[All About Microsoft] Enthusiasts over at the AeroXperience.org site also are looking to bring back Longhorn, a k a, the precursor to the Windows Vista release that Microsoft launched in January 2007. The Joejoe.org Longhorn Reloaded team is looking to ressurect and retrofit a 2004 pre-release version of Windows so that it can be used as an alternative to Windows Vista. The AeroXP “Vista Customization Square”/Retrophase team is looking to bring the existing Vista Aero interface to a pre-Longhorn-Reset version of Windows.

The first thing that I found amusing is that the AeroXperience guys call joejoe.org’s Longhorn Reloaded “An incomplete and incompatible platform, that has no servicing or support, and is illegal“. Yet their own “Retrophase” patches uxtheme libraries, modifies winload.exe, shell32.dll, etc… which seems to me (and I’m no lawyer) just as “illegal and incompatible” as Longhorn Reloaded.

Then, my second thought was: Why would anyone do this? Don’t people have enough problems getting things to just work in the officially released version of Vista? I know I did.

Somehow, I don’t think either Retrophase or Longhorn Reloaded will ever overtake the desktop market as a predominant operating system, but it sure is interesting to watch.