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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

#251

Post by wlesieutre »

Kuraj wrote: post #212
TeMPOraL wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, but they did. There was a series of problems with Vista that pissed people off, then there was the quite-ok Windows 7, and then Microsoft screwed everything up with Windows 8. The irony is, they've managed to fix a lot of Windows 8 UX problems in Windows 10, but then the telemetry stories and in-your-face pushing of the upgrade from 8 to 10 left some people I know stranded at 8 and afraid to try out 10. I guess t…

I feel like "quite-ok Windows 7" is underselling it. Response was largely positive and it wasn't even that different from Vista. It simply didn't suffer from the same problems, since hardware manufacturers caught up.

Yeah, Vista had two big issues that had both been mostly resolved by the time 7 was released: 1) Driver support was poor, and 2) A bunch of low end computers with "Vista Capable" stickers that really meant "It should boot but it's going to be awful."

IIRC Microsoft was pressured by OEMs into making a lower tier of Vista qualified hardware even though they knew it really required more than that to work acceptably well.

I never personally owned or used a Vista machine, but my office has a couple of them plugged in for a showroom area where they cycle powerpoint slides, and oh my god is it painful if you ever have to touch them. IIRC they've got 512 MB of RAM, and some of that is being shared with the iGPU. It's not pretty.

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

#252

Post by BruiseLee »

_o_ wrote: post #230
bad_user wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your preference for FreeBSD has nothing to do with the early development of Net/2 BSD, its license and the rise of Linux. Development of BSD was effectively not accessible to the outside world, being a closed playground for the developers at Berkeley. And to get an official version on disk, it also had a pretty steep price. Even now the various BSD distributions are very rigidly controlled. Yes, they adhere to certai…

I dont care about the "model". I only care about code quality and stability on critical tasks. And currently the distributions are becoming more and more chaotic, I think this will bite back, you can try and use some whatever the name paradigms but at the end development is hard and not made only from fun problems to solve, there are lots of annoying and pesky tasks that need to be done. And here the system where eve…

The world does not revolve around you. Regardless of your personal preferences, the Linux development model was an important part of its success.

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

#253

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

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.

10 is bloated by most metrics. Applications you don't need or want are bundled by default, it has a 20+GB install size, two separate sets of overlapping configuration utilities, a built-in HTTP server, built-in adware, etc.

There has been a lot of good work done on the underlying system, but it's had a ton of useless buggy crap piled on top of it.

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

#254

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

bad_user wrote: post #162
pavs wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried installing MacOS on non-apple hardware? Not sure I understand the comparison. MacOS shines as long as you are within Apple walled garden, while I personally like MacOS, I know plenty of users who like Apple hardware but not the OS. Windows or Most Linux distro doesn't have any such limitation and will work out of the box 90%+ of the time.

I am not going to dispute your claims, MacOS does not run on non-Apple hardware. What I am saying is that many people that would have been Linux users are now MacOS users. And one of those people is me. I was a hardcore Ubuntu / Debian fan, but then got a MacBook Pro from the company I worked for in 2014. After moaning about it for a while, I'm now a convert. Initially it was because of the hardware, as I love Retina…

>Many times it isn't Linux's fault of course. Surely you can't blame Linux for Skype not working

You sure as hell can, because distros love to break application compatibility as often as possible. It's basically the official sport of the Linux Desktop. It's 2018 and it's still basically impossible to distribute an application that will run on any Linux Desktop because of all the fragmentation.

But that's ok, because you can just release your application as open source and find some volunteers to maintain packages for it for all 200 distributions.

Even Linus recognizes what a goddamned shitshow application distribution is on Linux.

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

#255

Post by xenophonf »

bitL wrote: post #78
xenophonf wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a Windows licensing expert, but this is basically how it works: 1. You can't use the OEM license with retail installation media. 2. You don't get OEM installation media because the license is tied to the hardware. 3. The OEM recovery media can't be restored to different hardware. 4. The OEM license key can't be used to install a retail Windows install on a different computer.

Simply wonderful! ReactOS is really needed...

I feel you. It really sucks that ASUS's recovery media doesn't let you replace or upgrade your memory or storage. Those are user-serviceable parts, IMO.

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

#256

Post by bitL »

xenophonf wrote: post #255
bitL wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simply wonderful! ReactOS is really needed...

I feel you. It really sucks that ASUS's recovery media doesn't let you replace or upgrade your memory or storage. Those are user-serviceable parts, IMO.

I am not sure if ASUS won't allow it by principle, but Eee PC 901 was using odd SSDs based on Mini PCIe with the same form-factor as mSATA SSD, but different electric circuitry, so regular mSATA drives couldn't work and you had to get an adapter converting mini PCIe into mSATA first. And once you plugged it in, primary master disappeared, so I guess that's what confused recovery media. They likely couldn't predict the future of SSD interfaces and were using some early prototypes before standardization.

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

#258

Post by drdaeman »

__sr__ wrote: post #173
robertAngst wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two things >It lights a fire under M$'s asses to make windows competitive >Adoption is slow but exponential. Today is the first day I learned about ReactOS and I'm excited. I can program and I have money. If people can find value in it, adoption will grow.

>It lights a fire under M$'s asses to make windows competitive Err... no. Not unless the installed base reaches a critical mass. And certainly not when the market share is not even 0.1%. macOS (or even desktop Linux) has a higher installed base and they don’t bother Microsoft significantly. I’d be more optimistic if the OS had not been around for two decades. It had its chance when the likes of Vista was released. If…

> (or even desktop Linux) has a higher installed base and they don’t bother Microsoft significantly.

Except for they did. I'm pretty sure WSL was about developers who had preferred GNU/Linux-based systems (or macOS, since it can be compatible for some cases) for work, not about just running some *nix server software on Windows machines.

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

#259

Post by xenophonf »

newsbinator wrote: post #95
xenophonf wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a Windows licensing expert, but this is basically how it works: 1. You can't use the OEM license with retail installation media. 2. You don't get OEM installation media because the license is tied to the hardware. 3. The OEM recovery media can't be restored to different hardware. 4. The OEM license key can't be used to install a retail Windows install on a different computer.

It's a strange situation when a Windows licensing expert is actually a thing.

Commercial software licensing has always been a PITA, especially at the enterprise level. I just thank sweet baby Jesus every day I don't have to deal with IBM or Oracle.

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

#260

Post by [deleted] »

sspiff wrote: post #227
majewsky wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't use code blocks for normal text. This is frustratingly difficult to read on a phone where the code block becomes a scrolling container.

Sorry, I didn't intend to make it a code block, just wanted to indent the list headers. Is there a list syntax for HN comments?

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