ReactOS requires all contributors to affirm that legally they have not used or seen any leaked Windows source code. This is to avoid any hints of copyright violation. While AI may be capable of writing a new driver or fixing bugs, a developer using AI can’t affirm that the model hasn’t seen/trained on any leaked source code. So AI submissions would very likely be denied.
I look at ReactOS largely as an exercise in engineering and there's really nothing wrong it with it being just that. Personally I think projects like Wine/Proton have made far more in-roads in being able to run Windows software on non-Windows systems but I still have to give props to the developers of ReactOS for sticking with it for 30 freaking years.
Yes. The unique point of ReactOS is driver compatibility. Wine is pretty great for Win32 API, Proton completes it with excellent D3D support through DXVK, and with these projects a lot of Windows userspace can run fine on Linux. Wine doesn't do anything for driver compatibility, which is where ReactOS was supposed to fill in, running any driver written for Windows 2000 or XP.
But by now, as I also wrote in the other thread on this, ReactOS should be seen as something more like GNU Hurd. An exercise in kernel development and reverse engineering, a project that clearly requires a high level of technical skill, but long past the window of opportunity for actual adoption. If Hurd had been usable by say 1995, when Linux just got started on portability, it would have had a chance. If ReactOS had been usable ten years ago, it would also have had a chance at adoption, but now it's firmly in the "purely for engineering" space.
I would like to see ReactOS succeed for various reasons, mainly philosophical. On the other hand, for practical real-world use cases, it has to compete with several alternative solutions:
1. Just use Windows 11. Yes, it sucks and MS occasionally breaks stuff - but at least hardware and software vendors will develop their code against Win 11 and test it. In other words, you have the highest likelihood that your computer will work as expected with contemporary Windows applications and drivers.
2. Use an older version of Windows. If you want to use old hardware or software, odds are you will get the best experience with whatever version of Windows they were developed/tested against. You have to accept the lack of support for modern software, and you will need to take appropriate security measures such as not connecting it to the internet - but at the same time, it's unlikely that your Windows 98 retro gaming rig is your only computer, so that's probably an acceptable tradeoff.
3. Run WINE on top of Linux (or some other mature open source operating system). This might not be a good solution for the average person, but ticks the box for people who feel strongly pro-open source, or anti-Microsoft. Since Windows compatibility is dictated by Windows' libraries and frameworks and not the kernel, compatibility is likely to be comparable to ReactOS.
I am not saying that this covers every possible use case for ReactOS, but I would posit it covers enough that the majority of people who might contribute or invest into ReactOS will instead pick one of the above options and invest their time and energy elsewhere.
I think using WINE over Linux has won as the option to consider if you want to run Windows applications on a non-Windows OS without loading Windows into a VM.
I’ve been playing around with this for decades and it has been a pretty toy façade until recently. But the last time I found a package manager GUI and installed Python, and to my surprise it worked! Was gobsmacked it took this long but real progress is being made.
ReactOS is an amazing achievement, for what it is. Building a house is much easier than building exactly the same house without being able to even peek at the original blueprints, or take input from anyone who has.
To that point I hope that more people study ReactOS and get a sense for the Microsoft/IBM philosophy of doing a desktop operating system (which is completely different from the Linux/Unix way). I hope we someday see new operating system projects that use these learnings.
Congrats on 30 years of development, ReactOS team! What a lovely walk through the storied history of the project.
I wonder how well it runs on XP-era hardware, Thinkpads, etc. I have several for running period games and software, but it'd be super cool to run ReactOS instead and be able to hack on the OS.
I test ReactOS every now and then on a crappy 2011-ish laptop I bought from a thrift store a while ago to test one of my projects on Windows and Linux on real hardware.
Last time was about a month ago. It's still easier to list what works than what doesn't, but I like seeing progress. Ethernet works with some random Windows driver. The integrated GPU doesn't, but installing the driver doesn't make it bsod on startup any more, so that's an improvement. I've seen people have more success with discrete GPUs. Sound card doesn't work because it's too new.
The thing with these kinds of projects that target a vast existing library of software is that the progress feels slow for a long time, but at some point there's enough compatibility for people to try to use it for real, and this is when compatibility starts improving rapidly. I feel like ReactOS is close like never before to that point. I really want it to succeed.
How stable is it? A couple years ago I tried installing it in a VM, and my experience was it would BSOD in 15 minutes whenever I tried to do anything with it.
I tried ReactOS a little while ago, in some ways it's closer than it feels to being acceptable as a daily driver, in others it's quite far away.
I like the idea of there being more alternatives Operating Systems that aren't just a Linux distro. Operating Systems like Haiku and ReactOS I think are great for being a direction that isn't Linux. It's not that Linux is bad, but it's a slow moving change-resistant juggernaut that isn't going to be a place where innovation will thrive.
ReactOS has delt itself a massive blow by hiding so much of their progress.
The project has insisted on creating Windows Server 2003. Probably very little of the software you want to run works on Windows Server 2003. Certainly no modern web browser will.
There has been some movement in recent months though. They have a 64 bit version. They are implementing NT6 APIs. They are implementing UEFI. They are looking at WDDM drivers. The have synced with Wine 10.
If ReactOS can produce a version that can run a modern browser and maybe a half-way recent Office suite, I think a lot of people would change their mind about the potential.
If they can support modern GPU drivers, it is possible they could even gain some traction in that space. Lots of work to do but not impossible.
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 58.7 ms ] threadBut by now, as I also wrote in the other thread on this, ReactOS should be seen as something more like GNU Hurd. An exercise in kernel development and reverse engineering, a project that clearly requires a high level of technical skill, but long past the window of opportunity for actual adoption. If Hurd had been usable by say 1995, when Linux just got started on portability, it would have had a chance. If ReactOS had been usable ten years ago, it would also have had a chance at adoption, but now it's firmly in the "purely for engineering" space.
Yeah, they can even run modern games, which ReactOS can't. It can't even run on modern hardware properly.
It's a nice project, though. Good progress for a hobby project, and it's still going after 30 years!
1. Just use Windows 11. Yes, it sucks and MS occasionally breaks stuff - but at least hardware and software vendors will develop their code against Win 11 and test it. In other words, you have the highest likelihood that your computer will work as expected with contemporary Windows applications and drivers.
2. Use an older version of Windows. If you want to use old hardware or software, odds are you will get the best experience with whatever version of Windows they were developed/tested against. You have to accept the lack of support for modern software, and you will need to take appropriate security measures such as not connecting it to the internet - but at the same time, it's unlikely that your Windows 98 retro gaming rig is your only computer, so that's probably an acceptable tradeoff.
3. Run WINE on top of Linux (or some other mature open source operating system). This might not be a good solution for the average person, but ticks the box for people who feel strongly pro-open source, or anti-Microsoft. Since Windows compatibility is dictated by Windows' libraries and frameworks and not the kernel, compatibility is likely to be comparable to ReactOS.
I am not saying that this covers every possible use case for ReactOS, but I would posit it covers enough that the majority of people who might contribute or invest into ReactOS will instead pick one of the above options and invest their time and energy elsewhere.
To that point I hope that more people study ReactOS and get a sense for the Microsoft/IBM philosophy of doing a desktop operating system (which is completely different from the Linux/Unix way). I hope we someday see new operating system projects that use these learnings.
I wonder how well it runs on XP-era hardware, Thinkpads, etc. I have several for running period games and software, but it'd be super cool to run ReactOS instead and be able to hack on the OS.
Last time was about a month ago. It's still easier to list what works than what doesn't, but I like seeing progress. Ethernet works with some random Windows driver. The integrated GPU doesn't, but installing the driver doesn't make it bsod on startup any more, so that's an improvement. I've seen people have more success with discrete GPUs. Sound card doesn't work because it's too new.
The thing with these kinds of projects that target a vast existing library of software is that the progress feels slow for a long time, but at some point there's enough compatibility for people to try to use it for real, and this is when compatibility starts improving rapidly. I feel like ReactOS is close like never before to that point. I really want it to succeed.
I like the idea of there being more alternatives Operating Systems that aren't just a Linux distro. Operating Systems like Haiku and ReactOS I think are great for being a direction that isn't Linux. It's not that Linux is bad, but it's a slow moving change-resistant juggernaut that isn't going to be a place where innovation will thrive.
The project has insisted on creating Windows Server 2003. Probably very little of the software you want to run works on Windows Server 2003. Certainly no modern web browser will.
There has been some movement in recent months though. They have a 64 bit version. They are implementing NT6 APIs. They are implementing UEFI. They are looking at WDDM drivers. The have synced with Wine 10.
If ReactOS can produce a version that can run a modern browser and maybe a half-way recent Office suite, I think a lot of people would change their mind about the potential.
If they can support modern GPU drivers, it is possible they could even gain some traction in that space. Lots of work to do but not impossible.