
Explorer Shell Merged - jeditobe
https://reactos.org/node/920
======
jeditobe
A lot of screenshots

[http://community.reactos.org/index.php/news/enjoy-the-new-
re...](http://community.reactos.org/index.php/news/enjoy-the-new-reactos-
explorer)

~~~
digi_owl
Looks more Win2k than XP, and that is a good thing in my book.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
ReactOS has some theming support, so you can make it look Luna-ish if you
want.

~~~
digi_owl
Deities forbid...

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rbanffy
I commend their dedication, but I don't quite understand why they do it. Is it
fun to develop? What do the developers get from it?

I understand what the Linux kernel developers get (it touches the lives of
almost every living human being) or the BSD folks do (it's a exquisitely well
built OS) or the Haiku ones (it's a really cool OS), but reimplementing
Windows, with all the cruft needed to be binary compatible is an exercise the
joys of which completely elude me.

~~~
captainmuon
For those who work on it, it probably is just for fun.

But Windows is, at its core, not a completely bad OS. I heard many parts of it
are actually pretty well-engineered. The Windows NT kernel has pluggable
subsystems, one of which is for Windows applications, but there used to be
also a POSIX layer. In the kernel, almost everything is an object and can have
ACLs (security descriptors). You actually do have something like Linux' /dev
and /proc, it's just not exposed to the shell (you can sometimes see hard
drive device paths, not legacy drive letters like C:, shine through the
cracks, but mostly when there are boot problems).

Even in the shell, there are a few neat ideas. Everything is a (COM) object,
and has interfaces. Applications can embed parts of the shell, e.g. explorer
windows, and they can also contribute back parts, like custom places and icon
types.

Of course there are layers and layers of cruft in Windows, but funnily, the
older parts seem to be better engineered (especially taking to account their
age, and looking over things like legacy 8.3 module names). Its a bit telling
that the new Windows Runtime is actually a new version of native COM
underneath, and not .NET CLR (but both are fully brigded).

I think the hardest part to emulate for ReactOS is not the old cruft, but the
modern cruft. WPF for example does have a few nice ideas, but its insanely
huge and complicated. And a typical windows system has like 4 different,
incompatible .NET runtime libraries (.NET, Silverlight, WPF, WinRT). This is
one thing I hope MS will get sorted out in the future.

~~~
cbd1984
Core Windows is, still, Windows NT, which was designed by Dave Cutler, who
designed a number of OSes for DEC, which changed its name to Digital before it
was bought by Compaq, which then merged with HP, which is its own can of
worms.

Cutler designed RSX-11M, VMS, and VAXELN (a real-time OS for the VAX), which
are or were all serious OSes. VMS in specific was a serious competitor to
Unix; in the form of OpenVMS, running on Alpha and Itanium, it still exists.

So Windows NT is a foundation made by someone who knows OSes and OS design; in
many markets (not all, not that I think my parenthetical will stop people from
"correcting" me) it's the last OS family _not_ based on a fundamentally Unix-
like foundation. Having an Open Source version of that is interesting for
historical reasons, if nothing else, and there's something to be said for
hybrid vigor if some bright spark figures a way to port a few concepts to the
rest of the OS world.

~~~
heywire
For anyone who is interested in the story of the original development of
Windows NT, check out the G. Pascal Zachary book, Showstopper.

~~~
teh_klev
I would agree, not read my copy for a very long time but it's very enjoyable.
I think I read it at around the same time as I last read "The Soul of a New
Machine" by Tracy Kidder, also a worthwhile read for some of the younger
HN'ers who missed out on that era.

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overgard
Looking at those screenshots made me a bit nostalgic for the old windows 2000
UI. It wasn't exactly showy, but from a UX experience it was great (clean
lines, nice spacing, easy to find things, responsive, consistent). Every UI
Microsoft has done since then has sort of been a regression, even if not a
terrible one. Windows XP looked like a cheap toy, Aero was pretty but their
insistence on killing menus and blending UI elements with the title bar was
weird, and metro is awkward on a desktop. I know you can still go back to
"classic" mode, but it's definitely a second class citizen at this point.

~~~
dingdingdang
Why is it "second class citizen"? I've used it exclusively with Win7 and it
works fine (granted it does need 7 Taskbar Tweaker for best results..). I have
never ever liked the Aero Peek feature of Win7: it invariably adds extra steps
and mouse work to the simple task of switching between apps for no good reason
(no, seeing a mini thumbnail of an app I already know is running does not make
anything clearer or better).

ReactOS, I will be happy to go there if I ever get the chance from a
compatibility standpoint.

~~~
overgard
I guess it's subjective, but in windows 7 the aesthetics are weird. The
taskbar looks funny, a lot of the UI dialogs were obviously not designed with
that styling in mind, and so on. In windows 8 they killed the theme
completely. (Although once you get rid of metro, I actually like the windows 8
theme quite a bit).

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TazeTSchnitzel
Oh man, this is pretty big. Good as it was at the time, it's nice that ROS
finally, _finally_ gets the shell it's always deserved.

I wonder how well it will interact with Windows apps that deal with
explorer.exe.

~~~
chris_wot
Depends on the app - sometimes the apps don't work well under Windows - as
Raymond Chen found.

[http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2011/08/03/10192...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2011/08/03/10192225.aspx)

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secfirstmd
As someone who often trains people in places in the world with low levels of
IT literacy - where Windows is by far the dominant platform (very little
chance of most people affording Mac or being able to pick up Linux). I've
always thought ReactOS had a useful ability to bridge the problem of people a)
not being able to afford new versions of Windows b) Even when they do, often
ending up with counterfeit versions of it.

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userbinator
Looks good at first glance, but there's something about the icons that
compared to the real Windows ones doesn't seem quite right; I understand
there's copyright issues with using the Windows icons exactly, but these icons
have a very "Linux-ish" appearance to them, for lack of a better term.

~~~
oblio
They're probably stock Tango items. You've probably seen them before in Linux
distributions and OSS software, ergo the association.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
In fact, they _are_ stock Tango icons.

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erikb
I never heard about reactos before. Am I right to assume that this is Windows
98 as Open Source project? Am I right to assume that a lot of people who hate
that XP is not maintaned anymore will switch to something like that instead of
Linux or BSD? If that's true I have to sit in a corner for a while crying my
heart out...

~~~
jeditobe
Actually this is Windows 2003\XP as Open Source project

------
jeditobe
If somebody wants to support ReactOS development, he can do it by use of
[https://www.bountysource.com/teams/reactos/issues](https://www.bountysource.com/teams/reactos/issues)

Cast your bounties on bugs that bother you.

------
dingdingdang
Congratulations to the ReactOS team, awesome work! :)

