3 ms·

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 11y 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.
  • AstralStorm 11y ago
    Accepting binaries is relatively easy, you can often stub features and have the thing mostly work. See Wine project. Accepting drivers is super hard and this is the main part of ReactOS - the kernel.
• pizza234 11y 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.