/file/original-8...
- 1y ago
- Catbert59 1y agoWill call our IT support tomorrow and start this as a full screen. That will be fun in the office :-)
- NitpickLawyer 1y agoThat's actually not a bad April Fool's prank.
- heraldgeezer 1y agoThese are fun too - https://fakeupdate.net/ https://fakeupdate.net/
- not_a_bot_4sho 1y agoHave an automatic defibrillator ready just in case
- sergiotapia 1y agoDesign peaked here for OS's. Perfect balance of colors and functionality, and gloss. This was the top.
- ianhawes 1y agoNo, it's just nostalgic.
- Fergusonb 1y agoI 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 1y agoI 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 1y agoXP 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.
- int_19h 1y agoI was one of those people who stuck to classic theme all the way up to Win7, but that was the version that finally made me switch because the fancy default theme in it actually looked pretty well after they made the glass effects of Vista more subtle. WinXP looked like some kind of cheap plastic horror in comparison. It's very funny to look at Apple progressing from "looks like Vista" to "looks like Win7" in its iOS 26 betas.
- 1y ago
- frozenseven 1y agoPlaying Age of War right now.
- sangeeth96 1y agoReal thing is possible on https://copy.sh/v86/ 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 https://github.com/copy/v86/issues/86
- yakz 1y agoWindows 2000 in a JS VM is available: https://bellard.org/jslinux/ https://bellard.org/jslinux/
- zamadatix 1y agoWindows 2000 is also available in the above (with more pre-installed apps).
- int_19h 1y agoBetter yet ditch the browser and get a proper emulator, preferably one that emulates all the period-accurate hardware such as https://86box.net https://86box.net.
- ColonelPhantom 1y agoIs 86box period-accurate for Windows XP? It seems to go up to Socket 370 (Pentium III) which is very early for XP. Additionally, from my experience using PCem (which 86box is based on), you need pretty beefy hardware to emulate a Pentium II or K6, let alone to go beyond them. And those are period-accurate for Windows 98, not XP.
- jondusaza 1y ago[dead]
- benbristow 1y agoSo close that Microsoft Edge's heuristics picked it up as a potential scam after being used for a bit!
- accrual 1y agoWow, 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 1y agoYes. It's the new AI powered Scareware blocker. https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2025/01/27/stand-up-to-scareware-with-scareware-blocker/ https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2025/01/27/stand-up-to-s...
- netsharc 1y agoI've been on a Teams call with a dev colleague, who just randomly clicked stuff and got web popups that were spoofing the Windows 11 UI...
- JOHN-DAN 1y agoThe bootup sound brought a flash of joyful memories.
- devnull3 1y agoWin 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 1y agoI 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 1y agoI 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 1y agoI preferred the Media Center Edition theme myself... kept a copy of it for a long time to drop into XP and other windows flavors.
- zveyaeyv3sfye 1y ago> Seems like nobody is theming Windows We found more fun in ricing our linux desktops :) https://reddit.com/r/unixporn https://reddit.com/r/unixporn
- frantathefranta 1y agoSpecifically to look like Windows XP: https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/pdd4o6/xfce_windows_xp_tc/ https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/pdd4o6/xfce_windo...
- nine_k 1y agoWhy theme it? For many people, it has three main functions: starting a game, starting Chrome, and starting MSO. All three kinds have their own custom look, or theme support. The native UI is barely visible, unless you're a heavy Explorer user.
- Mistletoe 1y agoUsing this made me feel happy. I don't get that feeling from modern Windows.
- alex1138 1y agoThe 1990s were very Information Superhighway (I get that's said in a mocking tone now for people who didn't actually know what the internet was, but I tend to use it unironically) It's just a shame about the antitrust stuff and the bugs and glitches that came with MS Windows
- jmkni 1y agoSo disappointed it doesn't include OG solitaire!
- ch_123 1y agoI 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 1y agoIt 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.
- poglet 1y agoAlso the Windows boot loading bar was way too smooth.
- easton 1y agoIf you want the real thing: https://lrusso.github.io/VirtualXP/VirtualXP.htm https://lrusso.github.io/VirtualXP/VirtualXP.htm (takes less memory than Miro, at least in Firefox :D)
- jeffhuys 1y agoWorks great! Tested on Orion. Sad to see I couldn't delete system32.
- autoexec 1y agono spider.exe tho
- ComputerGuru 1y agoCrashes the tab on iOS.
- jeroenhd 1y agoRuns just fine on Firefox for Android. Display is stretched to a weird resolution in portrait mode, though.
- alexvitkov 1y agoThere's a very restrictive RAM usage limit on iOS and the tab crashes when you reach it.
- burnt-resistor 1y agoThis is the sauce. Works on an iPad Pro m4 on Brave faster than a P4 of the era. No half fakes allowed.
- pndy 1y agoLooks like it's some Windows PE release - still more real than this thing in OP
- balou23 1y ago> (takes less memory than Miro, at least in Firefox :D) Ouch.
- 1970-01-01 1y agoBack when the Start Menu made sense. It wasn't rose colored glasses, it was functional.
- accrual 1y agoYep. 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 1y agoThe 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.
- bravesoul2 1y agoWin 11 has no (decent) search function
- sunaookami 1y agoIt went to shit with Windows 10, yes. But I don't use Windows anymore.
- wpm 1y agoSearch is only a boon when the menu is so poorly organized and rendered it’s hard to find shit. I never needed search in XP cause I knew where everything was. Since Windows 8.1’s fucking abomination of a Start Menu, yeah, I’d miss having search.
- argsnd 1y agocan't beat press win key -> "not" -> press enter key -> notepad opens
- imafish 1y agoYou cannot drag & drop the Recycle Bin :(
- notpushkin 1y agoSee also: https://www.windows93.net/ https://www.windows93.net/
- accrual 1y agoI am viewing this post on a real Windows XP system on a 440BX platform from 1998. ;) The BIOS splash text loads and animates but not much else. I'm using Palemoon 25 (SSE1). Impressive that it loads at all!
- freedomben 1y agoSadly, accrual's system was just compromised so they're offline for now
- thecosmicfrog 1y ago"WIN32.RUN might have unexpected behaviors on browsers that are NOT Chromium-based (Safari, Firefox, Internet Explorer, etc.)" What would be the reasons this wouldn't run on Firefox? Genuine question from a non-web developer.
- tetris11 1y agoit's not an emulator -- it's a (very realistic) re-implementation of the desktop using standard JS and CSS. Flash is run through Ruffle. Edge opens pages using native iframes. Essentially the browser split comes from the usual browser split: discrepancies in JS and CSS implementations
- pjc50 1y agoThis means the developer hasn't tested it on Firefox. Platform compatibility is way better than it used to be but you still occasionally get differences in supported APIs or interpretation of the standard.
- BizarroLand 1y agoI ran it in icefox without an issue, even got a few games of minesweeper in. The only issue I had was the mobi reader wouldn't work, but that was fine with me.
- okincilleb 1y agoThis is awesome! I recreated Win XP for my personal website a few years ago (https://www.sohailsayed.com/ https://www.sohailsayed.com/), but this completely blows it out the water on functionality. I absolutely love just how much depth there is to the functionality in this (from being able to use apps like word, or being able to drag and move around icons on desktop). Brilliant!
- hard_times 1y agoWe get these cheap recreations semi-regularly on here. Why does stuff like this keep being spammed on here, besides the nostalgia factor?
- edgarvaldes 1y agoMaybe this is the "running Doom" of the UI/UX crowd.
- int_19h 1y agoOf web UI in particular. And this game is very old. I remember trying to get native-looking dropdown menus in IE6.
- alnwlsn 1y agoPeople have been making these for a while. I used to see them on Flash game sites all the time as a kid. It'd be "Windows 96" or "Windows XD" or whatever else they decided to call it. They all had a start menu, notepad, maybe a calculator, and maybe a Minesweeper clone, and not much else. Judging by the amount of Windows startup sound compilation videos out there, "the kids yearn for desktop UIs" might just be a little more common than you think.
- bityard 1y agoNot an authentic experience, it boots way too fast.
- Davidzheng 1y agowow it's one of the most nostalgic feelings I've ever felt. Like coming back home after leaving for many years. And you still know your way around even though you already forgot you knew.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- godot 1y agoLittle fun tidbit: I happen to use the WinXP wallpaper on my Macbook (just for fun nostalgia, and because I like it), so when I open this up on my browser the background blends: https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/70a66a71-3f6a-4853-8576-6ab8d28dba9a https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/70a66a71-3f6a-485...
- twwwt 1y agoStrangely enough, the first thing that some subconscious forces brought me to was to listen to Beethoven's 9th symphony (the file in media sub folder in the home folder). Very well done...
- jp1016 1y agoThis brings back so many memories I still remember having a cd with the serial key written right on it. Even now, that key is stuck in my mind qqwd7-8gr47-x9rcp-jjwh7-qpgqq
- eimrine 1y agoCheck margin/padding in filename input line of "save file as" menu. Ms Word is totally not real Main menu font should be monotype if I remember correctly Minesweeper has other fonts and pictures Browser in browser can not work by some browser policy. BTW the shot of nostalgy is MASSIVE My favorite video player from that times was LightAlloy and Winamp 2.
- dmpayton 1y agoI went through the "Install Windows" option just to hear the Windows XP installation music again. That track is such a vibe, I have loved it since I was a 14 year-old installing a pirated copy of XP in 2001.
- bombcar 1y agoAn installer having the ability to load drivers and play music was mind blowing
- cactusplant7374 1y agoAny support for Direct3D?
- apatheticonion 1y agoGod I miss Windows XP. I feel like, with a few small changes, the Windows XP GUI would be the most solid desktop experience you could possibly have. Throw in POSIX compliance/bash, first party Linux compatibility (not WSL), window snapping, dark mode, maybe a spotlight-like search and a few enhancements to the file manager and you'd have a pretty much perfect desktop/productivity OS. Why can't we have nice things?
- XorNot 1y agoFeels like you just want Cinnamon with maybe 1 or two more polished features?
- apatheticonion 1y agoI daily drive Linux and deeply appreciate the fact that pretty much everything (at least in the DE space) is developed for free by people donating their time - so don't take this the wrong way. ...but I've yet to experience the level of DE stability you get from Windows XP/7 That also applies to Windows 11 (low bar, I know) and MacOS. It is getting much better and that's happening very quickly - but there is always some jank. For instance, dragging a Chrome tab off the current window to create a new window. The various file managers in Linux (dolphin, files, thunar) fall short (also MacOS Finder is an actual joke). Also matching glibc versions when distributing software is a bit tedious
- inetknght 1y ago> ...but I've yet to experience the level of DE stability you get from Windows XP/7 Have you used Cinnamon? I used Cinnamon for five years and the only weird quirk is needing to change the keybind for locking the machine (Power key + L defaults to opening some stupid debugger).
- apatheticonion 1y agoNot recently. I think the last time I used it was a few years ago. I'll take a look though!
- itvision 1y agoLooks good but it's a JavaScript look alike, it's not a real deal.
- ww520 1y agoWow. This is very impressive. It would be trippy if IE can run https://win32.run https://win32.run again.
- dsp_person 1y agoCheck out SmolXP [1]. The one I setup had a 340MB qcow2 image, took about ~10 sec to boot to desktop with qemu, and used only 58MB ram idling on desktop. https://github.com/AFellowSpeedrunner/SmolXP https://github.com/AFellowSpeedrunner/SmolXP
- ornornor 1y agoWhat do you use it for?
- catsma21 1y agoi'd use microxp (not this, but similar) to read visual novels on my android pohne
- dsp_person 1y agoI was running it with a VFIO passthrough firewire 800 card to run my RME fireface audio interface, mainly to control the graphical mixer. It's amusing thinking if I rigged up an electron app for a mixer it would take up more memory than the entire disk+ram.
- pcunite 1y agoI loved XP. However, one of the first things I would do is make it look like Win2k. :-)
- DustinBrett 1y agoLooks good, always nice to see more web desktop environments.
- sireat 1y agoFun but its Python REPL broke the immersion for me.. Python 3.13.2 (main, Aug 4 2025 20:25:58) I was expecting Python 2.2 or 2.3 ... not sure what was the earliest version of Python on Pyodide
- Icy0 1y agoLove how Notepad has syntax highlighting for many languages and even has linting for JSON, HTML, and JS :)
- call518 1y agoTook a nostalgic detour to XP-ville—right in my browser. No VMs, no installs—just pixel-perfect throwbacks. Warning: May derail your workflow with retro joy.
- terrycody 1y agoWould be perfect if got internet connection