Exploring Windows XP on macOS ARM64 (opens in new tab)

The Visual C++ screenshot [0] took me back. The clean and clear UI, much simpler times.

[0] https://milen.me/images/writings/windows-xp-on-macos-arm64/v...

So. Many. Colors. I miss color so much, today's interfaces are downright depressing to look at :-(

Similar experience here. Nostalgia from XP days is so strong I forget the monstrosity the OS became from every release from 8.1 onwards.

> with M2 legendary battery life....

Is this true when running non-MacOS? A lot of the things that make a system blow through battery are OS-related things. XP wasn't exactly designed with battery life in mind.

Do you just like Windows XP's UI, or do you really like the OS?

SP2 to be precise, was the best.

Have you tried running your app on ARM Windows 10/11 and using their translation layer? It runs so damn fast, the M1 Mac is ironically the snappiest Windows machine I've ever used ha ha. Its faster than this 2019 Core i9 Macbook Pro I got sitting here running the same Windows app.

> I don't recall which hypervisor I used, but it was super slow.

You didn't. You used an emulator rather than a hypervisor, which is why it was slow.

For most use cases, running x86 Windows applications is much better either under ARM Windows 11 in a VM, or with a Wine-based solution. But if you really need an x86 Windows kernel running, it's going to be slow.

Windows 10 is far more bloated than XP, which was designed to run acceptably on sub-GHz processors. Windows 11 is even more so.

Try these emulators of previous Windows versions running in a web browser for something that'll definitely be slower than QEMU, but are surprisingly still not unusably slow; in fact, I suspect a lot of new corporate machines with the pre-installed spyware and other background stuff will feel slower:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24955706

On the other hand, in somewhat of a converse to your situation, I tried ARM Windows 11 in QEMU running under x86 emulation on a relatively new (2 years) machine, and it was an absolute slug. Installing took over an hour, booting to the desktop took 10-15 minutes, and right-clicking the start menu required a 10-second wait for it to appear (I dared not left-click, for the ad-filled monstrosity that summons would likely have taken far longer to appear.) Even the "modern" Task Manager took most of a minute to show up, and then continued to consume 60-70% CPU when "idle".

Edit: care to give some counterarguments?

I recently had to use an x86 version of Linux on my M1Pro MBP, hence using QEMU emulation instead of virtualization. The system was barely usable, although I only had basic headless server/SSH requirements. Researching a little showed that this is basically what can be expected running x86 emulation and the systems will just be wonky and slow, although it was running flawlessly, just slow.

There seem to be ways to use Rosetta2 inside a VM [0] to then translate binaries but I found no official support or documentation (using UTM+QEMU that was), this would be such a cool feature, at least there are discussions about it [1,2]

- [0] https://mybyways.com/blog/using-rosetta-in-a-utm-linux-vm-wi...

- [1] https://github.com/utmapp/UTM/discussions/4939

- [2] https://github.com/utmapp/UTM/issues/5460

For what it's worth, Andreas does post a lot of SerenityOS development content on his YouTube channel:

https://www.youtube.com/@awesomekling

I am a technical user, but don't intend to utilize it. I guess it functions as gatekeeping to make sure you actually are interested in it. If anything, I only want to check it out for a second.

You do have to build it from source, but the documentation for how to do so is luckily quite good, and there's a dedicated channel in the Discord server for helping people with build issues if you run into any problems.

You're obviously not obligated, but I'd encourage you to try building it if you're interested!

You can try it here (somewhat slow, but works as a demo): https://copy.sh/v86/?profile=serenity

If it helps at all, it's actually a lot less intimidating than it might look at the first glance. You just have to have all the build software and QEMU installed, and the scripts do the rest (and even launch the VM).

The licensing doesn't prohibit it, so anyone who wants to can offer ISOs for download.