
ReactOS 0.3.14 Released - jhack
http://www.reactos.org/en/news_page_70.html
======
jamesu
Having followed this project for around a decade, it amazes how slow it is
being developed compared to Haiku.

On the surface it looks like windows 2000, but as soon as you try and do
anything useful, you bump into problems. Firefox hangs the system when
loading. Fonts don't always draw correctly. LOTS of things are missing. Quite
often i press a button on a dialog, and it does nothing - why was is it even
enabled if it doesn't work?

Still a long way to go!

~~~
diminish
I have been watching this project for 7 years already; why doesn't ReactOS
simply target running IE7, 8, 9? if they could do that millions of people
would use it in VMs.

~~~
cookiecaper
Unfortunately WINE and WINE derivatives are not in a state where they can be
trusted to render pages as IE would render pages. WINE changes very quickly.
The drawing code is no exception; they've spent the last year or so
integrating a DIB engine, which will be among the flagship features of 1.4.

WINE is not likely to reflect a pixel-perfect representation of what your IE
users will see and that's the simple fact. I've been bitten before by trusting
the output of an IE in WINE. For testing IE, there is still no substitute for
the official Windows platform. I don't think there will ever really be one,
but it may be a decent distant-future goal for WINE: consistent pixel-perfect
rendering in every IE version.

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xxqs
I still don't understand the motivation for this project. If you ought to run
a windows application, you use windows anyway. If you like to move to an
opensource platform, you have to invest in migrating your applications anyway.

I don't get where ReactOS fits in this picture.

also how people can spend their precious time in re-implementing an existing
architecture? There's lots of interesting and creative projects to actually
build something new.

~~~
acuozzo
> There's lots of interesting and creative projects to actually build
> something new.

Can you recommend one that involves building a kernel, from scratch, that at
least _some_ people will use?

~~~
rbanffy
You either build something new or you build something people will use.
Building a Win32-compatible kernel is not something new. It's only a
reimplementation of something very old.

It's not saying it's not an interesting project in itself - it's just not
something I would attempt

~~~
xxqs
simply because there are less boring things :)

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devindotcom
Nice. I won't pretend I've been following the project closely, but it really
is an interesting and powerful thing they're doing.

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tigerweeds
does it work on a bootable flash drive?

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
I think somebody got it to install, but if I remember correctly, USB support
is not yet in stable releases.

~~~
tigerweeds
I just tried it and doesn't boot. Would really like to have it on a flash
drive, shame it doesn't work yet... :\

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iRobot
The second they launch a stable version I can use to replace windows XP
embedded will be a real milestone.

Lots of plant touchscreens and industrial computers run a stripped down
version of windows NT 3.51, win2k or XP (XP embedded is just a stripped down
XP) which dont need any bells and whistles, just a solid network connection
and the ability to run the win32 api. I have over 30 of these panel pc's
around various factories running touch screen apps in place of explorer.exe so
the desktop is not important to me and the demand is expanding all the time.

Thanks for the time and effort lads, I'm downloading it now to give it a go
:-)

~~~
cookiecaper
Not sure why you need ReactOS if that's the only requirement. You should just
put stripped-down Linux installs in their place and run WINE, on which almost
all applications work perfectly well. ReactOS in fact is mostly a kernel
project. The majority of their userland support comes from WINE. The
difference is that they are trying to clone the kernel to provide the truest
Windows-like experience (including driver compatibility).

If you don't need the hardware support the reality is that you'll be much
better off using a newer version of WINE on a Linux installation than you
would be using a ReactOS snapshot.

~~~
bwarp
Driver compatibility is likely to be more important as a lot of embedded
systems use proprietary and certified drivers which will never work on Linux.

Not to mention, WINE is far from perfect. I'd argue that ReactOS, albeit with
chunks of it coming from WINE is still far more likely to behave like a real
Windows machine.

At the end of the day, it'll probably come down to cost and an in situ
replacement of the OS without any application rewrite or hardware changes is
cheapest.

~~~
cookiecaper
>Not to mention, WINE is far from perfect. I'd argue that ReactOS, albeit with
chunks of it coming from WINE is still far more likely to behave like a real
Windows machine.

I would really like to know why you think this. ReactOS's userspace support
_is_ WINE almost entirely. They may write extra win32 applications like
explorer.exe for use with ReactOS, but they do not use a separate runtime
translator. They may modify portions of WINE to work with their ring 0
graphics code or whatever, but almost all of the serious work is done by WINE.

WINE is tested broadly on Linux platforms and the bugs usually get solved
quickly. ReactOS is barely tested at all and I would not expect the kernel to
be remotely stable for a long time yet. Why do you think ReactOS, which is
usually not using a very recent WINE base (at least not in snapshots), would
be more stable than Linux + WINE?

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wildster
To get were they are is an amazing achievement, but it still looks like Window
95.

~~~
wvenable
From the release notes: "ReactOS now has the infrastructure needed to theme
the user interface and shell, allowing users to install and use something
besides the classic Windows theme."

~~~
prg318
Another thing noted on the homepage to keep in mind -- "Please bear in mind
that ReactOS 0.3.14 is still in alpha stage, meaning it is not feature-
complete and is not recommended for everyday use." That being said, I gave it
another shot in VirtualBox with the recommended guest settings (Windows NT 4)
and I was pleasantly surprised of how smooth it felt. This project has come a
long way.

