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

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

#191

Post by Kliment »

pnloyd wrote: post #62
boramalper wrote: post #56

Genuine question: What advantage does ReactOS provide over Wine? https://www.reactos.org/wiki/WINE explains a bit but still doesn't answer the question. P.S. oh by the way, the developers of both projects are apparently collaborating and ReactOS uses Wine's DLLs for their userspace, so my question is not meant to criticise the "double-effort" or anything like that.

I've wondered this myself, anyone know if ReactOS can run anything wine can't? I tried wine-develolment a few days ago and 3D performance is still rather spotty (amongst all the other usuall hiccups). That being said is has helped me play a few games with a decent experience.

Drivers for one - reactos can be used for Windows driver testing, wine cannot.

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

#192

Post by wincy »

swiley wrote: post #133
wincy wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’d be good if it didn’t have all the damned spam baked in with non obvious ways to remove it. I got so mad the FIFTH time windows 10 pro installed Bubble Witch Saga and Candy Crush on my system. After seeing that I really want to save up and buy only Macs from now on.

Why not just run a FOSS OS?

A fair question, I actually did install two different Linux distributions a couple weeks ago. For some background I'm a software developer, and consider myself reasonably competent in using Linux.

I started with Fedora. Installed, seemed nice. Then I did a dnf update or something like that. It froze for 4 hours in the middle of the install. So I hit ctrl+z. When I restarted my computer GRUB was attempting to boot an OS version that did not exist and I had to manually try to figure out how to fix this which I was in no mood to do after having the OS for 10 minutes. Also apparently the newest version of Fedora didn't have the concept of turning off auto lock? Or a timer. I'm not sure, but the end result was that if I tried to watch a movie for more than 10 minutes my desktop would helpfully lock, continuing to play the movie.

So I then installed Ubuntu, which was fairly straightforward. Then deleted the couple of things that felt like advertisements (like a direct link to Amazon on the quickbar or whatever it is). Overall, was a pretty good experience until I installed the proprietary Nvidia drivers. Then for some reasons movies (DRM-free files) would stutter. At that point I was thinking about doing some C# development in visual studio anyway so I looked into dual boot installing windows 10 while having Ubuntu installed, and while there are a million articles on how to install Ubuntu with Windows 10 already installed, the reverse did not seem to be true. So I just wiped my system drive and reinstalled Windows 10, which helpfully activated based on my hardware profile even though I'd neglected to save the key.

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

#193

Post by __sr__ »

mastazi wrote: post #131
DEFCON28 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows 10 is good (really!) if you haven't taken a look at in a while. I switched from Mac on the Desktop to Windows 10 because I needed "pro" hardware (NVIDIA GPU, 1 TB RAM, etc) and it works just fine. They've really been on the ball in the last couple of years.

> Windows 10 is good Did Linux succeed because other UNIXes were bad? In my opinion, the reason why we need ReactOS is independent from whether Windows 10 is good or not. And yeah, I agree besides the privacy issues, Win 10 is pretty good

> Did Linux succeed because other UNIXes were bad?

No, it succeeded because there was a need for a UNIX like OS not encumbered by lawsuits (like BSDs) or costing a fortune (Solaris, SGI etc.).

Linux is a clean room implementation that doesn’t borrow any code from proprietary AT&T UNIX, ensuring that it has future. That, and the backing of FSF means it is not going to be sued into oblivion - something that could not be said for BSDs and other free variants back in 1990s. No one wants to invest into a something that may be shut down anytime. It is the fighting thtpat hurt the BSDs the most — causing them to be overshadowed by Linux despite being superior in many ways back in the days. Some would argue that they are still technologically superior in certain areas — but that is debatable.

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

#194

Post by ZenoArrow »

dtech wrote: post #176
_o_ wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows have become bloated to the point I have rather installed openSUSE and after ~20 years I am not touching them any more. I don't like linux (it has another set of problems) and I would be very glad if I could use ReactOS and instead using firewall, just recompile the winsock dll with my own instructions (just one example). Windows will never be free os, you will pay heavly with your privacy and from what I have…

> Windows have become bloated I don't agree. Vista was a mess but they seem to have made such tight performance budgets for 7, 8 and 10 that any computer which can run the 11-year-old Vista can also run 10.

Depends on which definition of bloated you choose. If you look at install size on disk it's clear that Windows 10 requires more space than Windows 7. In contrast, you can easily create a usable Linux system (including a window manager, not just a minimal server install) that takes up half the space of a Windows 7 install.

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

#195

Post by rkeene2 »

finchisko wrote: post #180
dragontamer wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wine and ReactOS are practically sister-projects at this point that share a ton of code. ReactOS does replicate the NT Kernel, so in theory (if it ever gets there), ReactOS would be able to run Windows Drivers. IE: the "real" NVidia and AMD Drivers or any other kernel-level drivers that exist in Windows land. These days, AMD (and even NVidia) have decent Linux drivers. And WiFi drivers have Windows->Linux translators…

Linux has ACL too.

The Linux equivalent to NT ACLs are called RichACLs, and they are quite new.

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

#196

Post by simooooo »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #134
BinaryIdiot wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> soon (well, years, but still) people will be using it everywhere as a replacement for Windows. No they won't. It's a fringe OS that requires technical expertise to install. Not only that but it looks like "old Windows". Users won't want to work with a Windows from a decade ago. Not only that but it'll have bugs and no support. You'll see tiny pockets of people using it but as Microsoft gets closer and closer to sim…

> Users won't want to work with a Windows from a decade ago. Not only that but it'll have bugs and no support. Depending on the age group, I guess. I know plenty of people who would say that Windows had its peak usability around Windows 2000/2003 and only got heavier and more confusing later on. If I know that ReactOS had a good chance of running most regular Windows applications, I'd install it on my mother's laptop…

Lol. Your mother doesn't care about linux.

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

#197

Post by TomMarius »

jordache wrote: post #167
ams6110 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the POS doesn't touch card data how would it fall under PCI?

If the pos is system is regarded similarly as a cc accepting website that proxies cc data to an endpoint, then the os shouldn't be a variable of pci compliance

Most (European) terminals don't even proxy to computer, they're completely independent devices connected to wifi that communicate directly with bank. The connection to computer is used only for "1 EUR" and "OK"/"FAIL" kind of messages and are completely optional.

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

#198

Post by JetSpiegel »

jhall1468 wrote: post #161
andreiw wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bet in 20 years no one will know what ReactJS even is, but ReactOS very much will preserve NT regardless of Microsoft’s successes. ReactOS is a usable Windows NT 6+ clone, with kernel ABI ( driver ) compat, that runs real software. What are you comparing it to, to be able to qualify the speed of its development?

There are hundreds of millions of lines of ReactJS in production today and hundreds of millions more coming. If you think 20 years from now all that is going to be re-written I've got a bridge to sell you. JQuery is 11 years old now. ReactOS is a goal and nothing more. Nobody is using it right now because it's barely usable outside of a VM, and even then it's software compatibility is smaller than WINE, let alone Win…

> There are hundreds of millions of lines of ReactJS in production today and hundreds of millions more coming.

10 years ago there were 0. The churn in JS code is just too high.

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

#199

Post by sspiff »

BinaryIdiot wrote: post #107
owenversteeg wrote: post #34

This has been one of my favorite software projects to watch, because it's such an insanely monumental undertaking and moves so damn slowly. There were people working on this two decades ago, putting in tiny fixes and little bits of code and whatnot, and they did it even knowing that basically nobody would see their work for decades. Hell, I have never seen a ReactOS installation in the wild, and I'm the kind of perso…

> soon (well, years, but still) people will be using it everywhere as a replacement for Windows. No they won't. It's a fringe OS that requires technical expertise to install. Not only that but it looks like "old Windows". Users won't want to work with a Windows from a decade ago. Not only that but it'll have bugs and no support. You'll see tiny pockets of people using it but as Microsoft gets closer and closer to sim…

I know a bunch of people (mostly gamers) who refuse to upgrade from Windows 7 to 8 or 10, mostly because of usability and privacy concerns.

Eventually, they'll have to (DirectX 12, but I'm sure there's a ton of APIs for non-games as well and drivers will stop being updated for Win7).

But if ReactOS can reach a level of maturity and compatibility to please such people, there's a sizeable niche there of people who:

  1. won't switch away from Windows to Linux or BSD,

  2. but would be willing to adopt a familiar and compatible operating system.

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

#200

Post by flohofwoe »

BinaryIdiot wrote: post #107
owenversteeg wrote: post #34

This has been one of my favorite software projects to watch, because it's such an insanely monumental undertaking and moves so damn slowly. There were people working on this two decades ago, putting in tiny fixes and little bits of code and whatnot, and they did it even knowing that basically nobody would see their work for decades. Hell, I have never seen a ReactOS installation in the wild, and I'm the kind of perso…

> soon (well, years, but still) people will be using it everywhere as a replacement for Windows. No they won't. It's a fringe OS that requires technical expertise to install. Not only that but it looks like "old Windows". Users won't want to work with a Windows from a decade ago. Not only that but it'll have bugs and no support. You'll see tiny pockets of people using it but as Microsoft gets closer and closer to sim…

To an average user, the latest Windows versions really don't add anything useful over WinXP or even Win2k. Many things got worse, like discovering and starting installed applications. Slap a modern UI theme on XP, and nobody will notice that it's a nearly 20 year old OS.
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