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ReactOS releases 0.4.8 with experimental Vista/7/10 software compatibility

reactos.org

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Re: ReactOS releases 0.4.8 with experimental Vista/7/10 software compatibility

#12

Post by jug »

rocky1138 wrote: post #4

What I like about this project, besides the dedication and professionalism of the team behind it, is that it offers PC gamers a possible way to play Windows-era games moving forward. In a decade or two, we likely won't be able to activate a Windows XP machine (and wouldn't want to with all of the security hazards either) so it's great to have a free and open source project to run our Windows stuff.

Yeah, DOSBox is nice for retro gaming or even the oddball application, but it pales in comparison to the potential of this project.

Re: ReactOS releases 0.4.8 with experimental Vista/7/10 software compatibility

#14

Post by mschuster91 »

konschubert wrote: post #11

What Kernel does this OS use? What's its history? Is it a unix fork such as Linux?

No, it's a reverse engineered Windows. I believe that due to copyright issues it even is a fully clean-room developed implementation, which means that it's not based on MS documentation or on decompiled source code.

Re: ReactOS releases 0.4.8 with experimental Vista/7/10 software compatibility

#15

Post by geff82 »

rocky1138 wrote: post #4

What I like about this project, besides the dedication and professionalism of the team behind it, is that it offers PC gamers a possible way to play Windows-era games moving forward. In a decade or two, we likely won't be able to activate a Windows XP machine (and wouldn't want to with all of the security hazards either) so it's great to have a free and open source project to run our Windows stuff.

Good thought, never saw it from an archiving point of view!

Re: ReactOS releases 0.4.8 with experimental Vista/7/10 software compatibility

#19

Post by wrinkl3 »

rocky1138 wrote: post #4

What I like about this project, besides the dedication and professionalism of the team behind it, is that it offers PC gamers a possible way to play Windows-era games moving forward. In a decade or two, we likely won't be able to activate a Windows XP machine (and wouldn't want to with all of the security hazards either) so it's great to have a free and open source project to run our Windows stuff.

Don't all new Windows releases ship with backwards compatibility modes?

Re: ReactOS releases 0.4.8 with experimental Vista/7/10 software compatibility

#20

Post by dfox »

fluxsauce wrote: post #9
iforgotpassword wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed a great read to catch up with the project. > Talking about the notification tray, due to Ged’s work, icons of killed and finished process are now automatically removed, even when apps crash. This is something that Windows doesn't even provide with Win10, and many Windows users may have noticed. Made me chuckle. This has bothered me since forever. It seemed like such a low hanging fruit to fix, I wonder why Mic…

> I wonder why Microsoft never did. I'm assuming it's because of the size of the codebase, available engineering resources, return-on-investment calculation, and a business prioritization of new features over refinement. Most engineers can look at their own work or codebase and think, "well, that's a bit shit but it works well enough." I can't imagine their backlog. I'm sure it's lurking in an issue queue somewhere.

One notable thing is that in Windows the behavior of taskbar changed around the time of Windows 98SE/2000 (I'm not sure in which version exactly). Originally the "orphaned" tray icons just were there and you could not cause them to go away, "new" behavior is that first event (ie. hover) causes them to be destroyed.
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