
ReactOS releases 0.4.8 with experimental Vista/7/10 software compatibility - bratao
https://reactos.org/project-news/reactos-048-released
======
owenversteeg
This has been one of my favorite software projects to watch, because it's such
an insanely monumental undertaking and moves so damn slowly. There were people
working on this two decades ago, putting in tiny fixes and little bits of code
and whatnot, and they did it even knowing that basically nobody would see
their work for decades.

Hell, I have never seen a ReactOS installation in the wild, and I'm the kind
of person whose friends install Haiku, Nix and NetBSD as their daily drivers.
And the second-hand stories I've heard about people who did install React was
basically "I was bored, I put it on a drive, played around for 5 minutes, and
wiped it."

But that doesn't discourage them. Meanwhile, work keeps going on in the
background. So many untold man-hours of thankless work going into the project,
and the vast majority of that "hard" work with no payoff for years.

And now it's finally getting close to actual Windows, after decades of work,
and soon (well, years, but still) people will be using it everywhere as a
replacement for Windows.

This is one of the most important software projects in history. My hat is off
to the ReactOS developers, and congratulations on the latest release.

[edit] Here are the names of the 75 programmers that have worked on ReactOS:
[https://github.com/reactos/reactos/blob/master/CREDITS](https://github.com/reactos/reactos/blob/master/CREDITS)

~~~
BinaryIdiot
> soon (well, years, but still) people will be using it everywhere as a
> replacement for Windows.

No they won't. It's a fringe OS that requires technical expertise to install.
Not only that but it looks like "old Windows". Users won't want to work with a
Windows from a decade ago. Not only that but it'll have bugs and no support.

You'll see tiny pockets of people using it but as Microsoft gets closer and
closer to simply having a free OS it doesn't seem likely anyone would ever use
this OS for anything beyond "hey, that's cool!".

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _Users won 't want to work with a Windows from a decade ago. Not only that
> but it'll have bugs and no support._

Depending on the age group, I guess. I know plenty of people who would say
that Windows had its peak usability around Windows 2000/2003 and only got
heavier and more confusing later on.

If I know that ReactOS had a good chance of running most regular Windows
applications, I'd install it on my mother's laptop in a heartbeat, and she
would love to see the familiar, lightweight OS.

~~~
smt88
> * I know plenty of people who would say that Windows had its peak usability
> around Windows 2000/2003 and only got heavier and more confusing later on.*

Given Microsoft's mostly successful effort to make Windows more friendly to
the user, I find it hard to believe any of these people have extensive
experience with Windows 7+

~~~
TeMPOraL
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 this'll change in the next hardware
upgrade cycle...

~~~
x0x
I've been windows power user for many years before I switched to Linux. I can
say that WinXP was one of the best windows and Win7 was okay and usable. Win8
and Win10 complete shit. Everyone I know had issues with it and had hard times
using it. Asking if it was possible to use at least Win7 again. Windows
completely screwed up there UI thinking it would be easier for people to use
and in process completely killing windows. Not to mantion Win8/10
security/privacy horror storries. The last usable windows was Win7. This is
why I see many people switching to Mac OS X or Linux.

~~~
Koshkin
> _WinXP was one of the best windows_

On a somewhat more objective note, there was _a lot_ of criticism back when it
came out. (Specifically, about "the bloat". Everything is relative, I guess;
one can say that things continued to get worse and worse from Windows 2000 on,
although some would swear that it was NT4 that was the best Windows ever -
e.g. it ran in 16MB of RAM vs. Windows 2000 that raised the requirement to
32MB; for comparison, Windows 95 only needed 8MB.)

------
rocky1138
What I like about this project, besides the dedication and professionalism of
the team behind it, is that it offers PC gamers a possible way to play
Windows-era games moving forward. In a decade or two, we likely won't be able
to activate a Windows XP machine (and wouldn't want to with all of the
security hazards either) so it's great to have a free and open source project
to run our Windows stuff.

~~~
bitL
Recently I had an issue activating XP on Eee PC after a RAM/SSD upgrade
(setting it up as a retro-gaming console, better performance than RetroPie). I
had to resort to registry hacks and msoobe to suppress activation forever,
despite having product key at the back of the netbook - XP CD wasn't accepting
it at all. One more situation where legal owners have to waste more time than
pirates... If ReactOS makes it far enough to run on Eee PC, I'll get rid of
XP.

~~~
rocky1138
I've been fiddling around with my Eee PC 701 in the past couple of weeks. Is
there still a community for this sort of thing? RetroPie supports Eee PC?

~~~
bitL
I have the next gen 901; you can use any of the 32-bit emulation platforms on
Windows and the 1.6GHz Atom (that could be overclocked to 1.8) is
significantly faster than any Raspberry Pi, so you have a larger pool of games
you can play at a proper speed. I upgraded it to 2GB RAM/60GB SSD, and it
really flies. It's only slightly larger than a handheld console, so I thought
converting it to a retro machine would be perfect use for it ;-) I tried Linux
Mint on it initially but it was much slower than XP, so I am sticking with XP.

~~~
megaman22
The last time I was using my eeePC 901, I managed to put Windows 8 on it, and
I remember it being faster than either the XP or Ubuntu/Mint varieties I tried
on it.

~~~
anthk
Slitaz would blew both 8 and Mint. Try it.

------
jug
I feel like ReactOS has gained more attention lately and hope some of it will
spill over to support of this project. It’s a bit like you need to reach a
critical mass in features and usability, and until then it’s an uphill battle
to maintain enough traction. Haiku is another cool project, especially as
someone who will always have a warm spot left for the Amiga. But until the
long waited for beta is out, I think they have an ever more dangerously steep
uphill path to climb.

~~~
erric
Haiku OS[0] is a BeOS inspired OS, though I do see some articles about a port
of it to Amiga hardware.

[0][https://www.haiku-os.org/](https://www.haiku-os.org/)
[1][http://www.generationamiga.com/2017/09/03/haiku-os-for-
amiga...](http://www.generationamiga.com/2017/09/03/haiku-os-for-
amigaone-500-computers-68k-port-in-development/)

~~~
antod
They must've meant AROS [http://www.aros.org/](http://www.aros.org/)

~~~
ZenoArrow
Within the Amiga community there's a certain level of admiration for HaikuOS,
as BeOS/HaikuOS is seen by these individuals as a spiritual successor to
AmigaOS. As you point out, AROS is the open-source reimplementation of
AmigaOS, so it's worth mentioning it, I just wanted to clarify why the
Amiga+Haiku link might have been made.

~~~
nickpsecurity
Those of you discussing Amiga might find this comment from skrzyp interesting:

[https://lobste.rs/s/vkpekg/morphos_3_10_released#c_ktgnn3](https://lobste.rs/s/vkpekg/morphos_3_10_released#c_ktgnn3)

It gives a huge, deep history lesson from author's perspective covering
important events, hardware/software, and especially the culture. It was
fascinating. Also made me hold off on MorphOS for one of my projects.

~~~
ZenoArrow
Thanks for sharing the comment, but it's got a number of inaccuracies. For
example...

> "The problem was that OS wasn’t completely prepared for that, but clever
> people from Phase5 found a way - they made their own microkernel (called
> PowerUP, later WarpUP)"

PowerUP and WarpUP were competitors, and were the seeds for the later Red vs.
Blue civil war.

If you'd like a clearer history of the Amiga, I'd recommend this series of
articles on Ars Technica (it doesn't mention AROS, but is otherwise a good
introduction):

[https://arstechnica.com/series/history-of-the-
amiga/](https://arstechnica.com/series/history-of-the-amiga/)

------
richard_todd
One day when Windows drifts too far away from its golden age functionality, it
will be great if ReactOS can fill the gap. However, I feel like MS could one-
up them overnight by providing a sandboxed 32-bit XP VM as part of current
windows. We’d get back DOS support and compatibility with old programs would
be better. Call it Windows Subsystem for Windows or whatever. That would also
pave the way to removing a lot of Win32 cruft from the main codebase, which MS
seems very itchy to do.

~~~
gambiting
It was already a thing in Windows Vista - at least in Enterprise, you could
download a "windows xp " compatibility package, right click on any application
and start it in windows XP - it would silently start XP in the background and
render the app the same way as a native Vista app, while running on the XP
kernel in the background. I have no idea if it exists in newer versions of
Windows however.

~~~
Jaruzel
No it doesn't, unfortunately.

The best option they suggest is moving it to a VM under Windows 10's Hyper-V:

[https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windows/en-
US/1f...](https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windows/en-
US/1f6e73ad-b3f0-4c05-9fb4-0f0237420f6b/how-to-legally-run-xp-mode-vm-with-
windows-10-host?forum=w7itprovirt)

------
Panino
> Several bugs have been squashed in the ReactOS CC and Freeloader, allowing
> it to boot in 96MB hardware (smaller RAM need than our 0.4.7 release).

This is an impressive update when most projects, and not necessarily wrongly,
always move in the opposite direction. Good to see.

As a free Unix user I'm primarily interested in ReactOS in order to test
certain Windows things such as cwrsync over ssh. I tried installing ReactOS
about a month ago but didn't have the right hardware to make it through the
installer. I will definitely try again.

------
boznz
Windows 10 is still not a good option for embedded x86 systems even in its
proper supported embedded mode. Once I've replaced the shell, turned off all
the services and junk programs and opened the one port on the firewall my
industrial touchscreen application requires I would really rather windows take
the hint not to change anything and leave things be.

I have been keeping an eye on Reactos for over 10 years, it is still a
promising candidate for my legacy systems, USB Install would still be good to
have as it is painfully hard to get it on to newer systems which don't have
Optical drives.

It took me a while but I can now compile my gui applications for Linux, so
going forward that is my strategy, but lots of factories out there still
scared to move off windows XP and Reactos would be ideal.

------
wensley
Seen ReactOS pop up a few times and always thought it was something to do with
the Facebook Javascript library. This is really amazing, I'm looking forward
to seeing where it goes.

~~~
bartread
Yeah, I've been confused too. The website itself doesn't help: no "About" or
"What is ReactOS?" in the main nav. I ended up looking it up on Wikipedia to
find out what it is: an open source OS that is intended to be binary
compatible with Windows.

This does actually ring a bell for me - I seem to remember mention of it very
early in the century. That perhaps cuts to the heart of the issue: it's been
going as a project since 1996, yet it's still only considered alpha. In other
words, I'm not so sure it's going anywhere fast, and I'm not sure what you'd
really use it for.

~~~
andreiw
I bet in 20 years no one will know what ReactJS even is, but ReactOS very much
will preserve NT regardless of Microsoft’s successes.

ReactOS is a usable Windows NT 6+ clone, with kernel ABI ( driver ) compat,
that runs real software. What are you comparing it to, to be able to qualify
the speed of its development?

~~~
pavs
> I bet in 20 years no one will know what ReactJS even is, but ReactOS very
> much will preserve NT regardless of Microsoft’s successes.

Don't be sure about something in the tech on such a long time frame. Just to
put things into context. Andoird is less than 10 years old and already close
to windows market share territory. Facebook is only 14 years old.

I can't even imagine to comprehend what will happen 20 years from now.

~~~
zaarn
The JS ecosystem is as of now still a rather ... fast paced environment. There
is a lot of churn in there. I don't think ReactJS will survive ReactOS.

------
bitmapbrother
With the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruling that API's are
copyrightable I wonder what type of impact it could have on open source
projects, such as ReactOS, if the copyright holder ever decided to take
action.

~~~
carussell
1\. The ReactOS project's implementation of Windows APIs is purely for
compatibility reasons; on the other hand, Android's implementation was not
meant as a compatibility layer for existing apps. (In fact, that Android _didn
't_ implement a compatibility layer was a huge sticking point for the Sun
contingent within Oracle—although if we're honest, we know the motivations for
Oracle proper are the dollar signs.) It wouldn't be a good idea to try and
draw direct parallels between the two.

2\. _Oracle v Google_ still isn't over, so even drawing any inferences about
_Oracle v Google_ itself would be premature.

3\. The copyright holder here is MS. Any action on their part to go after
ReactOS now be the undoing of all the goodwill they've built in the
Nadella/MS-on-GitHub era. The result would be (a) a bunch of I-told-you-sos
from the leery folks still holding on to their grudges today, and (b) a
massive, _massive_ , innoculating "fool me once…" reaction among the folks
who'd actually been made suckers for not heeding the grudgeholders' warnings.
All in all, it would be a spectacularly bad idea for MS at this point,
especially given how much weaker their empire has already gotten in the last
decade.

------
bhanu423
One of the most interesting changelog that I have read in a While. Well
written, thoughtful and gave me good insight into the project.

~~~
iforgotpassword
Indeed a great read to catch up with the project.

> Talking about the notification tray, due to Ged’s work, icons of killed and
> finished process are now automatically removed, even when apps crash. This
> is something that Windows doesn't even provide with Win10, and many Windows
> users may have noticed.

Made me chuckle. This has bothered me since forever. It seemed like such a low
hanging fruit to fix, I wonder why Microsoft never did.

~~~
fluxsauce
> I wonder why Microsoft never did.

I'm assuming it's because of the size of the codebase, available engineering
resources, return-on-investment calculation, and a business prioritization of
new features over refinement.

Most engineers can look at their own work or codebase and think, "well, that's
a bit shit but it works well enough." I can't imagine their backlog. I'm sure
it's lurking in an issue queue somewhere.

~~~
dfox
One notable thing is that in Windows the behavior of taskbar changed around
the time of Windows 98SE/2000 (I'm not sure in which version exactly).
Originally the "orphaned" tray icons just were there and you could not cause
them to go away, "new" behavior is that first event (ie. hover) causes them to
be destroyed.

~~~
mschuster91
Guesswork: once you hover over an icon in the taskbar, later Windows checks if
the process (or, rather, window, as the icon will be tied to the window handle
you get from CreateWindowEx) handle belonging to it is still alive. If not
(aka it cannot find a target window to send the message to) the icon gets
destroyed.

ReactOS, another guess here, does either a polling check if all taskbar icons
have valid process handles or a check whenever a process exits.

~~~
dfox
AFAIK the taskbar forwards the window messages destined for the icon to window
that owns the icon and in the "new" Windows' behavior simply notices that such
window does not exist. ReactOS behavior probably works on the basis of hooking
destruction of the owner window (although I suspect that on Windows windows
owned by killed process will not get WM_DESTROY message, but it's wild guess
as I'm completely out of my rudimentary and rusty knowledge of WinAPI there).

------
withinrafael
I've submitted non-clean-room reverse engineered code to ReactOS years ago
when I was younger and it was accepted with no questions asked. But since that
day, I can't bring myself to believe all of this is clean-room reverse
engineered.

I hope it was an outlier event and that external contributions are better
audited today.

~~~
d33
As long as nothing can't be proved, why bother? I don't think one could raise
a good point about ethics in favor of Microsoft. DMCA is shit.

------
boramalper
Genuine question: What advantage does ReactOS provide over Wine?

[https://www.reactos.org/wiki/WINE](https://www.reactos.org/wiki/WINE)
explains a bit but still doesn't answer the question.

P.S. oh by the way, the developers of both projects are apparently
collaborating and ReactOS uses Wine's DLLs for their userspace, so my question
is not meant to criticise the "double-effort" or anything like that.

~~~
pnloyd
I've wondered this myself, anyone know if ReactOS can run anything wine can't?

I tried wine-develolment a few days ago and 3D performance is still rather
spotty (amongst all the other usuall hiccups). That being said is has helped
me play a few games with a decent experience.

~~~
Kliment
Drivers for one - reactos can be used for Windows driver testing, wine cannot.

------
snvzz
The USB support isn't quite there yet (major rework didn't make it this
release) but otherwise this is a pretty good release with massive progress in
actual usefulness.

~~~
Koshkin
For why USB is hard, see
[http://www.usbmadesimple.co.uk/](http://www.usbmadesimple.co.uk/).

~~~
andreiw
Ugh. This website saved my ass trying to make HID devices work on top of the
completely non-conforming Linaro DwUsbHostDxe driver (look at
[https://github.com/andreiw/RaspberryPiPkg/commits/master/Dri...](https://github.com/andreiw/RaspberryPiPkg/commits/master/Drivers/DwUsbHostDxe)
for a laugh). I did end up having to hit the USB spec in the end, but it's a
legit resource to get a birds-eye view of the whole USB1 and USB2 thing. It
doesn't make USB simpler, but sure makes it more approachable.

~~~
voltagex_
Offtopic: What's the end goal of all this UEFI work you're doing for the Pi?

~~~
andreiw
No concrete goal beyond having a reasonably useful UEFI development
environment (more so than the 96boards one).

It’s been useful to be able to run the same Ubuntu and SUSE images as VMs and
servers do, but that’s only really possible because the built kernels have
RPi3 support (but at least you now don’t need a custom image with U-Boot).

------
digi_owl
Tried the livecd in a VM and a couple of niggles sprang up.

First of all, no driver for the network card in Virtualbox, though Vmware
worked fine.

Second, no web browser...

Third, the mouse sometimes freaked out and got stuck in a corner.

~~~
feikname
It should be obvious enough, but perhaps you missed: you can install a
browser, such as an old version of opera, by fetching its installer over the
internet via ReactOS builtin "program downloader" (I do not remeber its name).

If you meant lack of default browser preinstalled though, I agree with you its
lacking.

It's necessary to change the network card in VirtualBox for internet
connection to work IIRC.

~~~
digi_owl
Ah, i missed the program downloader while poking around.

I'll take another look.

~~~
andreiw
Firefox 48 worked, but the autoupdate crashed.

If you install 7Zip, you should know that 7Zip does not associate itself with
file extensions by default. This is 7zip behavior. You need to run 7zip, go to
options, and set associations by clicking on the '+' button.

------
chris_wot
I’m curious - so now that the ReactOS guys are picking up bugs in Windows,
does this mean they have a comprehensive test suite of Microsoft Windows
proper?

~~~
jacobush
They've had for a decade at least.

------
ksk
I'm willing to bet, this will be very useful in a few years time, and the
primary use will be 'fixed function' devices (in industries that are very slow
to change) that currently require Windows. (ATMs, POS, Announcement Screens,
Equipment controllers, SCADA systems, etc, etc)

------
orliesaurus
I think their site is getting the HN hug of death, loads extremely
slow/doesn't load at all...

~~~
make3
yep it's currently fully smothered for me

------
z3t4
I think Windows will just keep breaking compatibility faster then they
themselves and others are able to keep up. Forcing users to keep upgrading and
buying the same software over and over again.

------
sspiff
I wonder if the planned Vista/7/10 support will extend to kernel mode drivers,
especially for WDDM2 and up graphics drivers.

Currently, the supported graphics drivers is pretty sad for modern-ish
hardware on ReactOS, because they are limited to drivers for Windows Server
2003 / Windows XP, which aren't available for a lot of modern cards (or
integrated chips, for that matter). Additionally, a lot of the older XP
drivers don't work well on ReactOS today.

------
ww520
I love ReactOS, especially in VM. Windows requires separate license for each
VM. If I maintains 10 VM for testing, it's a problem.

------
gjvc
In case you are dismissing this as a fringe project, remember, what is
ridiculous today is commonplace tomorrow.

------
fsiefken
I'd be curious if ReactOS runs the Oculus Rift drivers, runs docker and is
more performant then Windows 10.

~~~
theandrewbailey
> more performant

Do you mean _faster_?

~~~
fsiefken
More resource fficient, which ususally means faster in execution or runs
better on resource constrained machines. For example how well does it run in
2G compared to Windows 10?

------
middleclick
Can anyone comment if I can install old Windows 2000 games on this, like C&C
Red Alert? Would it work?

~~~
antoineMoPa
And simtower?

~~~
exikyut
\- Version 1.0: Game saving is broken, everything else works:
[https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iI...](https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=789&iTestingId=36712&sAllBugs)

\- Version 1.1b (retail): Copy a DLL over for working sound, then everything
works:
[https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iI...](https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=28003)

------
konschubert
What Kernel does this OS use? What's its history? Is it a unix fork such as
Linux?

~~~
mschuster91
No, it's a reverse engineered Windows. I believe that due to copyright issues
it even is a fully clean-room developed implementation, which means that it's
_not_ based on MS documentation or on decompiled source code.

~~~
rossy
> _which means that it 's not based on MS documentation_

I think looking at MS documentation is okay. You're allowed to look at MSDN
for Wine development[1]. Since the projects share code, you're probably
allowed to do so for ReactOS as well.

[1]:
[https://wiki.winehq.org/Clean_Room_Guidelines](https://wiki.winehq.org/Clean_Room_Guidelines)

------
johnvega
appears to work well, including old photoshop 5.5 from a windows cd
[https://youtu.be/Ne88Is2cymQ](https://youtu.be/Ne88Is2cymQ)

------
unixhero
Does Starcraft run?

------
andreiw
So I'm a ReactOS fanboi, but... but...

\- You need to fix your flaccid dev community. Your forums have a terrible S/N
ratio. IRC may be great and all, but I don't see any hard documentation behind
any design discussions or development. I do see crazy shite like "can I run
ReactOS on Playstation 2". The forums make your project seem dead, which it
clearly isn't.

\- You need to fix your flaccid dev community. It needs a larger presence. It
needs to be tangible (who is doing what? who are the people? do you have
conferences?)

\- You need to fix your flaccid dev community. There is a bunch of really
useless, out-of-date, confusing and out-right self-inconsistent information on
building ROS, and the Git move didn't help (but kudos on the move, it is long
overdue). I've tried 4-5 times to do something, but the directions I followed
on Win, Ros or Linux all ended up breaking somewhere.

\- You need to fix your attitude problems (or your forums). There are people
asking reasonable questions, who get actively or passively aggressive answers.
Not good.

\- You need to fix your toolchain problems. This whole SEH thing is getting
out of hand. Does Clang support SEH yet? It might -
[https://clang.llvm.org/docs/MSVCCompatibility.html](https://clang.llvm.org/docs/MSVCCompatibility.html).
So maybe you need to bail on GCC, or maintain your own fork of it (yes, it's
ridiculous that GCC still doesn't have SEH support, and the patents have long
expired).

\- You need to get a grip on x64 support. Your toolchain problems cannot be a
gate (and you can clearly use MSVC for building... so...). IA32 support is
great and all, but needs a back seat to x64.

\- You need to get a grip on UEFI booting (note UEFI booting does not
/necessarily/ mean you need improved ACPI support, in practice)

\- SMP?

\- Forget Xbox, NewWorld PowerMacs (those were BE anyway) and 32-bit Arm chips
(which outside of the Pi are too varied and too few). Targeting 64-bit Arm
chips does make sense, though, now that Microsoft has released a client build
of Win 10 on laptops and an Arm server vendor demoed Windows Server at OCP'18
([http://www.opencompute.org/assets/Uploads/18150J-Ampere-
PPT-...](http://www.opencompute.org/assets/Uploads/18150J-Ampere-PPT-
OCPSummitKumar-final.pdf)). You will need UEFI and reasonable ACPI support to
support ARM64. You can target SBSA and SBBR compliant systems and this will
give support for the entire server ecosystem (and qemu VMs, har har).

\- You might wish to minkernel-ize ROS as well, so you can boot without a GUI.

\- You might wish to update Wiki (and build a list of links to relevant pages)
for active subprojects.

~~~
chris_wot
Wow, aggressive much?

~~~
andreiw
I dunno dude. I just pointed out the obvious, and all I get is a passive-
aggressive minusing. Most people won’t care enough to even give you “a rant”,
they’ll just move on.

If you don’t want feedback, don’t ask for feedback by posting publicly. My
“rant” is a collection of issues I’ve seen for at least the last 7 years of
actively paying attention to the project.

------
_bxg1
Every time I see this I briefly think it's a Linux distro with a React-based
window manager

