Hey Jow Forums, come check out React OS. It's a free and open source operating system released under the GPL. It's not Windows, but rather an open source clone of it. It's binary compatible with most win32 programs and runs on 32MB of RAM. It's an excellent OS that has been created by the devs reverse engineering real Windows and then implementing all of the underlying functionality of it from scratch. There's no Microsoft code anywhere in it, yet it runs win32 programs. It looks like Windows 2000 out of the box but you can apply XP themes. If you want to keep the classic Windows 2000 look, you can just swap out the icons and you're pretty close to the real deal.
Right now it's a work in progress and extremely buggy, and has no meaningful hardware support. The 0.4.8 release works okay in a VM but has graphical issues at resolutions higher than 1024x768 if you want more than 256 colors. So it's basically better colors or better resolution. It's pretty stable if you aren't multitasking too hard. With real hardware, I managed to get it to install on a ThinkPad T40 the other day. It worked flawlessly except for buggy USB support. I got it installed on a R60 as well but the ATI graphics weren't working at all, and the driver package for XP failed. Despite all this, I'm pretty impressed that it works as well as it does.
Even though it's still in its early stages, things are speeding up and the future of the project is looking bright. Take a look for yourself, Anons. Try it out in a VM if you haven't already.
anyone else see the pattern here? whether it is in development for 1 year or 27 (linux), it is still going to be an unusable, buggy and unstable pile of shit, fuck you open source pajeets
Wyatt Smith
the plug and play (PnP) manager has to be complete to be able to install windows drivers
Elijah Jones
It's also 32bit only and will remain so for at least a decade.
Joseph Sanchez
What even is the point of this project. If you want free software be a man about it and switch to Linux. Otherwise stay on proprietary Windows.
Logan Flores
reactos development was always slow because windows was tolerable for most people
since the release of windows 8 along with the frustrations of windows 10, development has picked up considerably because more people than ever realize there needs to be an alternative that's still able to run windows programs and isn't linux or mac
This; while installing the base system in a VirtualBox VM works, trying to put the VBox Guest Additions on it makes it hang/race the CPU on bootup. Definitely needs more work.
Owen Cook
For now, sort of. You could use it to run early win32 programs pretty well in a VM if you wanted to. QEMU will give you a bunch of options to tweak the emulated hardware for maximum compatibility with React OS. It's definitely a hobby OS if you want to use it on real hardware.
>open source pajeets 95% of open source code has been written by whites and Northeast Asians. Poojeets don't give a fuck about open source. They make shit like Windows 10, iOS, and various GPU drivers. Things like BSD, Linux, and RISC-V are driven primarily by white men. You sound like some 13 year old faggot who doesn't understand technology beyond big shiny buttons and games, and you think you're qualified to weigh in on technical discussion. Go back to /v/.
There's some progress with the 64-bit version as pointed out.
Another child who doesn't understand the technologies behind these systems. You have no idea how much legacy win32 software is still used all over the place. WINE just doesn't cut it for this stuff, and many companies rely on aging hardware with Windows 2000 or XP, or with virtual machines running these systems. React OS offers a solution to this problem, since Windows 10 broke a bunch of backwards compatibility. It's good for home users as well who want to run old software, or enthusiasts who want an OS for their toasters without the overhead of WINE and Linux.
Also, who the fuck shills for Linux except for tech illiterates? It's infested with systemd and gnome cancer the monolithic architecture of the Linux kernel has major drawbacks.
Jose Robinson
Can’t wait till I can use it to ditch my xp vm which keeps trying to reactivate every damn time I move it around.
Joshua Perez
>enthusiasts who want an OS for their toasters without the overhead of WINE and Linux
it's not about overhead since that's not a problem with linux, it's that linux is console-based and windows NT is gui-based, you can't get anything meaningful done in linux without being forced to type a bunch of commands in the terminal (requiring the user to rely either on rote memorization or googling for instructions). people have been saying for years that linux will one day have a gui-based front-end for everything so that normies could use it, but the closest we have is android which is just a walled-garden app store
Camden Turner
Wake me when it supports OpenGL 4.5+ on current AMD/Nvidia cards
Kevin Sullivan
Stop shilling this retarded project. Windows isn't good unlike unix, there is 0 need to make a freetard clone.
Chase Ortiz
opengl / vulkan support is among the easier things to implement because they use mesa3d and wine to handle that
>wont boot on real hardware >audio doesnt work even in a vm >virtuabox addons crash it on boot
wont bother to look at it until at least one of these gets fixed
Ryan Green
the only advantage this has over wine is the fact that it can work with windows drivers wine supports more userland windows software, and linux is a far more solid base and wine isn't as heavy as you might think
By the time it will be able to replace Windows, stationary PCs will probably only still be used by programmers and other specialists
Mason Cruz
>Hey Jow Forums, come check out React OS.
>Right now it's a work in progress and extremely buggy, and has no meaningful hardware support. The 0.4.8 release works okay in a VM but has graphical issues at resolutions higher than 1024x768 if you want more than 256 colors.
Make it work then and I'll check it out
Josiah Williams
It'll be awesome once the USB rework gets merged. The shitty USB support sticks like a sore usb thumb.
Bentley White
HaikuOS is comfier - and it actually BOOTS.
Parker Turner
I loved BeOS and love HaikuOS, but it's a different project trying to free a different OS. On low resources, AROS wips the floor with everything else. That's a free clone of AmigaOS.
Caleb Butler
Waiting for someone to play the classic Doom like everyone usually does.
Julian Ross
I could see the appeal of preserving Win32 and Win16 as microsoft moves away from that. ReactOS should have a 16-bit emulator built in.
Landon Hernandez
Preservation is huge for reactos, they're not going to drop win16/32. But they're also not going to just ignore win64. Their goal is to be a drop-in replacement, and still be able to run windows software, including drivers. Literally to free Windows from microsoft.
Ayden Morales
man I wish I could contribute to driver stuff on these projects. I've only done low level on z80 and 6502, x86 seems hard to break into. I'm thinking I should start with DOS programming, BIOS calls etc, is that moving in the right direction?
Michael Murphy
Learn C instead. Windows stuff, driver or not, generally isn't written in assembly.
Jaxon Jackson
I've written stuff in C to interact with an old wacom over a serial port. Stuff like PCI or that deals with hardware interrupts I wouldn't know how to deal with, I figure I need extensive x86 knowledge.
Elijah Gutierrez
That's way more OS specific than it is x86 specific, from a driver dev pov. Part of the job of the OS is to abstract the platform from you.
Jose Morales
But OP, I have.
I just used 0.4.8 to run some toroid inductor design software downloaded from the mfgr. A couple graphical glitches, but worked fine.
Liam Hall
There are cases where you need SOME assembly. And on those cases, you use inline assembly stuff, and just all you actually need. Writing a whole driver in assembly is asking for trouble.
Brandon Long
>Windows isn't good unlike unix Nah, linux and unix is a hacked together clusterfuck when it comes to many things.
I've looked at this from time to time with interest since around 2004 and I quite frankly do not believe this will amount to anything - ever. Why? Consider that ReactOS is something that's been around since 1998. Yes. It's now 20 years old. Look at where it's at after all that time. It's not even close to being a usable product. If you look at the progress since it's inception and imagine what it will become in the future at the same rate of progress then perhaps it will be a working usable OS in 40 years. But let's say they by magic manage to attract a ton of new developers and there's magically a lot of improvement. That would amount to something like a working Windows XP clone in 2024. win32 won't be very relevant at that time.
Now look at the alternatives. Let's say you want something that runs Windows programs on modern hardware and you ignore ReactOS and go from scratch. I'd personally go for making a GNU/Linux distribution which has really good user-friendly WINE integration. You've already got working audio, working graphics drivers, printing and all that stuff and the pieces needed to run Windows programs are there too. You can use WINE on Linux distributions today but it's not super user-friendly. But it could be. And that's a hell of a lot more realistic than making ReactOS some kind of usable product.
One last little detail to think about: One of the highlights of recent ReactOS progress is Parallel Port Printing! ...which no modern motherboards and printers use.
Jose Gonzalez
>I'd personally go for making a GNU/Linux distribution which has really good user-friendly WINE integration. "But muh wine will get super awesome soon" is also a 20 year old meme. Still a mess in many cases, like react(given they share the userland codebase, it shouldnt come as a surprise)
Noah Powell
Linux, sure, but Unix is sensible and logical. Its kernel was decent for its time, and the kernel seems to be the only decent thing about Windows
Bentley Thompson
>open source pajeets so go suck M$ dick you faggot
> Also, who the fuck shills for Linux except for tech illiterates? It's infested with systemd and gnome cancer the monolithic architecture of the Linux kernel has major drawbacks. I have never once used either systemd or gnome. If you use those it's your own problem.
Also are you about to tell me Windows NT isn't monolithic?
Joshua James
> trying to free a different OS. Wait what is HaikuOS trying to free? I thought it was a completely independent and original thing
Levi Jones
>Wait what is HaikuOS trying to free? BeOS
Nathaniel Clark
BeOS, an OS that, despite its commercial death, is not free.
>"But muh wine will get super awesome soon" is also a 20 year old meme. I haven't actually used WINE much the last few years, there was this one Windows program I needed it for which did work fine but I stopped using that and haven't played with it since. I am guessing you're right for most programs. But look at it this way, would it be simpler to improve WINE or make an complete new OS and run WINE on top of that? Let's say WINE by magic could run Windows programs perfectly tomorrow. Would that do much good on a OS with no audio, on accelerated GPU, no networking and not much else working either?
Brayden Cooper
impossible, gentoo is supposed to be number 1
Ian Gutierrez
>hacked together clusterfuck You just described windows
Joseph Martinez
>windows >clusterfuck Sorry, but no. Linux is a messy spaghetti monolithic kernel with a shitload of unstable internal APIs. NT is a hybrid design, way better organized and cleaner. If you have to spit on windows, at least do it with authority, knowing what you're talking about. Actually better designs include HaikuOS, Fuchsia, Genode, HelenOS, Minix3 and Dragonfly BSD.
>NT is cleaner >handles my scrollbars in kernel mode (GDI) wew
Luis Hall
>windows is just NT Are you retarded? The point was that the entire OS is a bunch of shitty patchwork.
Brayden Wilson
But can it run Touhou yet?
Jaxson Carter
my guess is you can just install normal windows drivers, some are probably ported from linux
Jack Hall
>Not mentioning TempleOS when discussing good operating systems
Blake Rogers
What baffles me is why big companies aren't backing this. It could be the solution to many problems.
Otoh, Microsoft could very well open source Windows at some point and make this irrelevant.
Liam Sullivan
They'd get sued to oblivion. Microsoft is very anti-competitive. They're influential enough to be able to make a law against reverse engineering.
Ayden Turner
I hope that they move onto 64-bit and work on getting up-to-date packages. I played around with the latest release recently and tried installing a newer version of FF with no results.
I think that 64-bit support is coming down the pipe, but it currently needs a lot of work.
Benjamin Davis
>They're influential enough to be able to make a law against reverse engineering. Apple, oracle, they're all just as bad, and they all work together on that.
Landon King
Why should I use a shitty made up version of Windows when I can use the real thing?
Kevin Myers
> extremely buggy, and has no meaningful hardware support
Which is pretty much one of the main reasons why windows is still widely used.
Adrian Moore
Because I just want windows 2000 on a new computer...
Dylan Barnes
Its easier to get windows 2000 working on a mew pc then getting react os to work properly.
Jordan Ward
>Windows 10 has botnet meme status >Windows 8.X is proto-10 shit >Windows 7 is getting Meltdown patches that actually cause other memory vulnerabilities to crop up >usefull functionality in Windows is only available as expensive software license >anything older is EOL
Undess you _have_ to game and use special snowflake software, any other free as in beer alternative will work fine.
Don't get me wrong, ReactOS is still in alpha and has a long way to go, but it's for free and the people behind the project don't seem to be going out of their way to fuck you over like MS.
Landon Hill
Buy an SSD and dual boot windows to play games. The CIA doesn't care what kind of games we play. But in a way even Linux is fucked up thanks to hardware backdoors.
Michael Rogers
>dual boot It's better to have a separate computer and have it disconnected from the internet.
>the CIA Has no business snooping on what we all are masturbating to, anyways.
>Linux us fucked too from hardware backdoors I am neutral about this. It's the lesser evil compared to Windows and going cold turkey encourages people to stop paying for software that only runs on Windows.
If ppl want to use Windows no matter what argument they hear, then that is fine. I wish that ppl stop making Windows out to be the greatest thing just because all their platform-specific software works on it and that's all they've known. Of course, the "best" stamp is sorta subjective and anyone's opinion on the matter can be partially true if only in their case.
Adrian Scott
>It's better to have a separate computer and have it disconnected from the internet. God what the fuck are you doing? I don't want Microsoft to look at my shit, but what you say is already tinfoil tier.
Jose Gonzalez
Can't argue with this, f@m.
Kevin Ortiz
Why should I use ReactOS to run legacy software when I can just install Windows 98?
Evan Powell
Use Windows Me you luddite.
Jayden Barnes
>special snowflake software When ReactOS or any other Linux distro can reliably handle Adobe Suite, Pro Tools, 3DS Max & Unity I'll switch. And please don't meme me with >muh gimp
Nathan Thompson
>windows 98 Unmaintained, insecure, doesn't run in modern hardware.
Hunter Diaz
>It's binary compatible with most win32 programs no it's not
Juan Hill
>3DS Max Unironically not using Blender. >Unity Runs on Linux just fine. Has for years.
Tyler Powell
>Blender what is this, brazil?
Joseph Cooper
>Unmaintained Since when is legacy software ever maintained? >insecure To what? If your company has networking software that literally requires it to run on insecure platforms you've got bigger problems. >doesn't run in modern hardware. I'll give you that one
Jeremiah Turner
Thanks for the heads up! Best thread on Jow Forums in decades
Tyler Hughes
It's a fucking free and open source Windows. You can learn so much from that. Imagine the possibilities. That's something I've been dreaming of since I was a kid.
>Mach >top-tier In the 80s, perhaps. Ever heard of Liedtke and his L4? >POSIX Admit it, you haven't read the standard. Me neither, reasons should be obvious once you try to. >GNUSTEP More like nextstep. It was good, sure. The abortion apple built from that just isn't. Too bad gnustep/etc have been kinda dead for a while. There was etoile but they lost the plot at some point, and that's kinda dead too. etoileos.com/ Personally, I'd love for CDE and Motif to come back, gain hidpi and utf8. So much better than the crap we see these days.
Anthony Perry
NT is heavily influenced by OpenVMS, being built by ex-DEC engineers it is, however, NOT OpenVMS, at all, in any shape or form, any more than GNU/Linux is real Unix stop propagating this meme OS X however, is very much literally NeXTSTEP, not GNUstep you silly fucknut >It was good, sure. The abortion apple built from that just isn't. >Personally, I'd love for CDE and Motif to come back, gain hidpi and utf8. So much better than the crap we see these days. you're just a hipster who likes old things because they're old have you even used CDE?
Juan Thompson
>you're just a hipster who likes old things because they're old Nah. >have you even used CDE? Yes, on sunray X terminals, CDE actually running on a sun rack in the basement of the Architecture of Computers building (D6) of UPC Campus Nord (upc.cat).
Christopher Ross
>whether it is in development for 1 year or 27 (linux), it is still going to be an unusable, buggy and unstable pile of shit, Then why do spacestations run Linux? Why do most web servers run Linux? Why do all the top supercomputers run Linux? I know you're probably just baiting but stop spreading FUD. Linux is stable as fuck, maybe there still some improvement to go on the desktop side of things but the kernel is rock solid.
Christian Morgan
>Then why do spacestations run Linux? Citation needed. >Why do most web servers run Linux? They also run PHP and MungoDB. You should pick better examples that don't make you look retarded. >Why do all the top supercomputers run Linux? Not all of them, and because a lot of money has been wasted by mistake into making linux run on these. Money could have been better spent elsewhere. >Linux is stable as fuck >Kernel rock solid Do you seriously believe that bullshit? Are you that clueless about operating system internals? For rock solid, look at systems designed for and used in critical applications, such as seL4. Linux is a joke, a bloated, spaghetti kernel where there's not even any guarantee it'll ever become preemptable after going non-preemptable.
Leo Sanders
>When ReactOS or any other Linux distro can reliably handle Adobe Suite, Pro Tools, 3DS Max & Unity I'll switch.
wine should be able to handle 32-bit photoshop CC (2013) and 32-bit fl studio 12 (with some workarounds)
