ReactOS (FOSS "Windows") achieves 3D-accelerated Half-Life on real hardware

https://www.phoronix.com/news/ReactOS-Running-Half-Life

by jeditobe • 1 month ago

290 80 1 month ago

ajross• 1 month ago

While this is sort of laughable out of context (I mean, Steam on Linux for the last few years has run basically everything with full acceleration)...

I think what is being claimed, but not explicitly in the article, is that this is running the NVIDIA driver stack (for an ancient GeForce 8 card) directly, as opposed to emulating DirectX at the API level on top of a Vulkan driver.

chadgpt32• 1 month ago

Indeed. ReactOS is to the full Windows stack what Wine is to the userland Windows API.

himata41132• 1 month ago

I mean they reimplemented directx without vulkan, that's indeed in a league of their own. wine/proton relies on opengl/vulkan to do anything.

ddtaylor• 1 month ago

Wine has had many different DirectX backends over the decades, including one before Vulkan existed obviously.

da_chicken• 1 month ago

While this is sort of laughable out of context (I mean, Steam on Linux for the last few years has run basically everything with full acceleration)...

Eh. It's sort of like saying FreeDOS is laughable because DOSBox exists. I think that's missing the point.

wolvoleo• 1 month ago

I wouldn't call it laughable. ReactOS was not created only to run half-life. It's just one of their many impressive achievements.

NooneAtAll3• 1 month ago

something I wondered for a while

do windows viruses get ported by such efforts as well?

chadgpt32• 1 month ago

Yes

augusto-moura• 1 month ago

Some, but not all, most don't. Ideally they would all work, ReactOS doesn't make a priority on being a "safer" option, just an open source option

canyp• 1 month ago

Somewhere in the docs they state that they must also recreate whatever bugs the API has, otherwise applications written with those bugs as an (implicit) assumption could misbehave.

hurtigioll2• 1 month ago

its worse than that, Windows activates/deactivates "bugs" based on the compatibility profile of the app.

so you can set an app to use a Windows XP compatibility profile, and this will simulate Windows bugs which were fixed in more recent versions of the OS

naturalmovement• 1 month ago

[flagged]

nvr219• 1 month ago

What's the major Linux malware problem that everyone is ignoring

nvme0n1p1• 1 month ago

Isn't it funny how such incidents on Linux are rare enough that they make headlines, but on Windows that's been the baseline expected state of things for so long that nobody bats an eye anymore.

Btw if you're running an OS that's never had a malware incident, please, tell us!

TechSquidTV• 1 month ago

Of course. Maybe not successfully but a "virus" is just software. If it runs software, it runs software, full stop. Maybe the same APIs are not available or behave differently, so it may be buggy or non-functional, but that's true of Half-Life here too.

shakna4• 1 month ago

WannaCry was able to successfully run on ReactOS in 2025. Most other virsuses do tend to crash, because the memory layout is just a tiny bit different, but yeah, compatibility means compatibility. Lots of malware comes along for the ride.

However, there is a permissions layer that is more nix than Windows, which means the first foothold is still better than XP - you have to choose to execute the file. Self-running things don't tend to infect systems.

Its not a panacea, and there is a risk factor. And there aren't a lot of antivirus systems that can run correctly under ReactOS, because they freak out and think the OS is the malware, because they're scanning hashes for Windows, not another system.

But for a hobby OS, keeping hardware and software accessible after the rest of the world broke access, it still works.

dmurvihill• 1 month ago

The payload yes, the exploit hopefully not.

ErroneousBosh• 1 month ago

You can run WannaCry under Wine, with a bit of effort.

alaskahoffman• 1 month ago

reactos has been in development for 28 years and it can run half-life on real hardware. that is approximately how long half-life 1 itself has existed in the first place!

theturtletalks• 1 month ago

Given enough time, open-source will win. Just think about how more and more people are programming and how that will draw them to open-source.

underscore_ku• 1 month ago

more people and AI

da-x• 1 month ago

Specifications are important.

The better the specs of a commercial product, the easier it would be to produce an open source version it, with coding and testing automation perhaps even a one-to-one offering.

xattt• 1 month ago

development for 28 years now
given enough time

This has been a lifetime for a slice of the human population.

It’s getting into Sagrada Familia territory.

KronisLV• 1 month ago

See, at this rate it won’t even take a century!

rzzzt• 1 month ago

This is an absolute tangent (a perpendicular one if you will), but I thought the Sagrada Familia is completed: https://www.forbes.com/sites/ceciliarodriguez/2026/06/10/bar...

The article talks about construction on the exterior, the cross on the main tower, the Pope's visit and commemoration of the architect, etc. while on the official website the timeline says "Today, more than 140 years after the laying of the cornerstone, construction continues on the Basilica": https://sagradafamilia.org/en/history-of-the-temple

So which one is it? Is this one of those cases where we have to define "done" first?

RattlesnakeJake• 1 month ago

It’s getting into Sagrada Familia territory.

Or "A million monkeys with a million typewriters writing Shakespeare" territory

pjmlp7• 1 month ago

Only if it keeps being relevant for the computing model.

Case in point, ReactOS is far behind what Windows 11 is capable of, and this not taking into account the ARM and CoPilot+ PC hardware changes in modern motherboards.

It is nonetheless relevant, especially in the presence of escape mechanisms to oppressive governments, and digital sovereignty.

mschuster91• 1 month ago

It is nonetheless relevant, especially in the presence of escape mechanisms to oppressive governments, and digital sovereignty.

Not just for that. There's an awful, awful lot of ancient embedded hardware running machinery sometimes worth dozens of millions of dollars, and it's running even more ancient software. Siemens, for example, recently searched for people capable of (and willing to) working with Windows 3.11 [1], presumably to deal with the HMI displays for locomotive/train drivers.

When dealing with hardware or software that has lifecycles measured in half-centuries, bridges to allow modern tooling to work with it are really, really important.

[1] https://www.heise.de/news/Deutsche-Bahn-sucht-Admin-fuer-Win...

loloquwowndueo• 1 month ago

ReactOS is far behind what Windows 11 is capable of

lol I guess, it doesn’t annoy you with endless ads and pop ups, doesn’t try to steal your data and passwords, doesn’t force you to buy an entire new computer just to run it. Far behind indeed.

woctordho2• 1 month ago

It's far easier to port ReactOS than Windows to ARM and other new CPU ISAs.

justinclift2• 1 month ago

Heh, wouldn't it be funny if some of the EU gov's decided to sponsor ReactOS for another/future pathway away from Redmond. :)

hilbert423• 1 month ago

"Case in point, ReactOS is far behind what Windows 11 is capable of, …"

More importantly, as I've mentioned, ReactOS is not stable nor reliable enough to even use as an offline O/S sans the Win 11 dross.

If these stability/compatibility issues were fixed then it'd develop a reputation for being reliable which would lead to further development work.

Unfortunately for everyone except Microsoft this is not the case.

micromacrofoot2• 1 month ago

this is the year of the linux desktop

goodcanadian• 1 month ago

I have been exclusively running linux on my desktop for 25 years, so from my point of view, this "joke" is a quarter century out of date

shevy-java3• 1 month ago

IF there are people who write code.

This is not always the case. Open source projects also die.

We need to improve the funding situation. I have no idea how to do that, but we really need to tackle that problem.

eaf7e281• 1 month ago

What is the benefit compared to a compatibility layer? Is it easier for future maintenance?

It's definitely a huge improvement towards "FOSS Windows."

okanat• 1 month ago

You can run proprietary drivers with ReactOS since it replicates the driver layer too.

So unlike Linux systems with Nvidia Kepler cards, you can still run the most up-to-date desktop environment. Or if you have an obscure WiFi card, you can use the Windows drivers.

BoingBoomTschak• 1 month ago

This, I'd love to be able to use Genelec GLM from Linux but it needs some custom serial drivers... too bad it only supports Win 10 right now.

maufl• 1 month ago

It would be great if we could combine ReactOS with Good old Games to build a retro Windows games distribution. I could hand that out at LAN parties as USB boot stick.

shevy-java3• 1 month ago

Agreed. For this to work, though, I guess there needs to be:

- a listing of all games that work well on ReactOS, similar to how WineHQ does.

Or perhaps a specialized variant of ReactOS with that focus in mind. Do we have such a list? I assume many games also won't work perfectly well; see WineHQ, that also had tons of issues with some games.

hilbert423• 1 month ago

"Or perhaps a specialized variant of ReactOS with that focus in mind."

Trouble is there's never been enough interest in ReactOS to get it to the point where it's stable let alone warrant fancy extras. (After three decades of trying to clone the basics and failing is proof enough.)

In short, developers see it as a dead end. Why there's so little interest I've never fully understood, but it's fact.

If it were actually stable and usable as a basic operating system it could be used for lots of offline stuff but it's not—even at this point. If it were useable I'd readily adopt it to use offline (I've tried many times and failed).

Another point, this lack of interest shows up on ReactOS's website; there's so little new news and info the site may as well be dead.

spwa4• 1 month ago

I think a lot could be achieved by defining a "rom format" for windows games.

dannyfritz07• 1 month ago

A Linux Distro that comes with Wine and Application shortcuts could probably achieve this. Sounds really cool actually. Retro LAN Party Distro.

shevy-java3• 1 month ago

That's great. I have not tested ReactOS in many years and I am rather reluctant to try it again (last time I tried, I could not connect to the internet with it, and that was a breaking point for me), but the better they are at providing a working alternative, the nicer this is as a win-win scenario. Linux kind of spoiled me though, I noticed this with HaikuOS too. If things such as ruby do not work, I am not going to bother anymore. Linux kind of raised the bar here, at the least for things that I would expect to work as-is (this is not the only example, there were more issues and I simply don't want to feel going into a downgrade-area when using an operating system; I have Win10 on a computer to my left side but whenever I do things such as copying data to an USB stick or to it, it is so slow compared to Linux. It annoys me every time I have to do so.)

succo• 1 month ago

we are still here lol

forinti• 1 month ago

Windows is going downhill so fast, I fear ReactOS won't be relevant before Windows becomes irrelevant.

Maybe ReactOS will live after Windows as an option for people with critical applications that for some reason won't run on Linux.

If ReactOS had worked this well 20 years ago, I would probably have used it (I did try it a couple of times). Today I just don't need it.

Jigsy• 1 month ago

I find ReactOS interesting, but I could never get anything to work the last time I tried it - which was a few months ago.

I also have a feeling that I'll be dead for centuries long before it ever becomes a viable replacement.

On the plus side, at least it'll be finished quicker than GNU Hurd will be...

ReactOS (FOSS "Windows") achieves 3D-accelerated Half-Life on real hardware

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