It's good to see a report like this. I hope that ReactOS can reach production ready status, even if it's just the basics, before the end of support for Windows 10 in October 2025 (or later if this gets postponed). Once Windows 10 goes out of support, I fear that there may be a spike in e-waste due to many older computers not officially supported by Windows 11 primarily due to its CPU requirements, even though the official ISO images don't stop Windows 11 from being installed onto these older systems at all. But then they can miss out on critical stuff like security updates that may or may not be worse than switching to a Linux distro, for example.
Given their fairly lacklustre progress in the past 20ish years [0], I doubt they’ll manage to make it much better within the next two.
Windows 10 going out of support is not going to cause the computers to stop working and become e-waste. Commonly used software (such as web browsers) will continue to support Windows 10 for a few more years; Windows itself may be less secure, but for basic usage and with a restrictive firewall, it should be fine.
If you’re concerned about lack of support for Windows 10 and want to switch to a supported OS, you’ll be better off using Linux.
I should've mentioned it earlier, but I already switched to Linux distros like Ubuntu since about 2011, so I'm personally not affected by these end of support dates as much. My concern is more about other people, the kind of stuff I can't really influence myself.
Of course I know that computers don't stop working after just because Windows 10 went out of support. It's more of, for example, a severe vulnerability is discovered that has been fixed in later Windows versions but not 10 that may cause some people to panic. Maybe I'm being paranoid here, but I did raise some valid points, some of which coincidentally play into profit motives such as by encouraging the purchase of new hardware.
I've only ever seen Realtime Operating System abbreviated as RTOS, so that should not be a problem. I mean, it hasn't been so far, and ReactOS has been around for a while.
ReactOS is sometimes very disappointing. Take the issue with toolbar icons, for example. Toolbar icons in at least Office 97, Office 2000 and Visual Basic 6 were affected, as was some game [0]. Microsoft Office is a complex Win32 application, making it a good guinea pig for testing compatibility. And yet, this was fixed a few months ago, and the Office bug was reported in 2016 [1]. The bug with no text wrapping for tray balloons is also an embarrassing thing to have lingering for years (I assume it was like this since the balloons were first implemented in ReactOS).
Does the world really need a buggy Windows Server 2003 reimplementation? I think the efforts of the development team could be better spent elsewhere.
There are plenty of systems where you might have a $5 million piece of hardware, tied into a $1 million of revenue per day process, that's all driven by a very specific machine with a very specific version of Windows and very specific peripherals.
Being able to replace them as close to identically as possible is a huge business. That's why there are weird service contracts that promise like-for-like replacements, and why a random scrap 20Gb HDD might be worth $2 for the magnets inside, or $300 if it's some specific Dell/IBM/HP FRU that can be fitted into an unreplacable system.
The software is becoming a challenge there. Until recently, you could just pay Microsoft progressively more and more money to at least get a checkoff that you were getting support for compliance-related things. But now, you really need to find something else if you don't want PCI or HIPPA people threatening to nuke your facility from orbit. ReactOS is the closest thing we have to a lifeline there.
I’m not sure if PCI/HIPPA/whatever auditors would have a positive reaction to ReactOS. And if the OS had issues with icons in a toolbar in 25-year-old software up until 2023, would you trust it to run the $5 million hardware?
> ReactOS is original Open Source code, developed outside of Redmond.
Plus code from Wine, the same project that is used for running Windows programs on Linux distros and macOS, and the basis for Valve's Proton tuned for running Windows only games on these operating systems.
We can say that ReactOS even benefits from some Proton development, although indirectly.
It's a very impressive project with very niche use. I think it's pretty clear that it would be good to have a FOSS system that's compatible with old Windows, especially since we live in a world where Windows XP has become one of those critical legacy techs that never quite go away, like fax machines.
At the same time ReactOS is sometimes disappointing as you say and feels like it's never going to be usable. In late 2023 now, it still rarely runs on real hardware at all, and is missing lots of features you had twenty years ago in XP. USB 2.0 is only supported partially, USB keyboard support is incomplete, wifi only supports WEP authentication, which has been deprecated for the same twenty years, etc.
I admire the project for still continuing with what's an extremely difficult task - they're reimplementing the NT kernel and some major userspace programs like explorer.exe but at this point I don't know if I believe ReactOS will ever reach parity with WinXP. I just checked and they still don't have RW support for NTFS, which was the default file system for XP in 2001. For Linux, ntfs-3g was fully RW in 2007.
Going by how long ReactOS is developed and how unuseable it still is I wonder if the time would haven been better spent decompiling windows 2000 and structuring the code. Once that is done you have a solid base to modify and modernize the OS however you want.
No need to decompile Windows since there have been substantial code leaks, and more recently the entire (or near?) WinXP source leaked. It's even on GitHub.
The problem is of course that anyone using the source code would be in legal trouble, and ReactOS has a policy of not accepting contributions from anyone who has as much as looked at the actual Windows source. How well they maintain their clean room is an open question, but an OS based on leaked or decompiled code would definitely be getting sued into oblivion.
> I think the efforts of the development team could be better spent elsewhere.
Talking about this, has it ever been established if ReactOS is actually 100% authoral code? I thought I remembered someone from Microsoft discussing somewhere (maybe Hacker News?) how everyone there thought it was based on RE that wasn't clean-room or leaked code.
IIRC, that Microsoft employee was acting alone, trying to pick a fight with ReactOS. He backpedalled when the community asked if he was representing his company. My guess is that his management chain heard about the drama he was creating, and he stopped commenting.
> has it ever been established if ReactOS is actually 100% authoral code?
How would you establish that?
> I thought I remembered someone from Microsoft discussing somewhere (maybe Hacker News?) how everyone there thought it was based on RE that wasn't clean-room or leaked code.
And SCO was sure Linux used Unix code. In both cases, I'm assuming FUD until given stronger evidence.
> Does the world really need a buggy Windows Server 2003 reimplementation?
I have a position on this: Sure, why not?
I do understand how at this point in time, this seems like a waste, at least if you consider intellectual curiosity a "waste". Hell, I kind of agree: right now, there's not too much coming out of ReactOS that's actually terribly useful. It's mostly a curiosity to me, and I'm sure to many developers it is a fun hobby. They do actually work on a lot of cool things after all.
However... we may be in an interesting transition right now. For the longest time, desktop computers were moving very fast. In this period of time, big corporations like Microsoft were often able to strike first and deliver sooner than smaller companies and hobbyists could've ever hoped to. XML, UNICODE, you name it, Microsoft was aiming to go to market earlier (and then sometimes, stagnate for a while...) And during this time, desktop computers and the software on them evolved fast.
At some point, we have to admit that things have changed forever. Desktop operating system design has effectively stopped moving. The biggest changes being made to desktop OSes today is just trying to mold them to be more like mobile operating systems. Instead of investing in new OS research, trying new ideas for capabilities and permissions, and giving users more control, desktop operating systems are patching around their security problems with giant bandages and strapping on app stores. Apple and Microsoft have a financial incentive to not give a shit about desktop operating system design: I think the majority of the benefit that can be gotten out of improved OS design has already been realized. The PC market will continue to grow at a glacial pace for a while, but it's not enough for anyone to really pour huge amounts of investment into, considering there's more growth and money to be made in other places.
Because of this slowdown, a target like Windows Server 2003 isn't as bad as it seems. Consider the following: Windows 3.11 was released in 1993, 10 years before Windows Server 2003. And you can absolutely tell that the difference between Windows 3.11 and Windows Server 2003 is factors greater than the difference between Windows Server 2003 and Windows 8. Don't get me wrong: they clearly made many improvements under the hood, refreshed the UI (uhhh... mostly, anyway) and added boat loads of new features. But, Windows Server 2003 is still a quite modern operating system for what it is.
Also, while ReactOS targets Server 2003 for compatibility, that doesn't mean they limit themselves to what Server 2003 can do. Obviously: it ships with a btrfs driver and package manager.
If it takes ReactOS 20+ years to catch up to what Server 2003 could do, I don't think it would be considered "useless". A fully-patched but reasonably modern and stable system that is compatible with Windows 2003 would be a godsend today. Because why not? There's nothing really wrong with this target. And once they're up to that point, they could always just simply keep going. Nothing says they have to stop at 2003.
And also, that's kind of the thing about open source. I think open source is bad at cutting edge, but it's good at "slow burn" stuff. Because once you've done the hard work of actually producing something useful, it will exist in perpetuity. It'd be hard for a company to just maintain something like ReactOS for years without any certainty of an eventual payoff, but a bunch of open source contributors mostly doing it on the side can pretty much do it as long as they feel like doing it. Traditionally, I think that this has been overlooked in part because programming practices, computers, and software used to move a lot faster, and because of this, code tended to "rot" pretty fast. Maybe there's still some room for that, but actually, I think that's also slowing down quite a lot, even with a lot of newer experimental programming languages with novel features and design, and even with the C++ language continuing to move fairly fast. Programming tools are improving rapidly in some regards, but the changing practices of programming do appear to be slowing down a little in general.
So the way I see it, all this work will accumulate and compound into something meaningful if it is to continue for a long time. As a hobby project to satisfy some intellectual curiosity, it's great. Will it ever be "useful"? It's certainly open for debate, but I think the odds are actually surprisingly tilted in its favor.
ReactOS is an interesting project, but I think they've become mired in complexity.
> UEFI support in ReactOS is experimental and under heavy development. It is not yet ready for general use and is not currently present in our main repository. We currently cannot give an estimate as to when it will be done, so please stay tuned!
Implementing UEFI boot is not like switching a car from gasoline to electric. It's like using an adapter to switch between China electrical plugs and UK electrical plugs. It's not really a huge undertaking. Normally! I suspect that ReactOS has become so complex that simple things take a long time. Probably a lot of waves of developers have worked on this project. Probably it has seen better days.
It's probably a good space for someone to start from scratch and make a competing NT implementation.
I think the problem here is that ReactOS wants to keep Windows compatibility. Don't forget ReactOS started out as an NT5 clone; I doubt porting Windows XP's NTLDR to UEFI would be as trivial as you may think it is.
Based on https://jira.reactos.org/browse/CORE-16175, I think the project is using Microsoft's bootloader to load the ReactOS kernel during the testing phase. If that's the level of compatibility they're going for, I can imagine implementing full UEFI support will take ages.
As soon as I read UEFI in the news letter I knew this forum post would end up in the comments :). The newsletter is about UEFI class 3, I.e. no CSM, where that is not. There are some later posts in that thread about using UefiSeven which is a project which hacks minimal int10h support but at that point you might as well just have modified freeloader for proper support instead.
> It's probably a good space for someone to start from scratch and make a competing NT implementation.
It's certainly not competing but SerenityOS probably has more mind share and development than ReactOS. However I do not know how well Serenity runs on real hardware or if that's even the focus. Overall Serenity has a similar aesthetic without the backwards win32 compatibility. Maybe someone will port wine to SerenityOS...
I believe WINE already builds for Serenity, but that's just the start of it.
If ReactOS ever manages to make its goals a reality, not only can you run basic Windows applications on it, your Windows XP drivers will also work. In a perfect world, ReactOS will provide "Windows XP, but open source and with the security holes patched".
That's completely different from SerenityOS's "let's make a modern operating system using modern tooling with a modern API that happens to look like a late 90s OS". If all you care about is running programs in Wine with a Win9x aesthetic, you'll have a much easier time theming LXDE or KDE instead.
this is a tangent, but it also kind of seems like a lot of the development behind Serenity is being sucked away by the Ladybird browser now. Especially with it now having funding I fear that Serenity will wither further and further as the focus shifts.
I'm not 100% sure. A lot of work is being done on Ladybird, but a lot of money is coming from sponsorships specifically for Ladybird as well.
When it comes to direct contributions to the project, I'm pretty sure only Andreas is working fulltime on generic SerenityOS+ projects. He recently made a series of videos about adding a JIT to Javascript which I found to be quite a typical SerenityOS style diversion, like Jakt had been for a while before that.
Most of the OS advancements have stopped coming from Andreas for a while now, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. There's a very active community working on SerenityOS and the various applications and subsystems within it. The steady stream of commits just isn't as visible and doesn't provide as much progress as three full-time programmers working on the browser does.
Unfortunately, a lot of the work that gets committed to SerenityOS seems to be the result of whatever video Andreas published last. I do hope Andreas switches back to SerenityOS work soon, but I imagine it'll be hard for him to drop such a cool and interesting project.
It's definitely not dead yet, nor is its fate sealed, but I am somewhat pessimistic about it long term. I would love to be wrong, though, and realistically it's a bit early to make any definitive statements about long term shifting priorities vs a temporary shift in focus. And obviously one developer will never make or break a project like this, but I think an important role that Andreas has/had is to be an advocate, recruiter, as well as just leadership to steer the ship a bit. Serenity needs to grow and gain new developers, and I fear that it might not be able to do that without a figurehead.
I think you are right but I also think that's a good thing. The web is a spec so every new implementation improves it. Serenity is apparently writing it's browser to more closley follow the spec (as opposed to just producing the right outputs) which is also good. So I think Ladybird provides more improvements to the web as a whole compared to the improvments serenity brings to operating systems as a whole. That's probably why it has more sponsors.
I like ladybird, and I think it's a cool project. It's probably more short term useful, but I think serenity is the more interesting project of the two, precisely because browsers are a spec. No one likes the absolute chromium dominance and more browser engines are a good thing, but they also all do exactly the same thing. Building an operating system is a much more open ended task that has more room for innovation.
