
ReactOS 0.4.6 released - jeditobe
https://reactos.org/project-news/reactos-046-released
======
dzmitry_lahoda
`In order to track ReactOS compatibility with Windows behavior, 1,088,893 unit
test cases have been added since 0.4.5. This new release has been tested
through 14,238,159 unit test cases, failing just 18,419 (a 0,129% ratio
failure). Still, ReactOS is marked as Alpha for the moment.`

14M tests are impressive.

~~~
niklasrde
I'm guessing they haven't been written manually?

~~~
bonzini
3 nested for loops may count as thousands of tests (not that it diminishes the
value of the tests). Probably most of them come from Wine.

------
nunobrito
It is getting much better with each release. I'm seeing it each time more as a
good replacement for the office machines that need to run the legacy software.

Plus, with this Windows exists no state surveillance involved nor costs with
licenses, perfect for VM deployment.

~~~
badsectoracula
I've used ReactOS at the past to automatically create Win32 builds for
software (the real hardware ran Linux, ReactOS was booted in a VM), the
command-line stuff tend to work fine. The main problem is that there are still
tons of issues with the GUI side, including glaring things like region
clipping (you can see obscured windows sometimes being drawn above other
windows or areas in some windows not being drawn at all) and a single window
being able to hang the entire UI (seems all window message handling is
synchronized).

Older software tends to work ok (i ran Borland C++ Builder on it without major
issues, beyond the GUI glitches i mentioned), but not perfect. Also old
software sometimes tends to include 16bit components that do not work yet with
ReactOS.

The file manager was also rewritten at some point and it seems to have issues
(e.g. you need to manually refresh the desktop/a folder to see changes, drag-
drop doesn't always work, etc). However it is much better than 1-2 releases
ago, which shows that it gets a lot of development.

Command-line stuff seem to work perfect (although the current shell is quite
primitive) though so, if nothing else it can be used for automated tasks.

IMO they should try to pay a bit more attention to getting the basics of the
GUI side working since this will attract more developers who are interested in
helping with the higher levels (as higher as working with stuff like
user32.dll etc can be anyway) but don't want to mess with the low level stuff
(graphics, etc). I think ReactOS is still at a point before the "snowball
effect" with its developer popularity.

~~~
oneweekwonder
> i ran Borland C++ Builder on it without major issues, beyond the GUI
> glitches i mentioned

To whom does the Borland C++ builder belong. Because I wonder if there will
open a market to get old c++/pascal code running in ReactOS?

There is projects like lazarus and free pascal.

But if you can keep your legacy win32 stuff in a self contained ReacOS vm...

This will solve the enterprise problem of keeping legacy applications
contained without win related licencing worries.

Also your long term support looks more promising with ReactOS compared to Win
XP; But microsoft will still drag the bone along for a little longer if not
indefinitely at a enterprise price, ofcourse.

~~~
rzzzt
Embarcadero was the company which made historically significant projects, like
Turbo Pascal, downloadable quite a few years ago:
[http://edn.embarcadero.com/museum/](http://edn.embarcadero.com/museum/)

~~~
badsectoracula
Sadly, this stopped around when they changed the name back to Borland and
years before they split into "Borland" and "CodeGear". I wish they would
release Delphi 1 at some point, but that never happened.

------
dimillian
Can it run Doom?

Edit: Ok I'm impressed, apparently it can even run Doom III
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rluGgjcXtEY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rluGgjcXtEY)

~~~
wiz21c
Doom most probably use a very superficial part of windows. Mainly, whatever is
needed to put a framebuffer on screen. So although this is definitely a good
news, it's not that impressive. Does it run MS Word or Visual Basic ?

~~~
badsectoracula
Assuming you mean VB6, apparently yes but with some glitches:

    
    
       http://s14.postimg.org/7xggyma75/VB6_React_OS.png
    

(not my image and it is 3 years old so it might work better now)

~~~
Koshkin
Note that VB6 was released in 1998 and thus was expected to work on Windows
95/98 and NT4 (and Windows 2000 when it came out). It is kind of sad to see
that ReactOS is not there yet...

~~~
badsectoracula
My guess is that most of API is generally there, but the issues i mentioned
elsewhere in this post with the region stuff cause the glitches. This looks
like a simple thing to fix (i've implemented regions at the past in an
experimental winsys i was writing on Linux [0] so i have a general idea of how
they work) for someone with knowledge about ReactOS' graphics stack, so i
suppose there are reasons it hasn't been fixed yet (maybe it relies on driver
support and they plan to change the driver model? Just an assumption).

[0] [https://i.imgur.com/v6NaqNW.png](https://i.imgur.com/v6NaqNW.png)

------
steinuil
Does anybody have experience with using ReactOS for hosting e.g. videogame
servers? I wanted to host the servers of a few old games in a vm (just for
some friends), and I'd obviously much rather run ReactOS than some outdated
Windows.

~~~
nailuj
Wine would probably be worth a shot as well.

------
apeacox
Kudos to ReactOS team! I've never used it in production, but I tried it
several times during the years and I was always fascinated by the efforts made
to improve this OS.

------
goffi
Would it make sense (understand: is it now stable and compatible enough) to
use it as a development platform for Windows version of a software (supposing
that we haven't any real Windows available)? Any experience with it?

I would be really interested in this use case.

Congrats for all this work through years!

~~~
bonzini
The mingw cross toolchain works surprisingly well; pesign and msitools (living
under the GNOME umbrella) can also be used to produce UI-less .msi installers
through a (very) minimal Linux-native version of Wix called Wixl.

(I was one of the two original authors of msitools, taking care of porting
Wine's msi DLLs to a POSIX environment. The other guy took care of making the
API less Windows-like, ported .cab file support and wrote Wixl).

~~~
SXX
And if project using CMake then it's even better with MXE [1]. It's basically
let you build toolchain with no effort by typing few commands and while I
didn't test Wix it's perfectly capable of creating installer with CPack /
NSIS.

Another option is to use AppVeyor CI + Microsoft's Vcpkg [2], it's also
integrated with CMake and require no manual setup.

[1] [http://mxe.cc/](http://mxe.cc/) [2]
[https://github.com/Microsoft/vcpkg](https://github.com/Microsoft/vcpkg)

~~~
bonzini
NSIS (imperative) is much inferior to MSI (declarative). MSI tracks each
file's users and is able to automatically uninstall packages as well as
rollback installs that fail in the mid of a transaction.

~~~
SXX
Thanks for the information. Now I have a reason to check Wix. Though so far
NSIS worked well enough because we efficiently only have one component, all
libraries needed just bundled inside and it's just 15-50MB in size.

------
flashdance
If I was trying to run a legacy Windows application, would I have more luck
with ReactOS or linux/WINE?

I know both projects share a lot of code, so if one is better, why is that the
case?

~~~
coolspot
One major difference is that ReactOS uses windows drivers for your hardware.

~~~
flashdance
Cool!

------
digi_owl
And the livecd is just a 70MB zip file, interesting.

~~~
kronos29296
It does make me wonder where did the rest of the space in a Windows CD go to?
I mean they needed a full cd for it and it wasn't even a live cd. And React OS
should atleast have most of WinXP's features and yet is much smaller. What did
microsoft use the rest of the space for?

~~~
kuschku
Roughly 20% of the space used in Windows’ exe’s and .dll’s is EXIF and similar
metadata in image assets. It’s very wasteful.

They probably never tried to reduce the size.

~~~
mmastrac
This seems unlikely, but giving you the benefit of the doubt - is there some
research on this?

~~~
noisem4ker
Windows is Bloated, Thanks to Adobe’s Extensible Metadata Platform
[https://www.thurrott.com/windows/109962/windows-bloated-
than...](https://www.thurrott.com/windows/109962/windows-bloated-thanks-
adobes-extensible-metadata-platform)

Also previously discussed here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14192353](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14192353)

It turns out that the overall Windows bloat due to XMP tags amounts to
something like 5MB.

~~~
kuschku
Interesting, I missed the follow up, and had only read
[https://www.thurrott.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Bloat-
Gr...](https://www.thurrott.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Bloat-Graphs.png)

------
barking
I can see that this is an awesome achievement but why would people, not
involved in the project, choose to use it instead of other operating systems
such as windows itself?

~~~
icebraining
_What are the differences between Windows and ReactOS?_

 _There are mainly two. Firstly ReactOS is open source. Secondly ReactOS is
Free. Also Windows (especially the newer versions) are known to monitor all
your activity by default. So if you 're concerned about your privacy or just
don't want to share any personal info, we promise (and you can check our
source code) that we don't track any of your data._

~~~
skrowl
"Monitor all your activity by default" is serious FUD here. There is some
telemetry data collected and phoned home, but it's not like they're monitoring
what websites you go to, what you write in your Word docs, etc.

~~~
PrimHelios
Last time I checked, Edge still sent all your keystrokes to Microsoft in
plaintext and over HTTP (not HTTPS).

So yeah, they are (at least were) monitoring not only what sites you went to,
but also what you typed into them.

~~~
viraptor
Went looking for it just in case it's true and... nothing. There's a case of
predictive text system in windows 10 which can query for suggestions (there's
an option to disable it), but no keylogger either in edge or windows that I
can find. And the predictive text didn't use HTTP.

------
ducttape12
Using a third party implementation of the Win32 API reminds me of vegan
cheese. It's great in theory, but it's never quite good enough. You'll either
end up giving up and eating real cheese (using Microsoft Windows) or use some
other ingredient (a different software product that runs natively on your OS
of choice).

~~~
veganjay
Slightly off topic but you mentioned it. There have been some great
developments in vegan cheese, most notably Daiya. The first time I tried it at
a restaurant I sent it back thinking they made a mistake by giving me dairy
cheese.

~~~
Koshkin
Going back to the topic, I hope that ReactOS/Wine will sometime become a
better Windows than Windows itself. (This, at least, is what was said about
OS/2). In some ways it already is, I am sure.

~~~
veganjay
I agree. Although "better" depends on opinion and usage. For some of my needs,
such as developing for HoloLens, ReactOS has a long way to go. But for other
things, such as solving Windows crackmes, ReactOS might be a good candidate.

------
ocdtrekkie
This might be a good candidate for running my automation software in the
future. I actually run it headless, but on Windows with a GUI for
compatibility reasons with the way I wrote it (Visual Basic, WinForms, etc.).
I was a little sad buying a Windows license for a single-app headless PC, and
had to do a lot to mitigate unwanted Windows 10 behavior.

------
esistgut
Why should I choose this over a Linux/Wine configuration? Maybe it is
compatible with Windows drivers?

~~~
bonzini
Yes, it is compatible with some older Windows drivers.

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DonnyV
It supports .NET 2.0!!
[https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=ReactOS-...](https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=ReactOS-0.4.2-Released)

------
wyldfire
Is there any popular CI-testing service providing ReactOS as a
build/test/deploy target? It would be interesting if someone like Travis or
Appveyor could offer that.

------
listic
I guess I should have bought a GeForce 9 series videocard instead of GeForce
10, as it's the last one having drivers for Windows XP. Might have worked with
ReactOS.

------
listic
Which Windows version are they emulating now?

~~~
gpvos
It's not possible to say that precisely; the closest thing I could find is
this:
[https://www.reactos.org/wiki/Missing_ReactOS_Functionality](https://www.reactos.org/wiki/Missing_ReactOS_Functionality)
.

~~~
gpvos
On the outdated page
[https://www.reactos.org/wiki/Version_Status](https://www.reactos.org/wiki/Version_Status)
you can see that Windows 2003 (the server version of XP) is a bit of a target.

------
computerwizard
Will it ever be able to run Adobe Creative Cloud programs?

~~~
coolspot
Don't see why not.

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jancsika
Does it run msys2?

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shamerd
Cool

------
horusthecat
Thank god, I was wondering what I'd replace Solaris with

------
matthew349hall
I really despise this. These developers could give the world someone new,
instead they clone exactly what they believe is evil.

~~~
igitur
The great thing about developers working on a project in their free time, is
that they can choose anything they want. They're not constrained by what other
people think they should be doing, despicable or otherwise.

