ReactOS 0.4.12 Pulls In Wine-Staging 4.0 DLLs, Many Kernel Improvements

[phoronix]

Phoronix: ReactOS 0.4.12 Pulls In Wine-Staging 4.0 DLLs, Many Kernel Improvements

ReactOS, the open-source operating system still striving for binary compatibility with Microsoft Windows as a drop-in replacement, has version 0.4.12 now available as its first big alpha update in six months...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=ReactOS-0.4.12-Released

[tildearrow]

Blue Screen of Death fixes,

Really? I never thought the BSoD itself would have bugs.

[dragon321]

Really? I never thought the BSoD itself would have bugs.

They probably fixed some bugs which could trigger BSoD, not BSoD itself.

[zexelon]

Just out of curiosity can it load a real graphics driver yet? (i.e. not say QXL or Serious on a vm) Anybody try getting it to run with a Intel/ATI/Nvidia card?

[angrypie]

Just out of curiosity can it load a real graphics driver yet? (i.e. not say QXL or Serious on a vm) Anybody try getting it to run with a Intel/ATI/Nvidia card?

I bet it takes a gargantuan amount of reverse engineering to load unmodified drivers as complex as GPU drivers. NVIDIA would also curbstomp them as soon as they got it working.

[Ground0]

I would say some complex driver like AMD or NVIDIA works... https://reactos.org/wiki/Supported_Hardware/Video_cards

[doragasu]

This is a project that seems interesting the first time you see it. Then you test it on a VM and... it falls into pieces. Software like Firefox or Inkscape fails to run properly, and you have way better chance of getting a Windows program running under Linux + WINE. I have been following the development for years, and it seems it is never going to take off.

Having a free (as in freedom) drop-in replacement for Windows is a powerful idea. Unfortunately I doubt it is ever going to happen.

[timofonic]

This is a project that seems interesting the first time you see it. Then you test it on a VM and... it falls into pieces. Software like Firefox or Inkscape fails to run properly, and you have way better chance of getting a Windows program running under Linux + WINE. I have been following the development for years, and it seems it is never going to take off.

Having a free (as in freedom) drop-in replacement for Windows is a powerful idea. Unfortunately I doubt it is ever going to happen.

It's happening and it's called Linux distro + Wine/Proton. I hope Wine Team wakes up and get more active developers on it, plus making contributions a lot easier too.

[EvilHowl]

I would say some complex driver like AMD or NVIDIA works... https://reactos.org/wiki/Supported_Hardware/Video_cards

Looks like only old GPUs with 2000/XP drivers work. Probably because ReactOS is only compatible with pre-WDDM drivers...

[Guest]

This is a project that seems interesting the first time you see it. Then you test it on a VM and... it falls into pieces. Software like Firefox or Inkscape fails to run properly, and you have way better chance of getting a Windows program running under Linux + WINE. I have been following the development for years, and it seems it is never going to take off.

Having a free (as in freedom) drop-in replacement for Windows is a powerful idea. Unfortunately I doubt it is ever going to happen.

Even if ReactOS fails, their efforts in reverse engineering Windows and its kernel will help anyone who wants to preserve Windows for the future, and make it possible to run software in the future.

I assume this is similar to HURD, where the reason for it's failure is that not enough people work on it to make it usable, and it's impossible to keep the needed pace of development.