ReactOS 0.4.8 Released With Fix For 17 Year Old Bug, Various Driver/Kernel Improvements

[phoronix]

Phoronix: ReactOS 0.4.8 Released With Fix For 17 Year Old Bug, Various Driver/Kernel Improvements

ReactOS 0.4.8 is now available as the project's first update of 2018 that continues working on becoming an "open-source Windows" with binary drop-in compatibility support...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=ReactOS-0.4.8-Released

[lucrus]

Granted it's a great project and I hope all the best for it, I suspect that at the current pace we could be able to ditch MS Windows within the upcoming ice age...

[Adarion]

It surely may be an interesting project, but I'd still rather see native Linux support for things first. Or, maybe, WINE support.
It's long ago that I tried reactos and I don't know how far and usable it is by now. But then, this 17 year old bug... ouch. Especially since it was a bug that could result in data corruption, maybe even file system corruption. This is severe and should have been fixed asap.

[Palu Macil]

Granted it's a great project and I hope all the best for it, I suspect that at the current pace we could be able to ditch MS Windows within the upcoming ice age...

From my perspective on the team, I don't think they intend to make it useful. For example, despite Windows shipping with the .NET runtime, they don't allow .NET applications and turn away contributions because it would complicate the build. I don't understand how anyone would expect it to be more than a toy project without .NET. Regardless on your views of .Net Core or Mono, etc, for better or for worse the team avoids the majority of potential contributions and legions of available projects that already exist.

[nomadewolf]

While it has been a long time, the reason is that developing a Kernel is very hard and very few people even have the knowledge to do that.
Now that the base is starting to be usable, i expect development speed to speed up considerably...

[nwah]

Granted it's a great project and I hope all the best for it, I suspect that at the current pace we could be able to ditch MS Windows within the upcoming ice age...

We're already in an ice age. Specifically, an interglacial period of one. Overdue for reglaciation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternary_glaciation

[Palu Macil]

I might not be correct on the team forbidding C#. It might simply be that it was far too early still when I looked at contributing last. It looks like you might be able to run an old version of mono now: https://www.codeproject.com/Tips/122...arp-on-ReactOS

I do wonder if the implemented version of Windows will even be useful by the time it is usable, though. I admire the work, and even if it remains mostly a toy project, I still think it's pretty neat.

[Awesomeness]

Why are they still using SourceForge? Would they have too many contributors otherwise?

[Palu Macil]

Why are they still using SourceForge? Would they have too many contributors otherwise?

Ug... I hate when I have to download something from SourceForge. I imagine the migration is a pain, but it has to be worth it!

[starshipeleven]

Ug... I hate when I have to download something from SourceForge. I imagine the migration is a pain, but it is very worth it!

fixed.

Seriously, how sourceforge keeps sucking even when compared to Github (that isn't particularly advanced either but for small projects it's at least usable and modern) is beyond me.