Longhorn Linux? Really?

[Aloone_Jonez]

Surely you're better off copying Windows 7? It's obviously the future of Windows.

Microsoft doesn't have any control over *nix?

Btw, I don't think these projects are "neat" in the least.

But they do, at least indirectly, for example the WINE team running around after them trying to keep compatibility with Windows.

[reactosguy]

But they couldn't mimic Windows 7. It started in the beginning of 2009 and mimicking Windows 7 would've taken longer.

Remember? Maybe in the future the dev team can work on that.

Also, I wonder how Jman6495 got here. Did someone in the forum tell the lead developer? Not me.

[worker201]

Also, I wonder how Jman6495 got here. Did someone in the forum tell the lead developer? Not me.

Most web hosts are able to track referrals.  A quick look at the referral list would have shown a number of hits coming from stop-microsoft.org, which might have triggered their curiosity. 

[worker201]

Surely you're better off copying Windows 7? It's obviously the future of Windows.

 :
I thought he made it pretty clear that they are not trying to create a Linux version of Windows, but a Linux version of the Windows that never was.  If they were interested in Windows 7, they would have bought it.

[Aloone_Jonez]

:
I thought he made it pretty clear that they are not trying to create a Linux version of Windows, but a Linux version of the Windows that never was.  If they were interested in Windows 7, they would have bought it.

No, it wasn't clear to me.

So was Longhorn actually different to Vista?

I thought it was the same, just a beta version.

I've never used either do I admit ignorance.

[worker201]

The Longhorn project team originally wanted to produce a big flashy OS (see the YouTube videos on the previous page) with lots of innovative (by Microsoft standards) features and stable technology under the hood.  But, like all project developers, their eyes were bigger than their stomachs.  As is usual with IT projects, featuritis, focus creep, and deadline issue caused the original vision to be drastically scaled down.  Longhorn (as defined by this project) was the concept, Vista was the actual product.

So, it depends on whether you think of Longhorn the initial concept, or Longhorn the name of Vista beta releases.  I guess after watching those videos, it became clear to me that this project was more interested in the former.

[Aloone_Jonez]

Watching the videos didn't mean much until I saw some Vista videos.

I suppose Longhorn was too full of eye candy for a typical 2003 PC which would typically have 256MB ram or so and a 1.8GHz single core processor and PC3200 board.

[worker201]

When I was in geospatial analysis school, we did projects, and we presented the status of our project every 3 weeks or so.  One of the groups started out like "We're going to have our own domain with a bicycling database and custom-served maps and Flex interfaces etc."  And then six weeks later, "We're going to have a Google maps plugin in a blog post."  It's easy to get excited in the beginning, but then it begins to sink in that you'll never be able to do all that in the time you have available while staying under budget.  Early stage featuritis and over-hyped design specifications are to be expected from student amateurs, but you'd think that the programmers at Microsoft would be a little bit more fucking professional.  Save the hype for the marketing department.

[Lead Head]

Well if your marketing department is driving the programmers....

But yes, the big issue with Longhorn is that it was based mainly on the XP code base. It was supposed to be a small update to XP, ex adding more functionality, new themes, etc..but as development went on they started adding more and more stuff. It just really couldn't support all that added eye candy and features they were adding onto it. The last few builds of Longhorn were actually regressing in terms of stability. From what I gathered from the Wikipedia article the last build or two before they scrapped it and started over were actually unusable, sometimes even failing to boot.

[Kintaro]

Plus, it's Linux. You can't run Windows apps unless you have WINE (which does poorly anyway).

Look at the system requirements. 3GB Hard drive space filled up, sounds good? Ah, but it uses 512MB of RAM. Enough to clog your PC?

Conclusion: If there's an operating system to mimic Windows' basic functionality, it's ReactOS (because they are working to make their OS neat and run many of the Windows apps).

Fuck ReactOS, I can run Windows inside VMware Unity and have its apps and even 3D games right on my Linux desktop, running on Xorg.

[Refalm]

Fuck ReactOS, I can run Windows inside VMware Unity and have its apps and even 3D games right on my Linux desktop, running on Xorg.

Have you actually tried this? I tried doing 3D gaming in Virtualbox, but it didn't work for RTS and FPS, since the mouse was uncontrollable (maybe due to having a 1800 dpi mouse). Racing games ran just fine though.

[Kintaro]

Fuck ReactOS, I can run Windows inside VMware Unity and have its apps and even 3D games right on my Linux desktop, running on Xorg.

Have you actually tried this? I tried doing 3D gaming in Virtualbox, but it didn't work for RTS and FPS, since the mouse was uncontrollable (maybe due to having a 1800 dpi mouse). Racing games ran just fine though.

I have tried it with a shitter computer, I do plan on putting Debian on this system so I can see how Team Fortress 2 will run. Faggy games like WoW that a friend runs if she stays here work okay on that computer. The problem is ram (as usual) because you need to have Windows running and Linux beneath it. Though to save on memory usage you can always run vmware under twm or some ultra light window manager.

I'll get around to testing it on beefier hardware sooner or later.