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

[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.

[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.

[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.

[kneekoo]

...real! This story of the ram used by the system makes sense only for some particular purposes of the OS or on a PC whose place would be an ecological landfill. Nobody or hardly cares ... most people care about having everything they need, ready to use. Today a pc should have at least 4Gb of ram, so the use of ram at startup has become obsolete.

"Everything they need" includes "need", which differs vastly from one person to another. I agree that most people need a browser, but anything more than that is just a guess. RAM taken by the OS matters a lot for people using hardware limited from the factory by the manufacturer. As lame as it is, we still have new hardware with 4GB RAM or less, without an upgrade option. These are the ones users install operating systems upon, that don't gobble up a lot of RAM just to show a GUI.

Leaving RAM available for anything else is a good idea no matter the times we live in. lVddvHo.jpg

[doragasu]

You can run systemd on low memory systems as well: https://elinux.org/images/6/69/Demystifying_Systemd.pdf

https://github.com/solettaproject/soletta

I have browsed that PDF and it's interesting, but the systemd part talks only about filesystem usage, not about RAM (that is what I was talking about). It would be interesting to see how much RAM a trimmed down systemd uses.

[rene]

Yeah there were some issues... also note that he is using PIO for the disk IIRC which kills performance. Also modern Linux probably doesn't fit well within the cache... if you are remembering how fast linux 2.x was on a 486 or similar... current linux probably is considerably slower.

Yes, this was intended as legacy libata test for our linux distribution https://t2sde.org. Also bus mastering IDE was introduced with some Intel Pentium chipset ;-)

[rene]

That machine is too slow for its specs. Have you checked if the "turbo" switch/jumper was enabled? Disabling it usually disables L1 cache, which brings everything to a crawl

It was only swapping to death, I had no more matching vintage RAM modules, but later ordered some more and it runs way better. Also the turbo switch / jumper usually did not disable the cache, but simply changed the cpu clock oscillator.

[darkoverlordofdata]

But seriously, with its current state and pace of development, I fail to understand who is ReactOS for. It looks like nothing but a hobby project by the developers for themselves. And it's not that I dislike small hobby operating systems or something. I think os like Haiku or others are pretty cool. But this? I just don't get the point of replicating an old version of Windows that barely can even run on bare metal of old hardware.

I've said before, I doubt they will hit 1.0.0 in my lifetime. I was very excited about it 20+ years ago. Since then, they have had their share of problems - copyright disputes, questionable funding, rewrites… I retired 3 years ago and gave up on them. I wish them luck, but I'm not holding my breath.

I do a fair bit of software preservation work, and where I see ReactOS's potential is similar to what FreeDOS and DOSBox did for DOS software perseveration.

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.

[cb88]

That machine is too slow for its specs. Have you checked if the "turbo" switch/jumper was enabled? Disabling it usually disables L1 cache, which brings everything to a crawl

Yeah there were some issues... also note that he is using PIO for the disk IIRC which kills performance. Also modern Linux probably doesn't fit well within the cache... if you are remembering how fast linux 2.x was on a 486 or similar... current linux probably is considerably slower.

[Old Nobody]

32MB i486 w/ https://t2sde.org Linux: no problem https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAYgCE0wFE4

That machine is too slow for its specs. Have you checked if the "turbo" switch/jumper was enabled? Disabling it usually disables L1 cache, which brings everything to a crawl