ReactOS

[hoss08]

Hey all,

Some guy at my college sent out an e-mail to the "Randomness" mailing list about this OS. I searched for it here, but there doesn't seem to be a mention. I don't know if I'll be trying it out myself, but it's fun seeing what people are working on.

Here's what they say:
"The ReactOS® project is dedicated to making Free Software available to everyone by providing a ground-up implementation of a Microsoft Windows® XP compatible operating system. ReactOS aims to achieve complete binary compatibility with both applications and device drivers meant for NT and XP operating systems, by using a similar architecture and providing a complete and equivalent public interface."

And the link...

 

[shelaby]

ill stick to SUSE/fedora. it just looks like a really ugly windows to me

 

[hoss08]

Yeah, I agree; it's not pretty. But if it runs everything that Windows will, then I can save the $20 it costs for me to buy XP Pro from my school's IT department

 

[drag]

I've seen this before.

It's a effort to make a open source software clone of NT like Linux is sort of a open source clone of Unix (not realy, but close enough).

They are quite serious about it. They love open source software, but hate Linux/Unix, so they figure NT is the way to go. This XP business is something I didn't see last time I looked at them, but it's expected developement.

It's probably worth checking out, but I don't think it's going to be very compatable.

NT and Windows XP are very very very complex peices of software and much is hidden and what isn't hidden is often misdocumented on purpose and even completely lied about by Microsoft as the Wine project discovered on numerious occasions. What they are trying to do is exceptionally difficult.

But it should enable them to be very compatable with Windows software if succesfull.

see:
http://www.reactos.org/en/dev_whitepaper.html

 

[Seeruk]

Ugly Windows??? Looks like KDE to me (i.e. yes very ugly!)

 

[tyanni]

If they are trying to make it like windows, why extra virtual desktops at the bottom (1,2,3,4) like KDE? Why not make it look more like XP?

 

[Nothinman]

Ugly Windows??? Looks like KDE to me (i.e. yes very ugly!)

You must not have seen KDE recently, I'm no KDE fan by any stretch but it looks a lot better than that thing.

If they are trying to make it like windows, why extra virtual desktops at the bottom (1,2,3,4) like KDE? Why not make it look more like XP?

Probably because they're still in early development and getting the core working is a lot more work than redoing the UI. And with Vista coming out in a year or so, people will be crying "Why not make it more like Vista?".

And on top of that, multiple desktops is something that Windows should do out of the box. The support is there in the core OS, it's just that there's no good way to control it without some 3rd party software and even then it still doesn't feel quite right.

 

[Brazen]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

Ugly Windows??? Looks like KDE to me (i.e. yes very ugly!)

You must not have seen KDE recently, I'm no KDE fan by any stretch but it looks a lot better than that thing.

If they are trying to make it like windows, why extra virtual desktops at the bottom (1,2,3,4) like KDE? Why not make it look more like XP?

Probably because they're still in early development and getting the core working is a lot more work than redoing the UI. And with Vista coming out in a year or so, people will be crying "Why not make it more like Vista?".

And on top of that, multiple desktops is something that Windows should do out of the box. The support is there in the core OS, it's just that there's no good way to control it without some 3rd party software and even then it still doesn't feel quite right.

Or maybe because they just want to make it run win32 binaries and don't necessarily want it to look like Windows. I hope they make the UI similar to the latest KDE.

edit: or actually, after looking at their screenshots, I realize I don't mind the look of Windows, but my biggest annoyance is the lack of virtual desktops on Windows, so that is nice to see ReactOS has it. What I should say is, I just hope they don't get caught up in making it Look just like the latest version of Windows. I hope they come up with a style all their own with all the advantages of the OpenSource model, and/or have the ability to use other desktop environments such as kde or gnome or fluxbox or whatever on linux.

I also hope new developments in ReactOS in regards to Microsoft's API's can further the development of Wine.

 

[phisrow]

Wine and ReactOS work closely with one another. Pretty much all of Wine's work, and a thick slice of ReactOS, is producing open versions of the Win32 environment. My understanding is that pretty much all the code is shared between the project, ReactOS just happens to wrap it around an NT like kernel, while Wine just uses *nix binaries.

This is why I both applaud and don't much care about ReactOS. It is highly unlikely to ever exceed Wine's ability to run Win32 code, as they share the same code; and It'll never equal the ability of Linux+Wine with respect to breadth of available programs.

 

[daniel49]

Originally posted by: phisrow
Wine and ReactOS work closely with one another. Pretty much all of Wine's work, and a thick slice of ReactOS, is producing open versions of the Win32 environment. My understanding is that pretty much all the code is shared between the project, ReactOS just happens to wrap it around an NT like kernel, while Wine just uses *nix binaries.

This is why I both applaud and don't much care about ReactOS. It is highly unlikely to ever exceed Wine's ability to run Win32 code, as they share the same code; and It'll never equal the ability of Linux+Wine with respect to breadth of available programs.

************************************************************************
interesting hope it works better then wine....would try it if I had time and space but already got 3 OS now...maybe later when its farther along.

 

[Brazen]

Originally posted by: phisrow
Wine and ReactOS work closely with one another. Pretty much all of Wine's work, and a thick slice of ReactOS, is producing open versions of the Win32 environment. My understanding is that pretty much all the code is shared between the project, ReactOS just happens to wrap it around an NT like kernel, while Wine just uses *nix binaries.

This is why I both applaud and don't much care about ReactOS. It is highly unlikely to ever exceed Wine's ability to run Win32 code, as they share the same code; and It'll never equal the ability of Linux+Wine with respect to breadth of available programs.

Well, if it's not going to run any more than Wine, than I'd just rather go with Wine. But if it gets more developers involved in decoding the windows APIs than its all good to me.

 

[bersl2]

Hopefully, ReactOS will take over how old version of Windows are used currently. Getting rid of the 9x-kernel based OSes out there would be wonderful.