It may sound like a joke or a grace from some LxA editor, but the truth is that it is true: Windows 95 is now available for Gnu / Linux.
A joker or lover of Windows 95, I'm still not sure, has used Electron technology to introduce Bill Gates' operating system into an app that we can install on any operating system, not only on macOS but also on any Gnu / Linux distribution.
The code is free, as free as possible, and we can get it through the Github repository of the creator, Felix Rieseberg. The package of Windows 95 does not occupy more than 100 mb, something that may surprise many young people but the truth is that this operating system was distributed on floppy disks and not on CD-ROM disks.
The Windows 95 operating system is full and we can use to remember the operation of certain programs they were on Windows 95 or just to run old MS-Dos and Windows 95 applications that we still need for various reasons.
It is also a great application to have fun and to joke, at least for those who did not support or did not enjoy this operating system. The installation of Windows 95 is very easy because we can from the github repository from developer download the deb package or the rpm package, depending on our distribution and install it from this installation package. The installation is simple and does not need proprietary libraries to function correctly as you can see.
Personally I think it is paradoxical how much less since not long ago Windows 10 supported Gnu / Linux distributions and allowed to install from its store And now it is the other way around, from the Gnu / Linux store (in the not too distant future) we will be able to install Windows 95. Although I will wait for Windows 98 to come out, an already interesting version for Gnu / Linux desktops although not as beautiful as KDE or Gnome.
I did it with DosBOX.
Absurd? Not less than WSL!
Interesting news. Two fixes:
- "The code is free, as free as possible." No wonder, the Windows 95 code is the property of Microsoft and will remain so unless Microsoft itself releases it.
- "The Windows 95 operating system" a common mistake, so much so that even Wikipedia itself makes it. Windows 95 was not an operating system, it was a desktop that ran on top of the MS-DOS operating system.
@Ignacio: Bearing in mind that MS-DOS worked in real mode without Global Descriptor Table, without task management at the processor level, without security rings, without I / O access control, etc ..., and Windows 95 went to protected mode and happened to manage all those things, it was an Operating System. It managed memory, I / O and access to devices, timers, shared memory, execution of processes in real mode, and it also had a graphical interface.
Another thing is that it required that MS-DOS be loaded first, but it came to make up for a deficiency of MS-DOS on 32-bit processors in protected mode, or that the security was really poor (which was implemented in NT and Win95 exposed an API where security parameters were required which I then ignored).