ReactOS 0.4.11 "Open-Source Windows" Available With Big Kernel Improvements

[rmoog]

To my defense, Windows ME was a dud that never even reached widespread use outside the US (or inside it) before Windows 2000 showed up. So I completely forgot about it.

Back when ME was relevant my only business use case for computers was games. Including DOS games which I had plenty. ME was a no-go. It booted straight into protected mode without starting real mode stuff first, which made it less compatible with my game library than 98.

[rmoog]

Surprise, surprise. I installed this fancy release of ReactOS and it won't even boot. SMH. I should never expect good news.
Edit: It boots if you don't install the OS on BTRFS. What's the point of offering a filesystem if they can't support it? 10 years ago they offered installing on NTFS which was broken in the most annoying ways - you'd get errors left and right when the system boots. A few years later they had EXT2 support in the installer and it was in just about the same condition as their current BTRFS support. Can ReactOS actually TEST things before they release them?

[Dr.N0]

Surprise, surprise. I installed this fancy release of ReactOS and it won't even boot. SMH. I should never expect good news.
Edit: It boots if you don't install the OS on BTRFS. What's the point of offering a filesystem if they can't support it? 10 years ago they offered installing on NTFS which was broken in the most annoying ways - you'd get errors left and right when the system boots. A few years later they had EXT2 support in the installer and it was in just about the same condition as their current BTRFS support. Can ReactOS actually TEST things before they release them?

You should report this to the devs directly.

[DMJC]

Did you install the ISO from the ReactOS website, or did you go to sourceforge and manually download 0.4.11? The ReactOS website is very slow to update the ISOs (Or Michael keeps reporting on the new releases before the website updates). I find that Sourceforge has the version you actually want well before the website links it. 0.4.10 has issues booting from BTFS but the 0.4.11 releases have been very stable for BTRFS for me. The main thing missing on BTRFS in ReactOS now is fsck or chkdsk support. For reference the ISOs are here: https://sourceforge.net/projects/rea...eactOS/0.4.11/

[danger]

ReactOS runs Skyrim, Caligari TrueSpace and 3D Studio Max. All of those programs are more complex than almost any of the Applications available on Linux.

Yet ReactOS can't run any of the modern browsers. Only some old versions which are not up to date with security patches.

[Dr.N0]

Yet ReactOS can't run any of the modern browsers. Only some old versions which are not up to date with security patches.

That is definitely a huge problem right now, but modern browsers do not run on Windows XP either, and most also stopped supporting Vista.

[the_scx]

That looks like Windows 95... plus no font anti-aliasing in 2019...

(Yes, I know they don't have the time for a new theme)

I have to disagree with you. It looks more like Windows 2000, but with the Tango icon theme.
Windows 95 didn't have a gradient in the window bar, but just a solid color.
Windows 98 had a light green desktop by default.
Windows XP and 2003 already had font anti-aliasing - ClearType (off by default). What's more, Windows XP introduced a few significant changes in Explorer (file manager). And of course, Luna was the default theme for XP.

[DMJC]

I have to disagree with you. It looks more like Windows 2000, but with the Tango icon theme.
Windows 95 didn't have a gradient in the window bar, but just a solid color.
Windows 98 had a light green desktop by default.
Windows XP and 2003 already had font anti-aliasing - ClearType (off by default). What's more, Windows XP introduced a few significant changes in Explorer (file manager). And of course, Luna was the default theme for XP.

Do you mean this theme? This is the Dark Lautus theme from ReactOS, it also runs on Windows. Msstyles themes work in ReactOS, just download the one you want to use.

[rmoog]

Did you install the ISO from the ReactOS website, or did you go to sourceforge and manually download 0.4.11? The ReactOS website is very slow to update the ISOs (Or Michael keeps reporting on the new releases before the website updates). I find that Sourceforge has the version you actually want well before the website links it. 0.4.10 has issues booting from BTFS but the 0.4.11 releases have been very stable for BTRFS for me. The main thing missing on BTRFS in ReactOS now is fsck or chkdsk support. For reference the ISOs are here: https://sourceforge.net/projects/rea...eactOS/0.4.11/

I did a reinstall. I now know why my first attempt with ReactOS on btrfs failed.

I made 1 partition spanning the entire drive, formatted that as btrfs and then installed on that. This failed.
What succeeded? Selecting the unpartitioned drive and selecting btrfs. This apparently creates 2 partitions, one of them btrfs. On C:\ I have 'Documents and Settings' while on D:\ I have 'ReactOS'. This is weird. This is gonna freak out so many things that expect system stuff to be on C:\... Sigh. At least it works and it's stable. Now perhaps is the time to pursue full KVM support and strike a distribution deal with driver vendors for network devices such as Realtek, Intel, Microsoft and RedHat.