ReactOS "Open-Source Windows" Making Progress On x86_64, Multi-Monitor

[Ladis]

You still need an OS to run in VM. And you're not free to install it, unless it is free OS.

Windows OEM license is cheap (almost nothing on the grey market). And the cost is not important for people who use Linux in the free as a freedom meaning and not in free as a beer (for those there's the warez market).

EDIT: Windows in VM = in a sandbox. That's safe (in the case of Intel CPUs install the mitigations).

[cjcox]

GNU Hurd is on schedule for release with Half-life 3.

[Vistaus]

No they don't. Sure there are 30 year old machines out there running DOS...

I thought FreeDOS ran on much newer systems as well?

[Vistaus]

The last release is from almost 5 years ago. I'd hardly call that actively developed.

Lolwut? Activity is measured in commits, not in releases. And in Hurd's case, commits are very frequent.

Not a fan of Hurd, btw, just putting it out there that it's far from being dead.

[Ladis]

Lolwut? Activity is measured in commits, not in releases. And in Hurd's case, commits are very frequent.

Not a fan of Hurd, btw, just putting it out there that it's far from being dead.

Commits are for developers, releases for users. I understand it's a nice sandbox where developers like playing in, but the output is probably not something presentable for the people outside (e.g. the new features have rough edges and need more testing and fixing).

[cb88]

I thought FreeDOS ran on much newer systems as well?

Obviously but what self respecting person would develop anything serious on top of DOS...

[Vistaus]

Commits are for developers, releases for users. I understand it's a nice sandbox where developers like playing in, but the output is probably not something presentable for the people outside (e.g. the new features have rough edges and need more testing and fixing).

Sure, releases are for users (although I fail to see the distinction in this case as Hurd isn't working any better in releases than in git master builds, but alas). But it was being said that Hurd was dead because there were no activities. A commit is an activity, so as long as they keep on coming, it's not dead.

[nomadewolf]

Awesome, perhaps in 15 years we finally have complete feature party with Windows XP!...
Its a fun pet project of course, but its so insanely far behind the Windows 2000/XP kernel it was built around its going to be unusable for pretty much everything.
Wine on Linux is the logical choice here to run Windows applications open source, because you actually have reliable drivers for it on modern systems.

It's true that the development has been slow, but there are some usides to it:
1. The kernel took longer because the number of programers that can program a kernel is a fraction of regular programers
2. It was a reverse engineeering effort, which also takes more effot
3. Many of the libs (dlls) have incomplete, incorrect or inexistent documentation, and those too need to be reimplemented (if i'm not mistaken)
4. Once the kernel is in a working state, amny more programers can start contributing to the effort, while experts work on improving the kernel
5. Since the Windows 10 is based on NT, techincally it should take a fraction of the time to create a W10 compatible version
6. ReactOS is already in a good place. It's not production ready, but you can run many software and it keeps getting more stable.

So, as you can see, even if it takes a long time, or if it doesn't achieve nothing practical, ReactOS will open many doors.

[DMJC]

Sounds like most of the people here haven't used ReactOS so I'll weigh in. I install and test ReactOS every few months. The progress in the last two years has been pretty incredible. I'm able to run Caligari TrueSpace and 3D Studio Max R2/R3 in ReactOS and it renders everything correctly. Including the OpenGL drawing. Sure those are old programs but it's actually stable at running them, and draws them both completely correctly unlike WINE which has to fit with X11's display model. My tests have all been done in KVM. BTRFS support in ReactOS is awesome. No need for NTFS and no messing around with Fat32 rubbish. The big difference is that ReactOS has added some paid developers in the last couple of years. They now have it booting/running on Pentium1 166mhz to AMD Ryzen hardware. It's not going to be that long until ReactOS hits a tipping point, Windows has too many apps/utils that people can't get on Linux and with Microsoft constantly changing the UI there's a strong incentive to move to ReactOS once it hits a certain level of usefulness. (And it already runs Skyrim)

[Jabberwocky]

Sounds like most of the people here haven't used ReactOS so I'll weigh in. I install and test ReactOS every few months. The progress in the last two years has been pretty incredible. I'm able to run Caligari TrueSpace and 3D Studio Max R2/R3 in ReactOS and it renders everything correctly. Including the OpenGL drawing. Sure those are old programs but it's actually stable at running them, and draws them both completely correctly unlike WINE which has to fit with X11's display model. My tests have all been done in KVM. BTRFS support in ReactOS is awesome. No need for NTFS and no messing around with Fat32 rubbish. The big difference is that ReactOS has added some paid developers in the last couple of years. They now have it booting/running on Pentium1 166mhz to AMD Ryzen hardware. It's not going to be that long until ReactOS hits a tipping point, Windows has too many apps/utils that people can't get on Linux and with Microsoft constantly changing the UI there's a strong incentive to move to ReactOS once it hits a certain level of usefulness. (And it already runs Skyrim)

It's fun to rant though (I do it too).

I have not installed ReactOS in one or two years. IIRC I did not have such a good experience running it in KVM. I've used Wine since the early 0.x releases. It was useful in many cases like play WoW while I was in school, managing multiple prefixes to get the most out the game was cool to play around with. Back then we already new that some games/apps would never get good support. That was more than 15 years ago. Wine is still very useful even to ReactOS but just as a standalone program, it's not my favourite at the moment.

These days I've tried using https://github.com/86Box/86Box to play games that doesn't run in Wine or Dosbox. I had lots of fun messing around with it. The games that I played work really well under Windows 95 and 98 SE. I would like to try running ReactOS via 86Box sometime.

If you are able to put ReactOS Skyrim gameplay on youtube I would love to watch that.