"Open-Source Windows" ReactOS To See Improved GUI Setup/Installation

[phoronix]

Phoronix: "Open-Source Windows" ReactOS To See Improved GUI Setup/Installation

ReactOS Deutschland e.V. has hired a longtime contributor to this "open-source Windows" project to spend the next five months working on the ReactOS GUI setup mode as an alternative to their classic text-based setup mode...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/ReactOS-GUI-Setup-Project

[Quackdoc]

always glad to see reactOS improvements, lately Id seen a stream of someone working on the reactOS longhorn trying to get some vulkan stuff wired up, pretty exiciting, though I would love to see reactOS support vulkan on the normal branch

[Gobrosse]

Vulkan support, seriously ? ReactOS still hoses its boot partition after a few hours of gentle use in a VM. For as long as this remains the case I'm afraid ReactOS will never be useful for anything except generating headlines. There are many people who would love something like FreeDOS for Windows NT, even NT 3.x, but ReactOS just can't seem to focus and deliver something usable. Which is only made more annoying when you look at how long it's been and how close they appear to be to those ever-moving goalposts!

[Snaipersky]

I see they have debug x64 builds, but I can't tell if they've worked out multicore support.

[M@yeulC]

It would be fun to wire up calamares for installing ReactOS

[avis]

I see they have debug x64 builds, but I can't tell if they've worked out multicore support.

Just tried it in VirtualBox, nope, still uniprocessor only but for a live CD session. Trying to install results in an error.

[avis]

[Retramon]

Great to see some ReactOS news, I would have contributed to the project my self if I had more time and programming expertise, and if I had the budget I'd donate even more or hire some others to do some good practical help. It's really a pity that there isn't more enthusiasm around such a project, probably because a lot of opensource developers are non-windows oriented and a lot of the time these also have wrong perceptions of Windows and the depths and capabilities of it because they were never serious users.

On Windows side, the users can be just as advanced and experienced and doesn't mean they only use Windows and that Windows pro-users were a lot of the time just as upset with Microsoft as everyone else, for literally doing nothing to improve windows for any kind of serious uses when it comes to file management, sys admin, developer and creator, os management and maintenance, most of the improvements are superficial for the masses and not really important to the most important users in the ecosystem. Took ages to get a GUI for environmental variables.

Windows is only as great because of the amazing work by some key third party applications and solutions, which are just miles ahead in every way of anything on linux in many fields, even the ones that are free. Sure there are some special programs which just happen to exist only on linux and they do the job fine for the main purpose they're built. Responsible 3rd-party application creators stick to a great standard on Windows of menus, locations, buttons, and it's all made for serious and workstation type users, without Microsoft having to mandate/check/approve/verify anything, it's just great, and when you get a program, you get a well done and fully fledged program that while mainly comes with a GUI per default, offers command line control or fine tuning of settings,

Microsoft was never interested in supporthing this great 3rd party ecosystem, they do pretty much the opposite, stifling and interrupting it, making Windows harder to adjust, tweak, configure, customize and work with, requiring more and more deeper and time consuming tweaking and modding to make things work the way workstation users want, to a point that ofcourse with Windows 11 many things aren't possible anymore.

[Ironmask]

The text-based installer always made me nostalgic. I hope the graphical one mimics Windows XP's installer.

[coder]

It's really a pity that there isn't more enthusiasm around such a project, probably because a lot of opensource developers are non-windows oriented and a lot of the time these also have wrong perceptions of Windows and the depths and capabilities of it because they were never serious users.

I wanted ReactOS to be a practical alternative to Windows, but I've been disheartened by how far behind it has been.

More recently, I've been a little worried about the Russia connection. Wikipedia claims it's received no support by the Russian government up to 2019. What about since then?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReactOS#Lobbying_for_support_in_Russia

Windows pro-users were a lot of the time just as upset with Microsoft as everyone else, for literally doing nothing to improve windows for any kind of serious uses when it comes to file management, sys admin, developer and creator, os management and maintenance, most of the improvements are superficial for the masses and not really important to the most important users in the ecosystem.

In my opinion, MS stopped focusing on windows improvements once they stopped viewing it as a product and started looking at it more as a platform for ad revenue and selling cloud services.

I've found Windows only gets stable once the next version has been released, because then they stop adding things to the previous one and basically just fix bugs.