ReactOS hits a milestone – actually hiring a full-time developer. And we've got our talons on the latest build to see what needs fixing
- Reference: 1594883077
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/07/16/reactos_project_milestone/
- Source link:
Victor Perevertkin [1]will work for three months on developing the storage stack, which the team says is “a long neglected piece of ReactOS.” The aim is to fix kernel plug and play bugs, improve SCSI support and USB storage support, and achieve better compatibility with Windows storage drivers.
ReactOS is a long-running project, started in 1996, but remains in alpha state. We tried the latest stable build, designated 0.4.13. There is documentation for installing in Hyper-V, the hypervisor built into Windows 10, but we had no luck, greeted with a black screen and no boot.
[2]
ReactOS is recommended only for evaluation, a warning that our brief hands-on suggests should be taken seriously. Click to enlarge
Oracle’s VirtualBox worked though, by carefully following these [3]instructions . It felt like going back in time, as the install process is more than reminiscent of Windows NT. The message on the desktop informs us “Reporting NT 5.2” which is the version number of Windows XP x64 edition.
Installation was successful though, with a few caveats. There are screen drawing issues, with icons inclined to go fuzzy until you drag the mouse over them to refresh, and in general the graphic performance is poor; but probably with some tweaking this can be improved. On the plus side, network connectivity worked out of the box, and looking at the Applications Manager shows a decent list of software, including GIMP, Inkscape, Firefox 48, Thunderbird 45, LibreOffice, Notepad++, and for developers, FreeBASIC, Lazarus (open source Object Pascal), Tiny C Compiler, Python 3 and plenty more.
ReactOS 0.4.11 makes great strides towards running Windows apps without the Windows [4]READ MORE
The Readme informs us that the project is “currently focused on Windows Server 2003 compatibility, but is always keeping an eye towards compatibility with Windows Vista and future Windows NT releases.”
The document also insists that ReactOS is legal. “All of the code of ReactOS has been written from scratch by our developers,” it says; a matter that was disputed by a kernel engineer at Microsoft, Axel Rietschin, who [5]declared last year that it is "a ripoff of the Windows Research Kernel that Microsoft licensed to universities.”
What is the point? The idea is to run Windows software and drivers in an environment that closely resembles Windows, to the point where you could substitute one with the other and users would hardly notice.
There is a vast amount of legacy Windows software out there which people want to run, some of which does not work on recent versions of Windows. ReactOS could perform a useful role for running older software without the hassles of trying to find a legal copy of Windows XP that will activate, for example.
[6]
Going back in time: running ReactOS feels like going back to Windows as it was 20 years ago. Click to enlarge
It would also form a more familiar alternative to Linux for those in search of a free and open source operating system. It is a few years old, but one user gave [7]61 reasons for wanting ReactOS, including using Visual Basic 6, DOS gaming, and “escape from Microsoft’s eternal UI redesign.”
There are plenty of downsides though, not least the question of when or whether ReactOS will ever reach a stable version 1.0 release. Security is another issue. Wine does a decent job running Windows software on Linux, and will be a better solution for most people.
That said, the announcement of a paid developer, while a small milestone by the standards of major open source projects, is evidence of some demand for ReactOS. It may have taken 24 years and progressed no further than alpha, but it is still going.®
Get our [8]Tech Resources
[1] https://reactos.org/project-news/victor-perevertkin-hired-full-time/
[2] https://regmedia.co.uk/2020/07/15/alpha.png
[3] https://reactos.org/wiki/VirtualBox
[4] https://www.theregister.com/2019/03/05/reactos_hits_0411/
[5] https://www.theregister.com/2019/07/03/reactos_windows_research_kernel_claim/
[6] https://regmedia.co.uk/2020/07/15/welcome.jpg
[7] https://reactos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=15868
[8] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: Very negative approach
It was also correct
Re: Very negative approach
I did try it once and retired hurt. Very hurt.
Will ReactOS ever be more stable and able to handle more stuff than Windows 2000 running as a VM guest under Linux? That's my legacy lifeboat with no activation issues. All installed from genuine MS CDRoms (remember them) so legal in Spirit but probably not in Redmond.
I hope the answer isn't written on the back of his P45.
It may have taken 24 years and progressed no further than alpha, but it is still going.
Well it is trying to recreate Windows, which is at least ten orders of magnitude more complicated than it needs to be. Should have gone for [1]AmigaOS .
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AROS_Research_Operating_System
It's interesting...
But in the last few years I've tried it about half a dozen times on different machines, and I've yet to be able to get into the desktop. I hope they get it running though, it could be fun!
Full-time developer to work on ReactOS
They have quite some way to go before they employ the thousands of Microsoft programmers used to write Windows NT m.n (choose your version).
Even if this ReactOS programmer was Extremely Agile (yes, it is a joke). I can't see that s/he could make much of a dent in the mountain of work required.
Still, hope springs eternal in the human beast...
2020 ...
... will be the year of the ReactOS desktop
/troll
Here’s Hoping...
...that it reaches stability before the inevitable day when Micros~1 pulls the plug on their last Windows 7 activation server, because I for one will be in the queue, assuming I can afford the large price tag that ReactOS will be able to command!
Hope springs eternal
I have been aware of ReactOS since the late 90s, around the time that they changed the focus from Win9x to WinNT (now Win2k3). Back then I would regularly play around with alternative OSes, as well as Wine on Linux. Over the intervening years, Wine has progressed from barely being able to run a simple Windows text editor, to giving most Windows apps a fair shot.
ReactOS, however, they seem to have relegated themselves to a Win2k replacement and little else. No x64 support forthcoming, no functioning sound support, and trying out new releases and the occasional nightly it's still far too easy to reach a point where the system becomes unstable. For one, never install VirtualBox Guest Additions, because these are not compatible and will break a lot of things.
That said, I still love the idea of ReactOS, and I wish that it got more love, the way that Linux and the BSDs get. As a life-long Windows user, I would love nothing more than to see an open source version of Windows 7, made possible by ReactOS. With the current way that MSFT is moving Windows, it's long past time that such a thing happened.
Either that, or we either accept that our Windows 10 PCs are terminals for the MSFT mainframe, or we struggle to pretend that the year of 'Linux on the Desktop' has already happened and we can just take our professional Windows-based apps and run them on our Linux-based workstations.
I rather miss how 'boring' Windows used to be, I guess. Whatever happened to MSFT around Windows 8?
Re: Hope springs eternal
I'm actually 7 months into the Year of the Linux desktop, having switched my company-supplied laptop to 100% Linux... (before that it was Windows 7 and Linux-in-VirtualBox).
Still, I see one use-case for ReactOS, if it were compatible enough: running those pesky devices for which no Linux driver exists, in my case some scanners. That is the biggest deficiency with Wine: it handles normal Windows programs, but the lowest-level layers of Windows obviously are not there.
Very negative approach
That really was quite a scathing review....