ReactOS is sometimes very disappointing. Take the issue with toolbar icons, for example. Toolbar icons in at least Office 97, Office 2000 and Visual Basic 6 were affected, as was some game [0]. Microsoft Office is a complex Win32 application, making it a good guinea pig for testing compatibility. And yet, this was fixed a few months ago, and the Office bug was reported in 2016 [1]. The bug with no text wrapping for tray balloons is also an embarrassing thing to have lingering for years (I assume it was like this since the balloons were first implemented in ReactOS).
Does the world really need a buggy Windows Server 2003 reimplementation? I think the efforts of the development team could be better spent elsewhere.
There are plenty of systems where you might have a $5 million piece of hardware, tied into a $1 million of revenue per day process, that's all driven by a very specific machine with a very specific version of Windows and very specific peripherals.
Being able to replace them as close to identically as possible is a huge business. That's why there are weird service contracts that promise like-for-like replacements, and why a random scrap 20Gb HDD might be worth $2 for the magnets inside, or $300 if it's some specific Dell/IBM/HP FRU that can be fitted into an unreplacable system.
The software is becoming a challenge there. Until recently, you could just pay Microsoft progressively more and more money to at least get a checkoff that you were getting support for compliance-related things. But now, you really need to find something else if you don't want PCI or HIPPA people threatening to nuke your facility from orbit. ReactOS is the closest thing we have to a lifeline there.
I’m not sure if PCI/HIPPA/whatever auditors would have a positive reaction to ReactOS. And if the OS had issues with icons in a toolbar in 25-year-old software up until 2023, would you trust it to run the $5 million hardware?
> ReactOS is original Open Source code, developed outside of Redmond.
Plus code from Wine, the same project that is used for running Windows programs on Linux distros and macOS, and the basis for Valve's Proton tuned for running Windows only games on these operating systems.
We can say that ReactOS even benefits from some Proton development, although indirectly.
It's a very impressive project with very niche use. I think it's pretty clear that it would be good to have a FOSS system that's compatible with old Windows, especially since we live in a world where Windows XP has become one of those critical legacy techs that never quite go away, like fax machines.
At the same time ReactOS is sometimes disappointing as you say and feels like it's never going to be usable. In late 2023 now, it still rarely runs on real hardware at all, and is missing lots of features you had twenty years ago in XP. USB 2.0 is only supported partially, USB keyboard support is incomplete, wifi only supports WEP authentication, which has been deprecated for the same twenty years, etc.
I admire the project for still continuing with what's an extremely difficult task - they're reimplementing the NT kernel and some major userspace programs like explorer.exe but at this point I don't know if I believe ReactOS will ever reach parity with WinXP. I just checked and they still don't have RW support for NTFS, which was the default file system for XP in 2001. For Linux, ntfs-3g was fully RW in 2007.
Going by how long ReactOS is developed and how unuseable it still is I wonder if the time would haven been better spent decompiling windows 2000 and structuring the code. Once that is done you have a solid base to modify and modernize the OS however you want.
No need to decompile Windows since there have been substantial code leaks, and more recently the entire (or near?) WinXP source leaked. It's even on GitHub.
The problem is of course that anyone using the source code would be in legal trouble, and ReactOS has a policy of not accepting contributions from anyone who has as much as looked at the actual Windows source. How well they maintain their clean room is an open question, but an OS based on leaked or decompiled code would definitely be getting sued into oblivion.
> I think the efforts of the development team could be better spent elsewhere.
Talking about this, has it ever been established if ReactOS is actually 100% authoral code? I thought I remembered someone from Microsoft discussing somewhere (maybe Hacker News?) how everyone there thought it was based on RE that wasn't clean-room or leaked code.
IIRC, that Microsoft employee was acting alone, trying to pick a fight with ReactOS. He backpedalled when the community asked if he was representing his company. My guess is that his management chain heard about the drama he was creating, and he stopped commenting.
> has it ever been established if ReactOS is actually 100% authoral code?
How would you establish that?
> I thought I remembered someone from Microsoft discussing somewhere (maybe Hacker News?) how everyone there thought it was based on RE that wasn't clean-room or leaked code.
And SCO was sure Linux used Unix code. In both cases, I'm assuming FUD until given stronger evidence.
> Does the world really need a buggy Windows Server 2003 reimplementation?
I have a position on this: Sure, why not?
I do understand how at this point in time, this seems like a waste, at least if you consider intellectual curiosity a "waste". Hell, I kind of agree: right now, there's not too much coming out of ReactOS that's actually terribly useful. It's mostly a curiosity to me, and I'm sure to many developers it is a fun hobby. They do actually work on a lot of cool things after all.
However... we may be in an interesting transition right now. For the longest time, desktop computers were moving very fast. In this period of time, big corporations like Microsoft were often able to strike first and deliver sooner than smaller companies and hobbyists could've ever hoped to. XML, UNICODE, you name it, Microsoft was aiming to go to market earlier (and then sometimes, stagnate for a while...) And during this time, desktop computers and the software on them evolved fast.
At some point, we have to admit that things have changed forever. Desktop operating system design has effectively stopped moving. The biggest changes being made to desktop OSes today is just trying to mold them to be more like mobile operating systems. Instead of investing in new OS research, trying new ideas for capabilities and permissions, and giving users more control, desktop operating systems are patching around their security problems with giant bandages and strapping on app stores. Apple and Microsoft have a financial incentive to not give a shit about desktop operating system design: I think the majority of the benefit that can be gotten out of improved OS design has already been realized. The PC market will continue to grow at a glacial pace for a while, but it's not enough for anyone to really pour huge amounts of investment into, considering there's more growth and money to be made in other places.
Because of this slowdown, a target like Windows Server 2003 isn't as bad as it seems. Consider the following: Windows 3.11 was released in 1993, 10 years before Windows Server 2003. And you can absolutely tell that the difference between Windows 3.11 and Windows Server 2003 is factors greater than the difference between Windows Server 2003 and Windows 8. Don't get me wrong: they clearly made many improvements under the hood, refreshed the UI (uhhh... mostly, anyway) and added boat loads of new features. But, Windows Server 2003 is still a quite modern operating system for what it is.
Also, while ReactOS targets Server 2003 for compatibility, that doesn't mean they limit themselves to what Server 2003 can do. Obviously: it ships with a btrfs driver and package manager.
If it takes ReactOS 20+ years to catch up to what Server 2003 could do, I don't think it would be considered "useless". A fully-patched but reasonably modern and stable system that is compatible with Windows 2003 would be a godsend today. Because why not? There's nothing really wrong with this target. And once they're up to that point, they could always just simply keep going. Nothing says they have to stop at 2003.
And also, that's kind of the thing about open source. I think open source is bad at cutting edge, but it's good at "slow burn" stuff. Because once you've done the hard work of actually producing something useful, it will exist in perpetuity. It'd be hard for a company to just maintain something like ReactOS for years without any certainty of an eventual payoff, but a bunch of open source contributors mostly doing it on the side can pretty much do it as long as they feel like doing it. Traditionally, I think that this has been overlooked in part because programming practices, computers, and software used to move a lot faster, and because of this, code tended to "rot" pretty fast. Maybe there's still some room for that, but actually, I think that's also slowing down quite a lot, even with a lot of newer experimental programming languages with novel features and design, and even with the C++ language continuing to move fairly fast. Programming tools are improving rapidly in some regards, but the changing practices of programming do appear to be slowing down a little in general.
So the way I see it, all this work will accumulate and compound into something meaningful if it is to continue for a long time. As a hobby project to satisfy some intellectual curiosity, it's great. Will it ever be "useful"? It's certainly open for debate, but I think the odds are actually surprisingly tilted in its favor.
Does the world really need a buggy Windows Server 2003 reimplementation? I think the efforts of the development team could be better spent elsewhere.
[0]: https://github.com/reactos/reactos/pull/5227
[1]: https://jira.reactos.org/browse/CORE-12377