…being disgusted by M$’s “No, You may NOT easily turn off the Metro interface in Windows 8 and MUST use your desktop/notebook as though it were a kiddie tablet,” approach, I decided to (finally) get around to in stalling ReactOS in a VM.
Pretty nice. From the page linked above,
ReactOS® is a free, modern operating system based on the design of Windows® XP/2003. Written completely from scratch, it aims to follow the Windows-NT® architecture designed by Microsoft from the hardware level right through to the application level. This is not a Linux based system, and shares none of the unix architecture.
The main goal of the ReactOS project is to provide an operating system which is binary compatible with Windows. This will allow your Windows applications and drivers to run as they would on your Windows system. Additionally, the look and feel of the Windows operating system is used, such that people accustomed to the familiar user interface of Windows® would find using ReactOS straightforward. The ultimate goal of ReactOS is to allow you to remove Windows® and install ReactOS without the end user noticing the change.
It pretty much works as advertised in that lil blurb, even in its Alpha development stage. Oh, installing sound drivers, etc., is a bit of a pain, but no more so than in many previous versions of Windows and less so than in most. Sharing folders bi-directionally in the Host-Client relationship of the VirtualBox setup of ReactOS doesn’t work well, but for most things I have plenty of workarounds for that.
It’s pretty nice; an experience that’s kind of halfway between Win2K Pro (the best desktop Windows pre Win7, IMO) and XP (the second-worst desktop Windows pre-Vista, IMO *heh*). Now, let’s just see how Vistart works (or doesn’t) in ReactOS… 🙂
Yeh, yeh, I know I can use (and have used) third-party software to very nearly regain the Win7 desktop functionality in Win8 CP, but why should one have to do that?
BTW, after deleting 2 VMs I rarely booted, my count on the two (physical) computers that I use for hosting VMs is now at only 12 VMs between them, using two different virtualization approaches. Half are Windows VMs and the others are various ‘nix VMs.