ReactOS 0.4.0 Released

https://reactos.org/project-news/reactos-040-released

by ekianjo • 10 years ago

211 91 10 years ago

reactos.org

flz• 10 years ago

10 years since the previous release ...

I'd really like to know how many people are actually using ReactOS for another purpose than testing or developing it.

xenophonf• 10 years ago

Dude, this is _Hacker_ News. Who cares? This is cool!

Also: Their latest release was 0.3.17 in 2014, with the 0.4.0 release candidates coming out late last year. So it hasn't been 10 years between releases, but around 1.5 years.

gedrap• 10 years ago

While usually I'd agree with your snarky comment, I am genuinely curious about this too. It's not some yetanother.js hacked together in a night but years (decades!) of man hours.

What's pushing them and stopping from giving up?

ma2rten• 10 years ago

ReactOs is still in alpha stage, so I don't think it's ready for everyday use. Also it has not been 10 years since the last release, it has been 10 years since the last mayor release.

mhd• 10 years ago

I'm quite impressed that they can load graphics drivers now. Those generally seem to be arcane as heck, delving deeply into the internals of not just the applications they support (e.g. games), but the operating system itself.

Although I guess this is a more basic level, i.e. not using Nvidia drivers to run 3DMark...

m45t3r• 10 years ago

AFAIK, Windows has a very defined model for display drivers (WDDM: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Display_Driver_Model) so it should be a matter of implementing the WDDM specification + bugs.

creshal2• 10 years ago

Stable driver APIs (WDDM for graphics, IFS for in-kernel file systems, and others for other areas) are one of the big differences between NT's (micro-)kernel and Linux' (rather monolithic) kernel with no API commitment.

Of course, "stable" may vary. Microsoft introduced a new kernel graphics API with every OS after NT4 (XDDM, XPDM, WDDM 1.0, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 2.0; I wonder which ReactOS uses?) because of how significantly GPU capabilities changed over the years; while Linux changes its APIs more often than that, the changes are usually minimal enough that neither Nvidia nor AMD are complaining significantly about it. (The X¹¹ API, on the other hand…)

gh02t3• 10 years ago

My understanding is that NT is more of a hybrid kernel than a true microkernel. Is that still true or has it moved more towards a micro kernel in recent years? I remember reading an interesting article about the influence of Mach on NT, but that they ended up having to put a lot of stuff (including the Executive) into kernel space for performance.

adam122• 10 years ago

I've got a bunch of old games that I can no longer run on Windows 8/10. If they can get some of those running smoothly, ReactOS will see a surge in new users.

TazeTSchnitzel5• 10 years ago

With its NTVDM, ReactOS can actually play DOS games out-of-the-box, which is something modern (64-bit) Windows releases can't do.

AlexeyBrin• 10 years ago

Have you tried to use DosBox ? I was able to run DOS era games and applications just fine on Windows 7/8.1/10 with DosBox.

exizt88• 10 years ago

Please don't hijack scroll on web pages.

adam122• 10 years ago

The scrolling seems fine to me.

davydka• 10 years ago

There's something non-standard going on with it for me. It snaps to certain sections at the bottom and I can't swipe to navigate back and forth like I usually do.

tpaksoy• 10 years ago

exizt88 is correct. I can't swipe to go back a page. And if I swipe up, the page seems to want to continue scrolling at the same speed, it feels different and not fluent.

cstrahan• 10 years ago

They're using kinetic/smooth scrolling, which is included in theme they're using from Okler. If you look in the JS, you'll see:

  Plugin Name: 	smoothScroll for jQuery.
  Written by: 	Okler Themes - (http://www.okler.net)

And here's a forum where a customer asks to disable it:

http://www.okler.net/forums/topic/disable-scrolling-effect/

Another offender:

https://www.astralgameservers.com/

Inertial/kinetic scrolling is incredibly frustrating when implemented in JS. On my Mac, sure, if I swipe my fingers and let go, I expect the OS to emulate a free-spinning scroll wheel. But when it's emulated in JS, there's no way for the code to know whether I lifted my fingers, so it defaults to making the page skid around uncontrollably, when I intend to quickly swipe - while keeping my fingers down at the end - to go to a precise offset in the page.

It's visually a cute a effect, but I have no idea how anyone thinks that it makes for anything other than an utterly infuriating user experience.

speeder3• 10 years ago

I am using Windows 8, chrome, Microsoft mouse with scrollwheel.

The scrolling is absolutely broken, it is jumping around all over the place, and made the page impossible to read.

marssaxman2• 10 years ago

More importantly, please don't build web browsers that give nitwit web developers the option of hijacking scroll (or control keys!!) in the first place.

jplur• 10 years ago

I use the web to build applications and very much need to set scroll points and capture key input thank you very much.

kuschku• 10 years ago

I’m using the page on Firefox, with a laptop (with touchpad) and it works perfectly normal – now I’m interested what I’m missing? What’s it like?

awqrre• 10 years ago

I'm using Firefox 44.0.2 on Linux with a mouse and it appears to be fine too...

_uhtu• 10 years ago

So I've heard the name ReactOS several times on here but never really been drawn in by the posts about it. Can someone explain why they would use it over Windows/their preferred Linux distro?

i ask out of curiosity not criticism. it seems like a cool project so I'm wondering it's benefits over existing OSes.

pavlov• 10 years ago

It's a binary-compatible Windows clone. If you don't need to run Win32 binaries, you probably don't want ReactOS.

TazeTSchnitzel5• 10 years ago

It's free, it's open-source, it's Windows-like, and it can run Windows applications. It's very lightweight and has a live CD.

alkonaut2• 10 years ago

Those are all good of course, but how long before it is significantly better (faster, more compatible, easier) than e.g. doing the same with Wine? is it already?

cookiecaper2• 10 years ago

ReactOS is an open-source attempt to re-implement Windows. As far as I know, no one uses it in production. I know the ability to load Windows drivers has been one of their primary goals over something like WINE, which only addresses userspace (and which ReactOS leverages).

mmastrac• 10 years ago

The longevity of this project is really impressive. I remember seeing it in the early days of Wine and thinking that it was a monumentally difficult challenge.

gosukiwi• 10 years ago

Very interesting project. I'll make sure to test it when they release 1.0 :)

alexandre_m• 10 years ago

At this pace it'll be your grandchildren that will test it.

eloisant• 10 years ago

They're having a heated race with GNU Hurd to be the first on your grandson's desktop!

chris_wot5• 10 years ago

Except it seems to be progressing exponentially, not linearly.

SmellyGeekBoy3• 10 years ago

2116: Year Of The ReactOS Desktop!

an4rchy• 10 years ago

I came in thinking this was something related to React Native (i.e open source OS for Android etc), but was pleasantly surprised to learn about this new OS, quite an achievement, seeing as they've been going on for 10 years.

arturhoo2• 10 years ago

Genuine question: is there a reason for the downloads to be hosted at source forge?

userulluipeste4• 10 years ago

It is an old state of things, but the data is not an executable installer (that is usually the problem, as SF has a bad habit of infect them with malware), it's a ISO image. For nightly (trunk) builds ReactOS uses its own servers, so I guess it's about the maximal bandwidth that may be of concern here especially when the new version are released, and SF may address exactly that.

themodelplumber• 10 years ago

(that is usually the problem, as SF has a bad habit of infect them with malware)

SF is under new ownership as of last week, and they've already removed the most problematic behavior. If you find malware you should let them know, as the new ownership seems much more on the ball.

flxn• 10 years ago

Two weeks ago the new owner of SourceForge terminated the controversial "DevShare" program. https://sourceforge.net/blog/sourceforge-acquisition-and-fut...

So it should be safe again.

arturhoo2• 10 years ago

I wasn't aware of that, thanks for sharing.

Piskvorrr2• 10 years ago

Nah. Reputation is hard to build, but eeeeasy to destroy; saying "trust us that you can trust us again" doesn't magically revert it to previous version (at least a suspicion remains of "...until we have another Wonderful Idea at an indeterminate point in the future").

voltagex_3• 10 years ago

There's nowhere else to easily host "large" binaries for free.

SmellyGeekBoy3• 10 years ago

Seems like a legitimate case for BitTorrent? It's always my go-to download method for Linux ISOs.

mixmastamyk• 10 years ago

Awesome, I'd love an updated (traditional) Windows 2k/XP GUI with windows and linux tools in it. :)

Interesting... I appreciate the faithful reproduction, but they've also copied the outright bad designs like the tiny environment variable window in the system control panel I always hated. ;)

Noticed they used a source-forge download instead of a torrent. :/

ConceptJunkie2• 10 years ago

Yeah, and that tiny environment variable window lasted at least through Windows 7. You would think with 10s of thousands of developers, they could fix these kinds of things.

zackify• 10 years ago

scroll hijacking....

pippy• 10 years ago

I've often thought there's a massive market for ReactOS in legacy support. There's so many platforms (ATMs, flight controllers, banking software) that use unsupported windows versions. Many of these platforms would pay an arm and a leg for ongoing support and security updates.

chris_wot5• 10 years ago

Actually, I'm curious, but for slightly different reasons. Windows can still technically support other architectures than x86; if ReactOS is truly compatible (which it evidently is!) then I wonder how hard it would be for them to port the HAL layer to things like SPARC.

slipstream-• 10 years ago

uh, Windows does support other architectures than x86: currently, it supports x86, x64, ARM and ARM64. (and as Windows Server 2008 R2 is still supported, the IA64 version is also still suppored)

osullivj• 10 years ago

Excellent point. I'm contracting on a banking project currently, enhancing a C++ MFC fat client application that dates back to 1995. The client org - a UK bank - runs it on Windows XP.

dingdingdang• 10 years ago

Congratulations to the team :). Personally I'm really happy that someone is doing this work.. although I wish they would aim for baking in a per-app-sandbox-environment - in short order user empowerment is going to define successful computing projects (just look at the rise of Qubes OS and I bet this is still in its pre-viral state - if Apple get compromised by gov and are vocal about it then it will educate a generation of users about the importance of storing data safely!)

ericmuyser• 10 years ago

Always a little disappointed when I remember ReactOS does not mean React.js OS.

chris_wot5• 10 years ago

ReactOS has been around for a lot longer than React.js.

However... if there was a React.js OS, then I'd love to see ReactOS run on React.js OS. At that point, I'd love to see this run on ReactOS.

SmellyGeekBoy3• 10 years ago

ReactOS has been around for a lot longer than React.js.

It'll probably still be around long after React.js has faded into obscurity, too ;)

chris_wot5• 10 years ago

I really wish they had pointers to the source commits in their bug tracker. That would be fascinating :-)

andersonmvd• 10 years ago

The project is neat, but they should not be proud of "9,000,000+ lines of code And growing!". Less is more. A security audit for example would be very slow already, given the number of lines.

exadeci• 10 years ago

Windows XP had 45 Millions lines of code, the Linux kernel has 20 Millions lines of code.

So it's pretty small. http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Source_lines_of_code#/Example

eatonphil• 10 years ago

Does this run internet explorer? This would be interesting for Koreans wanting something easier than Windows but still needing online payments [0].

On a different topic, does this run any IIS software? Does anyone use this to run any servers?

[0] http://betanews.com/2015/04/03/south-korea-looking-to-scrap-...

rchowe• 10 years ago

I wonder if ReactOS could target the same APIs as the upcoming Nano Server [1] in Windows Server 2016. They'd have to make it entirely 64-bit and implement some closed Microsoft protocols like WMI and DISM, but it could be a pretty cool drop-in replacement for any server apps that people decide to target to Nano Server.

[1] https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/windowsserver/2015/04/08...

userulluipeste4• 10 years ago

On IRC the developers have mentioned (as wishful thinking) a minimal (i.e. a stripped-down) version, with only kernel, drivers, and a few other small miscellaneous parts over which dedicated applications could run. This would be something for embedded systems and other specialized machines (basically servers) unlike the all-encomprising common version of ReactOS. That having been said, it's important to understand that one of the reasons for nano is... well, OS size, which for a "normal" version got to tens of GBytes! Currently, ReactOS is (and I think that's a lot --) under 200 MB with all its bells and whistles.

donlzx• 10 years ago

Kudos to the ReactOS team. I've tried the 0.3.x release about ten years ago and was a little disappointed. However, after a decade I've got a new perspective to appreciate their work.

I've kept several of my used laptops (Toshiba Satellite laptop, IBM Thinkpads, Lenovo Thinkpads, etc.) mainly for commemorative purpose. However, they can still boot and works fine with outdated OS's and extinct software. A potential very good use of them is to open my old archived documents, but I'd rather not to mess with these fragile machines.

When I checked my old archives, usually only plain texts and JPEG photos files are fine with current OS's and softwares. Nealy all my old software projects (mostly with Visual C++) no longer compile or run, or missing dependencies (DLLs, component libraries, tools, etc.). Even though I've backup most of the tools I used at that time, most of them would be a huge pain or impossible to reinstall correctly with right system dependencies.

Therefore I've come to think that the only meaningful archives are data with executables, i.e, documents with related spec, contemporary software and OS. In this aspect, a good Internet archive methodology should be like this: 1) data; 2) Fully installed and working software packages; 3) Running free OS such as Linux and ReactOS; 4) OS emulator on available hardware such as Virtualbox and KVM.

The importance of ReactOS here is that we will have a working OS on modern emulator or hardware for archiving purpose.

I'm omitting the hardware platform here, but it should be the other important aspect of archiving our knowledges.

ReactOS 0.4.0 Released

Related Stories