ReactOS "Open-Source Windows" Steadily Improving x64 Port

[Ironmask]

this is not always true there is a good number of retrogames that work poorly in wine and bad in something like dosbox

You gotta be way more specific than that. What games and why do they run poorly? Are there open bug reports, and, if not, why haven't you submitted them?

[Quackdoc]

You gotta be way more specific than that. What games and why do they run poorly? Are there open bug reports, and, if not, why haven't you submitted them?

plenty of games, one such example is utawarerumono, it doesn't work in wine since it runs way too fast without ability to slow it down, but then again, it doesn't work on modern systems, modern computers are simply too fast, on windows you can at least use cheat engine to force the game slower though, but there are plenty of other games too with a variety of issues. a lot of GDI games actually have similar issues. these bugs have been around for ages now and have been reported for other games too.

[DMJC]

WINE breaks stuff all the time, I used to submit a lot of bug reports and I still do, but it'll never run everything. It also has some severe limitations e.g running a 16-bit colour game that has no 32-bit colour mode means X11 has to be run in 16-bit or you have to mess around with Xephyr/Nested X11 and it gets super messy really quickly. Hell, I suspect it might even be the AMD GPU drivers but I'm struggling to run a lot of stuff which for years I considered working/stable in WINE. E.g old Wing Commander games like Secret Ops/Wing Commander Prophecy. Those games are gold/platinum rated a lot of the time.

[hotaru]

this is not always true there is a good number of retrogames that work poorly in wine and bad in something like dosbox

how well do those games work on ReactOS?

[Quackdoc]

WINE breaks stuff all the time, I used to submit a lot of bug reports and I still do, but it'll never run everything. It also has some severe limitations e.g running a 16-bit colour game that has no 32-bit colour mode means X11 has to be run in 16-bit or you have to mess around with Xephyr/Nested X11 and it gets super messy really quickly. Hell, I suspect it might even be the AMD GPU drivers but I'm struggling to run a lot of stuff which for years I considered working/stable in WINE. E.g old Wing Commander games like Secret Ops/Wing Commander Prophecy. Those games are gold/platinum rated a lot of the time.

interesting, I wonder if gamescope could be used to work around this, or maybe the wayland work? running nested wayland compositors is pretty easy so I wonder if that might help.

how well do those games work on ReactOS?

I was able to get ingame with utawarerumono and played the first level fine, I wasn't able to get it to boot inside of a qemu VM however

[the f.]

Windows 2000 had about 1400 full time devs and 800 full time testers. And ReactOS probably has 10-20 active contributors maybe. I don't know the exact numbers but there is a huge difference. It is no surprise that the development is not as fast Windows.

I'm not sure if it will manage to reach Windows 7 aka NT 6.1, but it's obvious that there are issues preventing devs joining the community. This Russian govt myth is one of them, I believe. I checked the wiki and news for fact-checking. The initial legal entity for the ReactOS Foundation was founded in Russia, because probably there was a good community in Russia back then. In time it was dissolved, and since 2015 the Foundation is legally in Germany. And once, one of the devs pitched the OS to Medvedev, responded with good comments. But the investment never occurred. I found news on Russia-ReactOS on every 2-3 years but it seems like it's an urban myth being remembered again and again.

Under the circumstances, I am not sure if the ReactOS community, aka the active members, cares about those. As I check the Github, they are focused on bugs. The PR is something requires effort and it looks like they don't have the resources to spend for PR.

[Developer12]

Exactly! Just like linux on apple silicon. Mac os is already unix and there is no way in hell linux will be more usefull or even on par on apple silicon with apples own software.

By the time ReactOS is daily driver i would not be even surprised if MS has already switched windows to use linux kernel

Linux is already colossally faster than macOS on apple's own silicon. The linux OpenGL driver for apple's AGX GPU is also already far more complete and standards-compliant.

[DMJC]

Windows 2000 had about 1400 full time devs and 800 full time testers. And ReactOS probably has 10-20 active contributors maybe. I don't know the exact numbers but there is a huge difference. It is no surprise that the development is not as fast Windows.

ReactOS does have the benefit of access to WINE's source code, as well as not having to chase the Latest DirectX version. By sticking to Windows Server 2003 they are able to make pretty impressive progress on the system. The Twitter channel for ReactOS is great. They have shown it off running on P1 133Mhz Hardware all the way up to AMD Ryzen 16 core systems. They are definitely progressing, I guess the main thing is getting baseline hardware working. E.g it needs to work with AMD/Intel GPUs at a minimum and AMD/Intel/NVIDIA preferred. Soundblaster and AC97 Audio is a must have. Not sure what they should use for Network/Wifi. The Network stack is limited to 10mbit last I saw, but that could be a cosmetic display.

I'm kind of surprised that no one has really bothered to make WINE into a full desktop environment on Linux. With a few control panels implemented which bridge to Pipewire and libRandR you could make WINE into it's own Desktop Environment. WINE can already draw a Start Menu/Taskbar and there's an Explorer.exe implementation. Why not just boot straight into WINE.

[Quackdoc]

I'm kind of surprised that no one has really bothered to make WINE into a full desktop environment on Linux. With a few control panels implemented which bridge to Pipewire and libRandR you could make WINE into it's own Desktop Environment. WINE can already draw a Start Menu/Taskbar and there's an Explorer.exe implementation. Why not just boot straight into WINE.

I think at one point this was actually tried, I have faint memories of a win2k style UI ontop of wine, can't remeber when this was though

[zexelon]

ReactOS does have the benefit of access to WINE's source code, as well as not having to chase the Latest DirectX version. By sticking to Windows Server 2003 they are able to make pretty impressive progress on the system. The Twitter channel for ReactOS is great. They have shown it off running on P1 133Mhz Hardware all the way up to AMD Ryzen 16 core systems. They are definitely progressing, I guess the main thing is getting baseline hardware working. E.g it needs to work with AMD/Intel GPUs at a minimum and AMD/Intel/NVIDIA preferred. Soundblaster and AC97 Audio is a must have. Not sure what they should use for Network/Wifi. The Network stack is limited to 10mbit last I saw, but that could be a cosmetic display.

I'm kind of surprised that no one has really bothered to make WINE into a full desktop environment on Linux. With a few control panels implemented which bridge to Pipewire and libRandR you could make WINE into it's own Desktop Environment. WINE can already draw a Start Menu/Taskbar and there's an Explorer.exe implementation. Why not just boot straight into WINE.

Now this is a really funky idea!

I came across this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NEwcKw-Elo

Its a short video clip of a hackish way to get a wine desktop running on Linux. Certainly not user friendly or polished but a really unique concept! If you could merge proton in with it in a user friendly way, this could be the "windows on a linux kernel" solution... with lite to moderate compatibility :P