
ReactOS Community Edition - kercker
http://community.reactos.org/index.php/features
======
pjc50
I still don't really understand the advantage of ReactOS in any particular
situation, although I suppose if you really liked NT-era Windows (and people
do) it's a re-enactment society for that.

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sdegutis
With XP ending support, I see many corporate customers switching to ReactOS.
Firstly it's free rather than paying for a Windows upgrade, and secondly the
premise is that all your apps will keep working exactly the same way, so no
compatibility problems, and hence hopefully little to no downtime.

~~~
afreak
To think that businesses will latch on to a solution that has never left alpha
stage for development is shortsighted at best. There are far better solutions
for making your XP applications continue to operate on modern systems.

Or what we will see instead is the status quo support or not from Microsoft.
There are plenty of 9x machines out there.

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bippi
Having an elevator-pitch somewhere obvious where an idiot like me could
see/find it would have been nice. They really could have put 'awesome' in 15
different fonts and sizes, and maybe some 'more awesome' in there and it would
have told me just as much.

I'll save everyone the wikipedia jump: This is intended to be binary-
compatible with windows NT-based applications.

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kelvin0
Wow, now if these guys could magically continue support for WinXP, they would
become filthy rich! Of course this is not possible, since it would entail
uninstalling all current XP machines and installing ReactOS and hoping that
ReactOS == WinXP

~~~
camus2
You could still maintain a level of compatibility for some critical enterprise
apps, and ReactOS could provide enterprise services for specific apps.

Anyway,there is no silver bullets or easy solution to the XP migration
problem,especially critical apps that relies on IE<=8 depreceated features.
Does ReactOS runs IE by the way?

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iso8859-1
It does not.

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lnlyplnt
Has anybody tried this? Thoughts? How well does windows compatibility work
IRL?

~~~
tmikaeld
Since they doesn't go into any specifics, i suspect the same as wine?

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M2Ys4U
It's been some time since I've looked at ReactOS, but it's a bit more than
that.

ReactOS actually uses some of the wine libs, and the two projects work
together.

IIRC, ReactOS actually aims for driver compatibility, so you should be able to
completely replace Windows with React.

~~~
davidgerard
Well, they don't "work together" \- Wine devs avoid ReactOS code and devs like
the plague. However, Wine is happy for ReactOS to use their DLLs - so Wine
does Win32 and ReactOS does the lower, weirder layers that Wine doesn't bother
with.

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pritambaral
> Wine devs avoid ReactOS code and devs like the plague

Is this due to any patent/copyright issues?

~~~
davidgerard
Copyright worries, I believe. Wine is paranoid of contributors who may have
looked too closely at Windows or reverse-engineered it in potentially risky
ways. I am vague on details.

Also, Wine is LGPL and ReactOS is GPL, so no code can flow in that direction.

~~~
VoiceOfWisdom
uaygsfdbzf, you are marked as dead. I believe this is due to a somewhat brusk
comment you made earlier, but your other comments deserve to be seen.

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ForHackernews
I wonder if ReactOS could position themselves as an upgrade path for Windows
XP users, now that Microsoft is ending support?

"Switch to ReactOS--run your legacy apps out of the box, and stay current with
security."

~~~
chriswarbo
Being under active development doesn't mean that ReactOS is secure. Sure,
there's attention being paid to OS-level security policies (user accounts,
passwords, etc.) but there's nowhere near enough dev resources to focus on the
kind of vulnerabilities that are actually exploited against win32 systems (ie.
bugs).

Running a Windows firewall and virus scanner might help, but a) do they run
reliably (they certainly hook into the OS more than most standard apps) and b)
how many exploits will be ReacOS-specific?

~~~
ForHackernews
That's an interesting question: Is ReactOS even vulnerable to win32 exploits?
In other words, are the vulnerabilities flaws in design, or flaws in
implementation? (Or some of each?)

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davidgerard
Wine does Win32 well enough to run malware. It's not so much 'sploits as just
running software that does socially unpleasant things.

~~~
ForHackernews
I guess they've improved their compatibility since 2005:
[http://archive09.linux.com/feature/42031](http://archive09.linux.com/feature/42031)

~~~
davidgerard
It's actually in the FAQ:
[http://wiki.winehq.org/FAQ#head-1c91cac836dd52754c846d2ef62b...](http://wiki.winehq.org/FAQ#head-1c91cac836dd52754c846d2ef62be4f346eebe87)

tl;dr don't run toxic waste without due caution.

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skrowl
This appears to be a pure marketing site aimed at getting IndieGoGo donations.
Nothing really new to see here if you've looked at ReactOS in the past (no,
0.4 isn't out yet).

~~~
jksmith
I think the project is worthy of marketing. Nothing wrong with trying to get
some jake together to speed development if that's what they're trying to do.
Full time developers should be working on this effort.

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pawelkomarnicki
Hah my first thought seeing screenshots was "oh, looks like windows 95" :D but
the page was more about "joining a revolution" than giving me actual
information

