win4wine Runs Windows XP's Real Explorer as a Linux Desktop on Patched Wine, Using Files From Your Own XP Disc

The English README opens with a tagline that sounds like a dare: “Your Linux desktop, with the Windows XP shell.”

It means it literally. win4wine “runs Windows XP’s own explorer.exe on a patched Wine as the desktop shell of Linux.” The README says “The taskbar, Start menu, desktop and folder windows are XP’s real ones, and Linux applications get XP’s frames and taskbar buttons.”

Linux windows minimize, maximize and Alt+Tab the XP way. Linux apps show up under All Programs. Tray icons from Linux programs land in XP’s notification area beside XP’s own network, battery and volume icons, fed by NetworkManager and PipeWire. The Windows key, Ctrl+Esc, Win+R and Win+E all work.

The nostalgia goes deep. An optional login greeter shows XP’s Welcome screen, the startup and logon sounds play, and Internet Explorer 6 and Windows Media Player 9 come along, “all from your own ISO’s files.” Display Properties offers the Luna and Classic themes.

None of Microsoft’s code ships in the repo. “No Microsoft files are included. Only the files that are needed are extracted locally from your own ISO.” You bring an XP Professional SP3 x86 disc image in Japanese or English, run one setup script on a fresh Debian 13 install, and reboot into XP. The project’s ground rules add that “Binaries from Windows are never modified” and “Microsoft binaries are never disassembled.”

Underneath, the README’s diagram shows “Wine 11.0 + 151 patches,” an X11 window manager called bridge-wm that pairs each Linux window with a Win32 proxy, and a supervisor that falls back to Wine’s own explorer and an xterm if the XP shell keeps crashing. Building Wine “takes about 90 minutes on 4 cores.”

No XP disc? The script can set up ReactOS’s free shell instead, which the README describes as “a Windows 2000-like classic look.” A Windows 7 SP1 ISO gets you an experimental Windows 7 shell. There’s even an optional Wayland session, which the README calls “even more experimental than the X11 session.”

The warnings are up front. “This is a personal, experimental project, not a finished product for daily use,” and it “has only been tested on a freshly installed Debian 13.” A virtual machine is the recommended place to try it. The repo went up on October 11 under LGPL-2.1-or-later, the same license as Wine, and had 154 GitHub stars by October 28.

Microsoft’s license terms for the XP files still apply, and the README tells you to follow them. What those terms allow for a 25-year-old operating system’s shell running on Linux, it doesn’t try to answer.

Wine was built to run Windows programs on Linux. Running the Windows desktop itself on top of Linux turns the idea around: the familiar part is Microsoft’s, and everything under it is free software.

That’s a strange and specific kind of comfort. Plenty of people learned computers on XP’s green Start button, and the muscle memory survives long after the machines don’t. A project like this gives that memory a working home on current hardware, as long as the disc is still in a drawer somewhere.