As I was watching my oldest son play Minecraft, I was rather amused by the buttons and widgets for the interface, they were very Windows 95. Although I was more of an Amiga user at that time, we did have a Windows 95 machine in the house to do… Windowsy things like that whole Microsoft Office thing. Something my Dad needed for work or his community, local government involvement. Regardless, fond memories of the mid to late 90s and computers.
I told my boy, rather excitedly about Windows 95 and to my surprise, there is an electron app I can install into Linux, Windows or Mac OS.
Installation
I downloaded the RPM from here:
https://github.com/felixrieseberg/windows95
and installed it,
sudo zypper in ~/Downloads/rpms/windows95-linux-2.2.1.x86_64.rpm
Upon running it, I was greeted with a start screen. For the purposes of my level of usage, the big center button “Start Windows 95” is all I need, for now.
Once it is booted up… or rather the state is restored there is a nice message from the developer and a round of Solitaire ready to go.
For nostalgia sake, I played a game of FreeCell, and won.
As far as FreeCell games go, the Windows 95 version is still my favorite… for reasons I don’t exactly know. The version on the Amiga or KDE Plasma’s KPatience are absolutely better but something about this version always leaves me with a smile.
It is also somewhat noteworthy that the idea of the Control Panel is still in use on KDE Plasma. Not sure if we can thank Microsoft for this or not as I do recall a “Preferences Folder” on the Amiga Workbench.
After enthusiastically showing my boy a Windows 95 computer, he looked at it, paused and just said, “cool.” and went back to playing Minecraft.
Final Thoughts
He was right, it is cool and there is a lot you can do with this. At this time, I was not able to get network access to do any meaningful and with only 53 MB free on the C: Drive, there isn’t much I can install. BUT, if I rebuild the image… there are several old games I would like to see if I can get running in it, although, not the most efficient way to do so, it would be fun, just because.
