I'm curious now, is this project has a purpose to get some share of users from Windows? Or is it just a fun/hobby project?
I'm asking it because the OS itself is 25 years old, however
it is not really ready for everyday usage.
Funny thing, I have seen it once on the screen of a cashbox in a supermarket in Kyiv. However, it is not clear if they really used ReactOS, or just their logo/graphics to avoid buying license for Windows.
I feel like 10 years ago or so, everyone would have seen this and thought it was understandable that a project like ReactOS would still be in alpha after all these years and still somewhat unstable. However, since then lots of open source OSes have started and have had some stability, although no widespread usage yet, primarily because these OSes are being developed on the side by people like google or facebook. And so may be that is why people look at reactOS after all this time and are surprised it's still a small shop.
It's similar to GIMP. GIMP was "impressive for open source" in 2013 but now it's behind the times when things like Photopea exist. May be ReactOS hasn't kept up with the progress people now expect from open source projects.
I feel like ReactOS should try to see if they can get with Steam / Valve to work something out where they both work on Proton together, and Valve lets them use their efforts for ReactOS, and gives them well needed funding. My understanding is they are reaching for similarish goals. One benefit of ReactOS is it tries to support Windows drivers, I'm not sure if Wine does this or not? But for something like SteamOS if it doesn't have driver support, it would make way too much sense to support it via Proton / ReactOS.
I think they should focus on embedded devices, and a story as a replacement for appliances using either Windows or Windows CE.
Even in todays rather unstable state, it would work fine if it was easy to bundle it such:
- an application EXE
- boot with a readonly root file system
- read-write partition for application/user settings
- builtin watchdog to reboot when/if the system crashes
There's a shit-ton of stuff running Windows of some sort behind the scenes.
I'm sure there's also some kind of cloud application I can't quite put my finger on which would be useful, but maybe more niche. I have been known to test Win32 applications I have written against ReactOS. If it works there, it will run on every Windows version still running under the sun.
Maybe as part of a CI pipeline generating Win32 EXEs?
The only "downside" to the CI pipeline for generating Win32 EXEs is you can already do this from Linux, I don't recall if C does, but I almost want to say gcc will do it from Linux, I definitely know on Linux with FreePascal/Lazarus I've generated an EXE file. So you don't truly need ReactOS in this regard, but maybe the CI pipeline for testing and confirming that it works might be worthwhile to ReactOS to create some sort of profitable project. I'm thinking of things like Puppet or other web automation testing tools, but for GUIs on Windows using ReactOS as the host, with automated UI tests that output screenshots.
I would love to see ReactOS get more serious funding, and get farther ahead than where it is today.
Lazarus/FreePascal 32bit does work on ReactOS. Also some older versions of Tcl/Tk / Tclkit works. ReactOS has GUI package manager with some programming languages etc.
I didn't actually mean generating the EXE from ReactOS, that's easy in Linux. (I develop for Windows in Linux and MacOS.) But I meant regression testing on ReactOS.
You can use Conveyor to generate MSIX packages from Linux or macOS if you want to ship Windows apps from a Linux machine. (https://hydraulic.software/)
For a greenfield project, sure, why not. I was thinking about existing stuff, like the gas station pumps with dodgy touch screens I worked on once upon a time. A bunch of stuff already written and moving to Balena would not exactly have been cheap.
But if there was a ReactOS BSP or SDK of sorts, or even a HOWTO for embedded ReactOS, it could make sense to take the plunge.
Space Cadet is definitely one I miss. I have seen devs in the past suggest making ReactOS into an omniuse OS that could someday also include Linux packages, so you could in theory also "apt-get install" whatever you wanted to install.
That would be cool, they could leverage Flatpak I'd imagine, if didn't want to manage a distro as well as ReactOS. Just a very minimal shim to provide linuxy stuff.
Alpha or not, is it usable? Because by all accounts windows 9x systems were alpha quality as well and millions of people were depending on it and accepting the shitshow.
So if ReactOS is still rated as alpha but has a similar stability as XP it is something I believe some people praising the windows 9x/NT UIs would be happy to use them.
I only tested it on a VM once in a while out of curiosity, tried some apps I knew but since I have been primarily a Linux user for decades and wasn't particularly fond of the windows UI those were all opensource apps I could run on Linux so I had little incentive to spend much more time on it. From the little I explored it was working.
It hangs for me pretty easily when I run my own code on it. Feature wise, it's definitely XP or better. I just wish it was rock solid. There are constant bugfixes, at some point it should tip the balance and stop crashing. For it to crash, it must be in the kernel code, so while large, it's not an inhuman task to fix it. "Not crashing" is a lower bar than "perfect compatibility".
There aren't that many developers working on it though. I wish some company would adopt it and run with it, like how Wine really took off after Codeweavers.
I’m not sure what you mean saying “gimp being behind the times” compared to photopea. Gimp absolutely blows it out of the water in terms of being a useful tool.
There's sure something to be said about OSS projects and release health/hygiene. I'm not qualified to synthesize and say it, but I know which of my daily-driver projects release frequently. And I know which ones don't, and which ones my [distro] and others patch around because they can't bother to tag + publish releases, or lack the discipline to know when to ship.
I fully expect GIMP to ship gtk3 support after gtk3 is deprecated, at this point.
When wine, an entire, very functional win32 re-implementation and proprietary s***-a** discord is your brethren, it's a bad sign.
Gimp is an interesting example as it’s been used successfully as a platform for other commercial projects like Pixelmator, maybe ReactOS will be the seed of something else.
But if it is an undocumented feature of MS Windows, then the ReactOS developers must have guessed how it would be implemented or 'borrowed' from the original source code (win2k was floating around on the Interwebs, not sure about more recent versions). The ReactOS developer community is eager to leave the impression that the latter won't happen. If the former, then I'm not sure, how valuable this truly is for analyzing malware.
I'm guessing its a little like FreeDOS. Its not really going to siphon users away from Windows, but it will find little niche uses. Weird embedded system type things where somehow it manages to support drivers that unsupported combinations of drivers and software that real Windows versions don't, for example.
For people who like to mess around with live cds, https://ventoy.net/ let's you create a bootable USB stick where you can simply copy .iso files to, and it will let you boot from that iso.
That way you don't have to keep reformatting / preparing the usb drive.
Ventoy is a fairly common source of trouble from people trying to boot ReactOS.
It's a nice, well, toy, but its compatibility with various OSes is spotty at best. You're much better off just writing a real CD-R or USB stick with the plain image than trying to manage it via Ventoy.
Ventoy never "worked" for me for some reason. It usually gets me to the ISO selection stage of the boot process, but the image refuses to boot, quickly followed by a reboot. Am I missing a trick?
Rufus continues to be easy to use and reliable on the other hand.
ReactOS helped me in a pinch recently when I needed to run a Windows only app to configure an IoT device. As I don't own any Windows system, it's very nice to have an option other than buying or borrowing a copy of Windows.
I'm a bit puzzled by this. You can install Windows without having to buy it. You can even run it forever if you want to - other than a watermark and some personalisation options being locked, nothing is different from an activated copy.
For stuff like simply configuring a device, any old ISO or even VM image available directly from MS should do.
I first heard it back in the days when I was still on 56kbps modem and Clinton was facing his impeachment trial.
After so many years especially after the success of linux + wine, I don't think anyone needs a Windows NT clone. I know they share code/knowledge, there is just no practical reason to have a full clone of the NT kernel.
I'd further argue that Microsoft should stop developing its windows OS kernel altogether, running wsl2 on top of a boring windows kernel is never the solution. They should build Windows on top of the Linux kernel, I mean let Windows be a good Linux Window Manager.
> I'd further argue that Microsoft should stop developing its windows OS kernel altogether, running wsl2 on top of a boring windows kernel is never the solution. They should build Windows on top of the Linux kernel, I mean let Windows be a good Linux Window Manager.
Well Windows 11 is now already the best Linux Desktop distro with WSL2.
No need to further complicate it with the rube goldberg contraption that the Linux desktop ecosystem brings.
Windows is based on kernel + NT subsystems, such as console and Win32. There used to be a Unix subsystem too. That's why it's called like that. "Windows subsystem for X" makes sense only with historical context.
Yep. It could have been the other way of course. If it was LSW, I wonder, would people ask the same question? We'll never know, until they decide to do another renaming op.
How so? I’m considering switching to a Windows laptop for the first time in 10 years of doing development on MacOS. Mainly because I’m into machine learning/ neural network these days and everyone around me keep saying buy a laptop with CUDAs support
Ah I think I wasn't clear in my message... I was speaking about the performance of WSL on Windows 10 compared to a native Windows system. The only time I tried ReactOS in a VM I didn't feel it was slow either.
I still use "MIDISoft Recording Session" to edit midi files. Seriously ancient software there, and it's having some compatibility problems (related to moving the mouse cursor) under OTVDM + Windows 10.
"What are the differences between Windows and ReactOS?
There are mainly two. Firstly ReactOS is open source. Secondly ReactOS is Free. Also Windows (especially the newer versions) are known to monitor all your activity by default. So if you’re concerned about your privacy or just don’t want to share any personal info, we promise (and you can check our source code) that we don’t track any of your data."
I'd love to try this out, but any attempts at booting in a VM fail with an error that it's unable to open txtsetup.sif. I've tried pre-formatting the drive as FAT32, FAT16, with and without FreeDOS installed, nothing. I tried the 0.4.14 release as well as recent 0.4.15-dev ISOs, to no avail.
This has apparently been an issue for a while, and is a regression.
I just tried compiling newest Qemu from Qemu git repo, and newest ReactOS 32bit nightly, it works great with networking support, with these instructions that work for any Debian or Ubuntu based Linux on any CPU:
That's extremely unlikely and it's concerning that you think the exact same error at the exact same point starting after the exact same last-known good build is "not related." If that's a possible failure mode of your code base then your code base is pure shit.
I linked to several detailed bug reports and told you very clearly that I had the "exact same" problem. It is not encouraging that you won't even read the bug reports, and certainly doesn't encourage anyone to further help you.
I really don't understand your childish behavior. You flaunt your unwillingness to cooperate, as revenge for the offense allegedly inflicted on you by someone. This is stupid and naive. There is nothing difficult about naming your version of the Virtual Machine.
The error "Failed to open txtsetup.sif" can theoretically pop up for a million reasons\scenarios, and even fixing all of them may not help in your particular case, without providing information from you.
However, this error is extremely rare. Developers can't fix a bug that they can't reproduce. Therefore, extra efforts are needed to catch, eliminate or bypass it.
Hysterical insults on volunteer developers of a free open source project are not the best example of interaction.
I've seen this many times before, now I'm curious to know a lot more about it. How does it run, does all windows software run well, even advanced apps and games (doubt it)!
I said this in another comment, but I feel like they're missing an opportunity not reaching out to Valve / Steam to work on Proton and integrating that instead. Steam will pay people to work on Proton fixes, so it seems like a no brainer to me.
I'm very curious, from a high-level, but technical level, how differently ReactOS and Wine are. And/or how much they share.
As someone who keeps playing Halo Infinite at 120FPS via Proton on a Zephyrus G14 running NixOS, I'm kind of amazed on a daily basis that this is where "Desktop Linux" is. I know that there's a bunch of HNers who used Ubuntu 6 years ago to tell me otherwise, but this is insane. As soon as the HDR kernel patches are rebased on 6.1, I'll have HDR too.
(edit: lul, to be fair, NixOS ships upstream latest kernels, so even latest Ubuntu on this laptop might be a serious step back, but that's what you get for listening to Ubuntu users's take on "Desktop Linux".)
Just bonkers. I'm getting nearly as good of perf for a DirectX 12 modern game on Linux as I am on Windows. Meanwhile, this is all on ZFS, all incrementally backed up, I can restore this entire state of this laptop in about two minutes. Wow, desktop linux haters can hate, but this is still blowing my mind.
How does Google Chrome run on this? On Windows 7 it started popping up a banner that new Chrome releases won't land on that version of Windows anymore.
Does ReactOS pretend to be a certain Windows version?
No, Chrome only runs on newest amd64 Linux/Windows/Mac.
For modern browser, there is compatible Firefox fork Mypal where older version works also on ReactOS. It can be installed on ReactOS 32bit from GUI package manager included in ReactOS, and I have also copied it to here:
When I tried, newer versions of Mypal did not work on ReactOS 32bit.
ReactOS 64bit is still more unstable, not much works on it.
For older Windows versions like WinXP etc, that Microsoft does not support anymore, there are some replacements for Windows Update, like http://legacyupdate.net , some others are also listed at https://github.com/wekan/wekan/wiki/Windows . When I tried it, it installed most updates, but not Windows Live Essentials and some other update.
I remember when I played with that, was mostly to try to run some old worms/exploits and write win32 offensive code for windows XP.. stuff worked pretty well actually.
I posted it mainly because not everyone on HN is always aware that ReactOS exists, the thread shows up every year or so, and you always find someone learned something new. I also love the engagement around the subject, sometimes you learn something new about the project.
I, for one, just thought of ReactOS again 2 days ago after a large gap. Perhaps the Zeitgeist is presently weighted toward ReactOS. Can't possibly just be my own confirmation bias, because I'm a rational thinker, you see.
I don't think anybody is accusing the submitter of being a sockpuppet. It's just a rather well-known project already, and there's not any news to discuss related to it right now (as far as I know).
I get that there's always one of today's lucky 10,000, but I think a certain threshold of obscureness is reasonable. It wouldn't make sense to submit the Linux Kernel project, or Mozilla Firefox without any news.
Maybe I'm overestimating how well-known ReactOS is, though.
I was wondering if they'd reached some new milestone, but yeah it seems it's just one of the "check this cool project out" submissions. It's fair enough, as you said there will be the xkcd lucky 10k who are encountering it for the first time.
Though now that you mention it, it would at least be a little bit funny to submit kernel.org and be like "Found this cool indy OS kernel, looks like it's just a hobby and won't be big and professional like GNU but it's still neat" in the comments :)
I've followed the project for years, and I assume not literally everyone on HN is aware of it, maybe the power users, but the casual HN reader might find it interesting.
The issue with ReactOS is that it's not a greenfield OS project. The devs do not make the biggest architectural decisions. They have to follow MSs steps. Unfortunately, most of those steps are not documented and they must be followed. Because the one and only target of the project is to be fully "Windows compatible".
Which has been almost abandoned since the developer left ReactOS contribution. There's no maintainer if one wants to contribute to Btrfs. IIRC, it was done to find a viable alternative for NTFS as it is almost as hard to develop ReactOS itself. Still, lack of an open source NTFS driver is the most important lack of ReactOS. Because many of the reliability issues are tied to filesystem reliability and FAT is not as reliable as NTFS. When you do a hard reset, registry might get corrupt because it could not flush to disk properly and without a Journaling file system, it's not easy to prevent, rollback, recover from this situation.
I think ReactOS has an unfulfilled promise it can't deliver on yet, but is so tantalizingly close.
You know how people complain about how Windows adds weird shit and is no longer just an OS, staying out of your way and which you can run applications on?
You know how there are so many false starts of a Linux distribution which will be simple to use, no-nonse, and just be user friendly? (Looking at you, ElementaryOS.)
Well, ReactOS could be all that. Just an OS. Free license. Most old-school programs just work, and for newly developed Win32 programs, very few tweaks are usually needed to them running on ReactOS.
What's missing, in priority order?
- STABILITY
- "Marketing" to show you can develop modern apps for ReactOS
- Hardware support
- Make sure .NET works (not everything, but the basics)
Stability is key. It's unstable even on VirtualBox.
Hardware support is nice to have, but you could deploy ReactOS on modern hardware by booting Linux as essentially a hypervisor and run nothing but ReactOS in thin VM at boot.
All projects need marketing, even Open Source ones. Everything needs a story to tell what it's about.
Having .NET work, even in a limited capacity, would open up ReactOS as a target to many more developers, useful for pros (embedded) and enthusiasts alike.
Parting thoughts: ReactOS is very alluring to me because it doesn't churn and chase the latest, which is tiring in Windows and Mac, but also in Linux land.
What if XP or 7 was just updated to support new graphics, 64-bit, new processors (ARM)? I wouldn't mind switching to an open source OS which was all that. I don't mind the Windows "clunkyness" as much as I dislike the ads, the telemetry and the churn. ReactOS reminds me of when my computer was My Computer and not some corporate cloud tentacle.
> You know how there are so many false starts of a Linux distribution which will be simple to use, no-nonse, and just be user friendly? (Looking at you, ElementaryOS.)
A 3 decades old looking OS with a terrible desktop experience is quite the opposite of what we call user friendly today.
What I mean is the new users of the 2020's don't necessarily understand better the old paradigms. My daughters are more comfortable on Gnome 3 because it is closer than their parents phone UIs.
This is true and my intuition may betray me here. But on the other hand, Windows 95 was perfectly useable to people who had never sat down at a computer before. It was obvious where the buttons where, and some programs even had the little question-mark icon, which you could click on, then click on any UI surface, and you got a text explanation of what that button or whatever did.
This got me thinking about of another thing: PCs (broadly speaking) are becoming less popular (not in absolute terms perhaps) compared to glass slab devices. But on the other hand, when people do real productivity stuff on touch devices, they often do PC-ish workflows, using an external keyboard and such. I don't know what to make of this. I think a real IDE made for touch from the ground up could be incredibly powerful. Like a Lisp (under the hood), where there are no parens, just touch-enabled rectangles you zoom into, one for each function.
> But on the other hand, Windows 95 was perfectly useable to people who had never sat down at a computer before.
As did Gnome 1.4 on my grandmother's first computer (an old 486 we saved from the bin).
People who never sat down on a computer have always been the easiest in term of adoption because they aren't limited by old habits, muscle memory and resistance to change.
One of the stated goals is to be compatible with Windows drivers, so assuming that ever progresses to sufficient stability and reliability, that feature would sidestep a lot of the work needed for hardware support.
Funny thing, I have seen it once on the screen of a cashbox in a supermarket in Kyiv. However, it is not clear if they really used ReactOS, or just their logo/graphics to avoid buying license for Windows.
UPD: Found the photo https://i.imgur.com/5biLbTj.jpg (2016)