ReactOS was selected for Google Summer of Code 2016

http://www.reactos.ru/project-news/reactos-participation-google-summer-code-2016

by jeditobe • 10 years ago

253 80 10 years ago

hazelnut• 10 years ago

Sorry, but the scrolling of the page is just confusing.

Even if it was done with a good and helpful intend. For a lot of people it's pure pain if you take control of the scrolling.

currysausage• 10 years ago

I hate to bikeshed, but the amount of wasted vertical screen space [1] makes me almost a little angry. Web designers: if you think it's a good idea to reimplement basic browser functionality (scrolling), or to emulate the UX of HTML frames, please think again.

[1] http://i.imgur.com/IUEqFj7.jpg

ank_the_elder• 10 years ago

So many mobile sites implement this same unpleasant UI control where the header follows your scrolling and stubbornly takes a portion of the screen without adding any useful functionality, that I wonder if people know it's possible to scroll to the top of any page and see the header there...

arm2• 10 years ago

It looks absolutely fantastic with JavaScript disabled though (which is how I browse the Web most of the time):

http://f.cl.ly/items/0Y3e3k3A17293r0s2y3d/Screen%20Shot%2020...

edwinyzh• 10 years ago

Agreed, the Gmail web UI is another example, and I've never been able to understand this...

SonicSoul• 10 years ago

hijacked left swipe to navigate back was a bigger pain for me

mintplant• 10 years ago

Google's Blogger does the same sort of thing, and it really annoys me. Swerve left or right as you're scrolling through the page and it "helpfully" takes you to a different article.

trymas2• 10 years ago

web design 101: do not override default use of mouse and keyboard.

That's just pure rage. Why developer of that website even bothered with implementing (or using some library) to hijack mouse actions.

rybosome• 10 years ago

Agreed. I tend to scroll in small increments (maybe every other line of text) in an attempt to keep the content I am looking in the same position relative to my eye. This site's scrolling kept behaving in a way that was inconsistent with my expectations, and forced me to actively pay attention to what should have been an intuitive interaction. Irritating and distracting.

speeder• 10 years ago

My mouse is currently with the scrollwheel having some issues.

On this site the result was a total disaster: any attempt of scrolling made the site jump around randomly, and immediately stop right back at the start again, making scrolling with the mouse impossible.

userbinator2• 10 years ago

Every time I see comments on how a site tries to override the browser functionality, I'm once again reminded of why I don't have JavaScript on by default. I don't notice these things at all as a result, and this site is as pleasant to read as any other.

visarga2• 10 years ago

Yes, the design is awful. I feel like it's 1995 all over again.

jensen123• 10 years ago

I seem to remember blinking text, animated GIFs, slow-loading Flash and Java applets back in 1995, although I'm not sure if things were ever as bad as it is now. Then I guess around 2005 web design was generally quite good. And lately it has become pretty awful because many people obviously aren't able to restrain themselves with Javascript.

andreapaiola• 10 years ago

voilà

http://andreapaiola.name/magpie/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.reacto...

StevePerkins• 10 years ago

If you want to talk about bad scrolling experiences, then I give you Hacker News. Half the time when there's a submission about some deeply technical topic... before seeing any discussion of the actual topic, you have to scroll through 3 or 4 pages of debate about the ergonomics of the font kerning on the blog post or something.

This is a group of C/C++ hackers who have spent the past 18 years re-implementing Windows 95. The fact that there's any CSS at all on their website is a minor miracle.

I don't know how strongly I feel about non-responsive websites displaying a fixed header bar. However, I'm pretty sure that most people who do feel strongly about it either way aren't going to be using or hacking on ReactOS.

orbitur• 10 years ago

Collapsible threads should be a part of the site by now. I have a Chrome extension installed that adds this feature but it's kinda wonky sometimes.

rawe• 10 years ago

smoothScroll for jQuery; seems to be fixed now. https://jira.reactos.org/browse/ONLINE-525

jeditobe2• 10 years ago

Please recheck!

No more smooth scrolling!!!

https://www.reactos.org/

djsumdog• 10 years ago

ReactOS has been going at this problem for a loooong time. It's a pretty amazing initiative, and the fact that it's taken so long goes to show how insane a kludge Windows is under the surface.

I wonder if the reason we haven't seen more work on ReactOS compared to Linux development is the commercial backing that Linux development receives from the big guys (Red Hat, IBM, et. al.) I wonder if people are wearisome of funding ReactOS beacuse of Microsoft.

ericflo• 10 years ago

Why does the fact that it's taken so long show how insane a kludge Windows is, rather than indicating that there is simply a lot of work to recreate?

thanksgiving• 10 years ago

While I'd love to throw poop at Microsoft, I think this is correct. If someone had to create an operating system that accepted GNU/Linux binaries without the benefit of looking at internal communication or the source code, I bet it would take many years as well.

pizza2342• 10 years ago

Based on what I see from the development blogs, I see that most of the effort is just fighting against the huge complexity of building an O/S, more than the quirks/bugs of Windows itself.

You can see very often the pattern of "X was implemented using the library from Y, which works but not well" or "Y was implemented and working for Z case, but it's effectively broken" and so on.

I've seen comparatively little complaints of the kind "bl00dy Windows performs this functionality in an awkard and messy way".

I don't really have much faith in ReactOS, although I would really love to see it mature.

Following its evolution with the time, I can see clearly that it's a type of product which is doomed to be "90% functional" for its entire life (unless somebody will throw a massive amount of money at it).

While you could consider Wine to have the same fate, there is a distinction in the fact that Wine is more directed to a per-case basis, which makes the "90% functionality" state acceptable.

jensvdh• 10 years ago

Jesus. What kind of "smoothscroll" is applied to that site? It's super annoying.

eggy2• 10 years ago

In a recursive fashion, I had to scroll past all of the comments against hijacked scrolling to get to the first comment about the subject matter. This is not the first time on HN I have had to do this. Maybe a single comment, without all of the piled on comments would lessen this distraction? My intent is serious, and I hope not taken the wrong way, but the irony is there.

tbolt• 10 years ago

For the love of god, leave scrolling alone.

mikejmoffitt• 10 years ago

Seconding this. Websites shouldn't push a preference like that on users.

simonebrunozzi2• 10 years ago

From their webpage: "Nearly ten years ago the ReactOS Project released version 0.3.0. Today we are proud to announce the formal release of version 0.4.0. ".

This is the problem. Going from 0.3 to 0.4 in TEN years means that you cannot be commercially successful.

As much as I admire ReactOS' contributors and their efforts, I have little faith in their ability to make a dent in the market.

outworlder• 10 years ago

Maybe I've missed the sarcasm?

GSOC is for FOSS projects only.

viraptor2• 10 years ago

Linux went from 2.6.0 to 2.6.39 in 8 years. That's not even 0.1 change! It can't be commercially successful...

</sarcasm> Version numbers don't mean anything out of context. Is there any specific issue you wanted to point out that took them too long to implement?

chrisweekly• 10 years ago

Re: version numbers and context: Hear, hear! High time to decouple marketing releases from software api versioning. Eric Elliott says it better:

): Major.minor.patch (: Breaking.feature.fix

https://medium.com/javascript-scene/software-versions-are-br...

simonebrunozzi2• 10 years ago

I really don't understand why the downvotes. Can someone explain?

reitanqild• 10 years ago

As outworlder pointed out being commercially successful does not seem to be a requirement to be accepted for GSOC.

pjc503• 10 years ago

It's a software freedom project, so commercial success is irrelevant.

freeqaz• 10 years ago

The Project Proposal page has a list of potential items for people to work on. Pretty interesting!

https://www.reactos.org/wiki/Google_Summer_of_Code_2016_Idea...

riscy3• 10 years ago

Given Microsoft's recent moves towards a freemium desktop operating system, with its numerous privacy concerns and baked in advertising, it's great to see an actively developed alternative for those who make use of software originally developed for Windows. Lock-in is a terrible thing.

cmdrfred• 10 years ago

I also like to think that some of the ideas implemented in this project might make it's way into things like Wine as a major side benefit. I agree this is a very important project.

Piskvorrr4• 10 years ago

They do. ReactOS contributes to WINE a lot.

melling• 10 years ago

Considering that people have been complaining about Windows lock-in for 2 decades, I can't really see the point. Chasing Windows compatibility is not the answer. Getting software to run on other platforms and reducing Windows dominance is more important. Make it easy for people to switch platforms so companies need to listen to consumers.

riscy3• 10 years ago

Chasing Windows compatibility is not the answer. [...] reducing Windows dominance is more important. Make it easy for people to switch platforms so companies need to listen to consumers.

Agreed, but not everybody's seen the light, aka POSIX.

I also view ReactOS as a way to subvert Microsoft's control over users and developers who enjoy aspects of Windows-like operating systems, such as the UI or the APIs.

aikah• 10 years ago

Given Microsoft's recent moves towards a freemium desktop operating system

It's not even free. New computers still pay licenses for windows 10. The "free" upgrade offer ends in July.

riscy3• 10 years ago

Oops, yea, I really meant the whole Windows-as-a-service direction. I could see Microsoft extending the free offer, though, since they appear to be aggressively pushing people to enroll in the service.

shmerl• 10 years ago

Wine is much more usable for that purpose at present though.

shrewduser• 10 years ago

the two projects do share some common stuff, so it's nice that they're both around and helping each other when they overlap

jadavis• 10 years ago

Read this headline and thought, "First React Native, and now ReactOS. What'll they think of next?"

eggy2• 10 years ago

Yes, I also have to do a 'double-take' on these names. I know it's not the point of your comment, but ReactOS started first for those who don't know already.

orionblastar• 10 years ago

ReactOS is a cool idea. Use WINE to create a Windows compatible FOSS Operating System. They aim for XP/2003 compatibility so it doesn't run a lot of newer stuff. But it is good for legacy Windows apps. With the 0.4.0 release they added more driver support, Wifi support, Audio support, etc. They need more people to work on it, and I hope that Google funds them some money as well to pay people.

So far it is in the alpha stage and needs to go to beta stage soon. It only has a 48M overhead and loads faster than the real Windows. It has EXT file system support as well as FAT support but NTFS is read only.

Someone can make a ReactOS bundle with PHP, MySQL, Apache2 so it can be used as a web server. If someone ports CLRNET or the Dotnet open source programs over to it, it can run ASP.Net stuff as well.

pizza2342• 10 years ago

You're severely underestimating the massive amount of resources needed to accomplish such target, especially when compared to what the target it.

There isn't much point in throwing a massive amount of resources for building an AMP hosting environment. If somebody needs to start an AMP server from scratch and he really needs to save money, there is LAMP.

The only realistic use case of ReactOS is large-scale deployments of machines which need Windows (driver) compatibility, in which case ReactOS would save large amounts of money.

_yosefk2• 10 years ago

Why doesn't Google make a free, compatible Windows clone, for the same reasons Microsoft as well as Google made free, compatible browser clones? I honestly don't understand it.

runeb• 10 years ago

Google Docs, Sheets and Slides. They're just picking the parts of the Windows ecosystem that many people use.

dr_zoidberg• 10 years ago

Hardly a replacement for Office. They're good to collaborate and work with people over long distances, but when documents grow to not so big sizes, problems begin. I even have problems to load 30 page documents. Word 2016 flies on Windows 8 and 10, and it takes 60-100 MiB of RAM.

Also, there are countless document templates (which plague different work fields) that are utterly incompatible with Google Docs and break all over.

pjc503• 10 years ago

Because that's an enourmous amount of work and likely to attract hostile legal action? They didn't even create their own operating system for their phones.

_yosefk2• 10 years ago

Why then does MS work on Bing? Bing is more likely to infringe on Google's patents than a Windows clone is likely to infringe on MS's patents, not? And Bing is certainly lots of work.

jahewson• 10 years ago

Why would they? It would cost billions, take years and mostly consist of dead-end features which Windows keeps around for compatibility. The end result would be an almost worthless product which always trails behind Windows and which MS can dominate with their existing software. It would also massively increase the market for "real" MS Windows.

Don't extend your competitors platform. Chrome took IE users and made them Chrome users because Google's platform is the web, not the desktop. So Chrome has been pushing forward traditional desktop features such as offline, OpenGL, and sockets, to displace desktop software.

Look at what Apple has done with the iPad, they've been the market leader and MS has had to follow them, only recently shipping Office apps for iOS. They're blazing ahead with their own platform which serves their goals, not tired old legacy software from 30 years ago.

e1ven• 10 years ago

I suspect that Google's view is that the local Operating System is decreasing in importance over time.

They might argue that we're spending more time in web applications, rather than purely in native desktop apps - This is reflected in their Chromebook offering, which largely strips away the non-web experience.

trymas2• 10 years ago

note: it's just a complete nitpick, but I just have a question

In the front page of ReactOS[0]:

9,000,000+ lines of code
And growing!

Is the huge and growing codebase a pro or a con?

[0] http://www.reactos.ru/

FnuGk• 10 years ago

I think it implies that the project is active

Piskvorrr4• 10 years ago

For a complete OS+GUI, this is entirely a reasonable size.

lugus35• 10 years ago

The problem with ReactOS is its lack of automatic or semi-automatic OS update.

There is plan to do it, but from what I understand, it's still not available:

https://www.reactos.org/wiki/ReactOS_Update

Security is another major problem with this OS. They are proud to have produce 9M LoC, but they don't advertise how they assure this code is not full of vulnerabilities.

Do they audit the code ? Do they use static analysis tools ? Do they have specifics security practices and processes ?

I don't see any security advisory on their page. I only see a wishlist on their wiki https://www.reactos.org/wiki/Security

zymhan• 10 years ago

The problem with ReactOS is its lack of automatic or semi-automatic OS update.

Among many other reasons why you shouldn't use it as your main OS. But not even the React Devs would suggest that you do, so I'm not sure what your point is. It's clearly still in the development stage and is almost certainly just going to be run in a VM for the time being anyway.

jeditobe2• 10 years ago

It is alpha version. Too early for autoupdate.

ReactOS was selected for Google Summer of Code 2016

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