ReactOS 0.4.14 "Open-Source Windows" OS Brings Many Improvements

[elvis]

Don't we already have than with WINE? That's what IBM told us to use years ago, when we needed to run legacy apps. That's what originally got me started with Linux.

For me, yes, I prefer WINE. I know a lot of people who loathe Linux enough that WINE isn't even a viable option to them.

I consider that their loss, personally. But ReactOS serves as an option for them (or might do, one day).

But like I said earlier, more efforts to port chunks of WINE to Windows (for example, WINED3D, which is very specific to a tiny subset of what WINE does, but is quite useful at bringing older Win95-WinXP titles to life in Win10/Win11) might be more "real world useful" sooner. Although there's not a lot of folks doing that sort of work either.

I share your impatience. I would have liked to see the project much further ahead by now. But I'm also happy that it exists at all, even if progress is slow.

But, for myself, Linux+WINE definitely provides me with a more all-round, high-compatibility environment for older Windows games (better even than Windows10/11 for quite a number of titles). And that irony is pretty sweet, too.

[yasyugan]

Same was said about Linux many years ago.

Linux himself said:



As for the shell improvements, I am a little disappointed they are trying to make it look like Windows 10. Trying to chase these gimmicks will just waste time. However if they are enjoying theming it, then I suppose this is another thing entirely. Let them have their fun if that's what they're into

You forget that Linux doesn't predate ReactOS by much. Linux 0.0.1 was released in September of 1991, development of ReactOS' precursor "FreeWin95" started 1996. So, ReactOS is 25 year old. Now think what Linux was capable of when it was 25 years old. That's not that long ago, 2016. Personally I have been using Linux as my daily driver since 2001, when Linux was 10 years old, and it already felt incredibly stable back then, and I never owned a computer on which it would not run. By contrast, since ReactOS got a GUI, it failed to boot on the overwhelming majority of computers I tried it. And I tried it often.

Sure there might be reason why its development is so unbelievably slow, but still believing that it will take a similar route to Linux eventually is deluding yourself.

[yasyugan]

ReactOS has a long road ahead of it, but I'm really hoping it can help. Although I think even then, user space libraries (WINE on Windows for example) might end up being an easier option for that use case.

ReactOS already has a long road behind itself. The boot screen says "1996-2021", that's a quarter of a century. In computing, that's deep time. Double that and you are where the unix age began. And it is not out of alpha yet.